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Jörg
Imberger Life in a Changing
Climate
Thousands of years ago human life on earth was in harmony with nature
on a 100,000 year cycle, the period between the ice ages; this is when the human
mind and body evolved and essentially our genetic design stems from this period.
Genetic evidence suggests that the human race evolved from the primate starting
around 150,000 years ago,or two ice ages ago; the human DNA was fine tuned during
this period. The human that was created was designed to function in harmony with
the environment of the time; in the womb the mother programmed the DNA switches
to ready the child for the new outside world, in the first 6 months of life the
immune system inventory was set up and in the first 6 years or so the brain learned
to conform to society's norms and be in relative equilibrium with the immediate
environment. The human of the day survived around 30 to 50 years with death,
in probabilistic terms occurring through different breakdowns in the functioning
of organs and the immune system; life expectancy increased as early failures
mechanisms became repairable revealing every newer failures is succession. Over
the last 15,000 years, essentially since the last ice age, the functioning humans
set up their icons; family, the concept of God, the various cultures and forms
of government and the hierarchical ideas of respect for experience. Spirituality
was an important part of this evolution, providing the connection between
humans, nature and the unknown. Before organized religion came about humans expressed
their spirituality through a combination of respect for the unkown, superstition
and fear of what was not understood. Hinduism evolved first and may be seen as
a transition between simple spirituality and the organized religions; a movement
with a minimalist structure. Judaism, the first version of an organized
religion, ordered the various expressions of spirituality into a more consistent
set of rules, much like laws order community consensus. In simple terms, these
rules were simply reflections of the constraints imposed by nature on our evolution
and so formed sign posts for living in a way that promoted better survival. However,
as the structure became more consolidated, the organizational part of the structure
gained in strength. Christianity followed, consolidating the structure even more
and people started to interpret the rules to the advantage of humans and, in
particular, the church. Islam followed with yet further extension of rules
and structures. In the last 100 years, we have devoted ourselves almost
exclusively to "liberating" ourselves from these icons and in the
process trashing nature and removing most of our reference points; technology
provided the mechanism and the GDP the measure of success for this mission. Technology
is pursued to liberate us from the constraints of our reach, and in that it has
been singularly successful, but it has resulted in unintended consequences
unleashing some very disturbing new feedback mechanisms that are having alarming
consequences for the human race:
a) Climate change in now controlled by the increase in hurricanes, the melting
of the permafrost and the loss of solubility in the ocean as well as a breakdown
of ecological balances.
b) Recent research has shown that our genetic destiny
is set in the prenatal period when the stress levels in the mother determines
much of the well being of an individuals life; the more stress the mother is
under the higher the incidence of pathological behavioral changes in the adult,
rendering the resulting society less able to make mature decisions.
c) By changing our environment our immune system is no longer
being set up properly, leading to an alarming rise in diseases. This motivates
us to further sterilize our environment only making the problem worse.
d) By removing "creative loafing" time from our
daily lives, we are getting better at short term decision making, but much less
able to cope with holistic problem solving.
e) Economic growth is fueling the information age that, in
turn, is increasing productivity leading to a positive feedback into economic
growth; the result is that the GDP of most countries is now growing exponentially
and we are totally addicted to consumption, with all the symptoms of
clinical addiction.
f) Even more alarming for the human race is that technology
has allowed, over the last 15 years, a massive concentration of wealth and power,
in the hands of a few, upsetting the fundamental democratic institutions.
g)
Our senses no longer match our needs and we compensate by viewing the world through
the simplifications of the computer screen, this is having the effect of devaluing
nature and its therapeutic influence on human well being.
The alarming feature of these feedbacks is that they imply that, the climate,
our psychological state, the economy and nature's habitat will all move, irrespective
of what humans do, to a new unknown state in the time of one human life, all
bring a significant imbalance between the human capability and his/her environment.
In essence humans, by expanding our reach to global scales through technology,
have set up a 50 year global experiment where we are both the observers and the
subject and for which we have neither a hypophysis nor an objective;
we have put the earth and ourselves in the hands of fate. Not a comfortable experiment
for a scientist!
What is to be done? I shall examine some of the more popular ideas such as carbon
trading and sequestration and show that these technologies are much less effective
than improving food production efficiencies and returning the released land to
reforestation. However, an even greater challenge for our Universities is to
develop technologies that allow people to participate in society in the face
of wealth inequity, declining biodiversity, unbalanced population increases and
genetic manipulation.
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