by Mike Bendzela

From preface of Number One last month: Anytime is a good time to take stock of what you think you know, or what you think you have actually learned, but once you have seen two-thirds to three-quarters of your life pass, it would seem rather high time to do so. For all I know, the full measure has actually passed, as I could drop dead tomorrow while digging a grave at my summer job, so I had better hurry with this. [. . .] What would I say if, launched into the firmament and finding myself at Heaven’s Gate, St. Peter said to me, “What have you learned, sinner?” So, a few things I think I actually do know, in descending order of certitude, over the course of three articles: evolution, overshoot, determinism.

The human species likely exists in a state of ecological overshoot. The question is, how much longer can we exist in such a state? Can we prop up our behemoth of an existence for much longer?

That “apparently” in the title has to do a lot of work: I cannot actually say that I know this is true, the way I can say that evolution is true, but it sure looks that way to me (and I must thank sociologist William Catton and human ecologist Bill Rees for their work and insight).

In some ways the two ideas pull in opposite directions. The certainty of evolution is apparent in the abundance of Earth’s archives of evidence, which consists of traces of evolution’s past meanderings over a billion years, sussed out through 200 years or so of hard scientific labor. Overshoot, on the other hand, is about the weight of the present human “ecological footprint” and its bearing on an uncertain future. But they both have in common the idea of the inevitability of mass die-0ffs.

Is it possible for an issue or problem to be so large as to be invisible? I’ve already expressed how evolution by natural selection lay unseen all throughout human history until about 170 years ago, even though it is responsible for all life on the planet. Darwin states succinctly that it is the “laws existing around us” that have brought forth, well, everything. But we were blind to this for two chief reasons:

The mind cannot possibly grasp the full meaning of the term of even a million years; it cannot add up and perceive the full effects of many slight variations, accumulated during an almost infinite number of generations.

We will tend to notice the immediate effects of a condition even while being blind to it as the ultimate cause. A patient experiences chronic numbness in the legs and goes into treatment for neuropathy. Later, the patient experiences loss of vision and seeks treatment for retinopathy. There was a time when the chief cause of these signs, Type 1 diabetes, was unknown. The patient had been treating symptoms all along, not the disease.

Currently, we are obsessed with “solving” a plethora of “problems”: climate change, ocean acidification, soil erosion and loss of arable land, PFAS and microplastics contamination, resource depletion, etcetera. But these are mere symptoms of a larger, untreated disease. Read more »