Why greens are on the wrong planet

By John G. Lankford
web posted December 2, 2002

This Thanksgiving now past, we can all add a belated note of
gratitude that so many of us, more than six billion, are still alive.
About 75 000 years ago, one of Earth's routine natural events
killed all but a few thousand of us. Another such event is about
40 000 years overdue. That 40 000 years improved our
prospects immensely. But, it appears, the next major setback is
impending. It's a wonder it hasn't happened yet.

It's called a supervolcano, or a caldera structure eruption. The
one we expect will blow next is underneath Yellowstone
National Park, where it powers those fascinating geysers. It is
also shoving the park's surface upward to a degree now
noticeable to the casual observer. When it goes, most people in
North America will probably go with it. Billions will join us
shortly thereafter in the ashfall, water supply ruination,
agricultural land blanketing, and ensuing ashen-sky-engendered
ice age.

Just in case the Yellowstone boomer fizzles, there is another one
handy under Long Valley, California, and it has also been getting
frisky in recent years. Actually, there is nothing that would
absolutely prohibit either setting off the other, too. And maybe
several more scattered around the world. But that would be
showing off: all it really takes is one.

The last time one of these beauties let go full scale, about 74
thousand years ago on what we now call Indonesian Sumatra, it
reduced the world's human (Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal, at
the time) population to just a few thousand specimens. In our
surviving branch, the drastic culling effect is still detectable in
DNA.

Having been around between 100 000 and 150 thousand years, our
species should now exhibit a more diversified genetic spectrum
than it does. Due to that drastic kill-off, two chimpanzees with
the same parents are almost certain to be more genetically
disparate than the two most dissimilar humans alive.

Of course, all the world's chimps went through the cataclysm
with our ancestors, but chimps are tougher than we are. Our
gang invested a remarkable amount of potential wiriness and
vigor into exceptionally powerful brains instead. These
turbocharged contemplators consume about a third of the
oxygen and nutrient our blood circulates, thus shortchanging the
brawn departments. Some of us use that brainpower to
assimilate information and perform reasoning based on it. Others
use it to invent dream worlds they would prefer to inhabit,
pretend they do inhabit them and demand everyone else conform
to their pretensions.

They envision a world that will maintain a wiggly but almost
perfect equilibrium, biologically, geologically and in general if
human beings will only refrain from engaging in heating, lighting,
cooking, manufacturing, powered transportation, and probably
operation of cigarette lighters. According to their "precautionary
principle" you have a duty to re-think the candles on that next
birthday cake, because the heat they generate could be the one
spark that will set off a cataclysm and ruin it all.

The fact is, it all ruins itself, or is ruined by cosmic events,
periodically, and humans and other species are ruined with it.
Whoever and whatever is left starts over, each living being doing
what all living beings are biochemically programmed to do:
preserve life, improve it, multiply it and spread it around.

The fact that caldera-type supervolcanoes exist and explode on
occasion has to be added to the facts that noticeable objects
from space strike the planet from time to time, that there are
floods, droughts, ice ages, plagues, famines, wars and other
genocidal jamborees. Caldera-structure supervolcanic eruptions
and really big space rock strikes just remind Earth creatures that
catastrophes and calamities aren't everything: there are also
cataclysms.

Although those grim realities have to be acknowledged, a sense
of futility is not called for. Like flight, brainpower is a very
unlikely and expensive survival adaptation, born of cataclysmic
desperation. Dinosaurs remaining after the comet strike north of
the Yucatan Peninsula, or whatever killed so many of them, were
driven to adapt to flying and become what we now know as
birds. Flight being such a strenuously expensive expedient, bird
species that have found a way to do without it, such as penguins,
abandoned it.

Humans remaining after the Sumatra blow, or any comparable
earlier cataclysm(s), resorted to thinking and learning. Human
intelligence is the most unique and miraculous phenomenon, short
of divinity, in the universe. If we are lucky and work very hard,
we may achieve it any time now. That promise in view, it would
be unworthy of us to languish and sulk and wait for the
Yellowstone-Long Valley obliteration.

On the one hand, it does not make a lot of sense to cramp
ourselves for the sake of obscure vermin and weeds that are
doomed in their natural environment anyway. That does not
mean we should go to ravaging the terrain deliberately or with
gross negligence, diminishing our prospects by fouling our nest. It
does mean we are the only hope of all that lives now, or as much
of it as we can salvage with some number of our own feisty kind,
and we had best decline to pretend they will be all right without
our best and brainiest efforts and get about something that
actually promises to work -- starting yesternow.

The last time we had to recover from a world cataclysm, that
Sumatran blast, the survivors were still in the Paleolithic Age.
What could be done with rocks and sticks, and not the full extent
of that, as the subsequent Neolithic Age proved, was about the
extent of technology. Organized agriculture was still more than
60 thousand years in the future, assuming it hadn't gotten started
somewhere and been snuffed out and further assuming the
middens our archaeologists have found so far are the oldest
ones.

This time we have advanced considerably further, what with
powered industry and transport, globalized satellite
communications and moon landings, et cetera. There are those of
the environmental absolutist persuasion who would have us
return as closely as possible to at least late Neolithic conditions
and live at that level so as not to damage the Earth. But, as
pointed out above, that does not acknowledge that the Earth will
certainly damage itself considerably if a big space rock does not
do the job first.

That simply leaves us with the question whether we should plan
to recover from the next world cataclysm from a Paleolithic or at
least Neolithic starting point or from as much of a powered-
technology one as we might be able to salvage. The cataclysm
certainty cancels the rationale for a voluntary return to the
Neolithic stage. So does the hardwired human imperative to
compete for ascendancy: You can impoverish yourself if you
care to, but you may not survive a try to force me, or most other
people, to resume historical squalor.

The Neolithic option ruled out, the remaining question is the vast
bundle of questions as to how to select, stage and harden, and
prepare to operate the powered technology we decide to keep
on hand to dig our way out of the ashes and resume improving
our lives and spreading our kind around. That would make for an
article many times longer than this one.

But space will permit adding that spreading our technological
achievements around the globe, especially to the half of
humankind that has very little of them yet, will make it all the
more likely that a considerable share of them will survive. If the
hardened staging bunkers prove not hard enough, or are buried
under too much ash, a spot on the other side of the world might
do.

The point here is to highlight the reasons why extreme solicitude
for every discoverable species and every specimen thereof is
ludicrous. Just as our lives as we know them if not our lives
absolutely, they're inevitably goners. We might better consider
preserving some DNA along with the selected, stored, hardened,
and prepared technological assists.

All of us will not survive the cataclysm. Most of us will not
survive the cataclysm. But our proto-intelligence and often-
claimed compassion do compel us to arrange to have as many
humans and, even if only as resuscitatable DNA, other species,
survive and recover as possible. If for no other reason, there will
be another cataclysm, and another, and so on on this planet or
any other we eventually infest.

We cannot afford to keep getting knocked back to our savage
beginnings. Instead, we owe it to our nature and its glimmer of
intelligence to try to proliferate among planets and then stars and
achieve circumstances in which cataclysm on one planet is no
more significant than a calamity on one island on present-day
Earth. And that certainly requires resuming our progress as
quickly as possible after each of these rude interruptions.

This is John G. Lankford's first contribution to Enter Stage Right.

Enter Stage Right -- http://www.enterstageright.com