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Fruit Flies in a Bottle
Ernest Partridge
September 8, 2010
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“Men at some time are
masters of their fates. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in
our stars but in ourselves that we are underlings.”
William Shakespeare
Julius Caesar |
I
Place a few fruit flies in a bottle with a
layer of honey at the bottom, and they will quickly multiply to an enormous
number, and then, just as quickly, die off to the very last, poisoned by
their wastes. Similarly, add a few yeast cells to grape juice, seal the
bottle, and the cells will consume the sugar and turn it into alcohol. When
the alcohol rises to 12.5% it will kill off all the yeast, and the wine will
be ready for the table.
Fruit flies and yeast in a bottle are embarked upon suicidal endeavors. They
can’t help it. They don’t know any better, lacking the cognitive equipment
to “know” anything at all.
Human beings, we are told, are different. Humans can utilize their
accumulated knowledge, evaluate evidence and apply reason, and with these
skills and accomplishments they can imagine alternative futures and choose
among them to their advantage.
Human beings have these capacities. But history teaches us that all too
often, human beings simply refuse to apply them and, like the mindless fruit
flies, march blindly into oblivion. For example:
-
None of the antagonists in the First
World War wanted the war. It was touched off by the assassination of an
Austrian Duke in the Balkans. And when it was all over four years later
and sixteen million had died, one German politician asked another, “How
did it all happen?” The second replied, “Ach, if we only knew!”
(Tuchman)
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When the Nazi pogrom against the Jews
accelerated, a few wise Jews fled Germany, leaving friends, professions
and all their possessions behind. The others, reflecting that “This
can’t be all that bad, after all, I am a loyal German,” remained. When
in January 1942 “the final solution” was decided at the Wansee
conference, it was too late.
-
Industrialized fishing techniques have
drastically reduced both the quality and quantity of the world-wide
catch. As Elizabeth Kolbert reports in
The New Yorker, “In the late nineteen eighties, the total
world catch topped out at about eighty-five million tons... For the past
two decades, the global catch has been steadily declining ... by around
five hundred thousand tons a year.” This is a paradigm example of
Garrett Hardin’s
“Tragedy of the Commons,” whereby “ruin is the destination toward
which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest...” While
a global agreement to limit fishing might restore the take to
sustainable levels, there are ominous indications that, in addition to
over-fishing, climate change might be significantly responsible for
these reductions. (More about this below).
Finally, consider Easter Island. When
Polynesian explorers discovered and colonized Easter Island at about 900 AD,
they arrived at an island that was fully forested, with huge trees that
supplied essential resources for canoes, houses, food, fuel, ropes and
textiles. With these resources, the islanders built more than eight-hundred
stone statues (moai) for which Easter Island is famous. When the first
Europeans arrived in 1722, they found a barren island totally devoid of
trees. The peak population of this sixty-six square mile island is estimated
to have been as much as thirty thousand. In 1872, only one hundred and
eleven native islanders remained. (Diamond). Could the Easter Islanders
foresee the consequences of the destruction of their forests? If not, then
why not? If so, why did they not act to protect this essential resource
before it was too late?
In his book, Collapse, Jared Diamond poses these questions in words
that strike ominously close to home:
I have often asked myself, “what did the Easter Islander who cut down the
last palm tree say while he was doing it? Like modern loggers, did he shout
“Jobs, not trees!”? Or: “Technology will solve our problems, never fear,
we’ll find a substitute for wood”? Or “We don’t have proof that there aren’t
palms somewhere else on Easter, we need more research, your proposed ban on
logging is premature and driven by fear-mongering”?
Sound familiar?
II
When we look back in time, we find
numerous examples such as these of a collective failure of societies to
anticipate and deal with oncoming emergencies. With 20/20 hindsight, we look
back and wonder: How could they not have seen what was in store for them?
Thus it is fair to ask, how acute is our foresight today? What are we doing,
or failing to do, that might prompt future generations to ask the same
question of us: How could they not have seen what was in store for them?
The answer, I submit, is most discouraging. Our political and corporate
leaders have eyes, but will not see. They have minds, but will not think,
much less anticipate the catastrophes before us and take appropriate action
to avoid them. Consider:
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Regarding the domestic and global
economy, our leaders are steadfastly ignoring
Herbert
Stein’s law: That which can not go on forever, won’t.” Wealth
continues to “percolate up” from the producers of wealth to the owners
of that wealth. Today,
forty percent of the U.S. national wealth is owned by
one-percent of the population.# The average Standard and Poors 500
CEO earns in half a day, more than his company’s median worker earns in
an entire year. When, if ever, does this trend end? More in an hour? In
a minute? Meanwhile, the super-rich pay a smaller fraction of their
income in taxes than the average citizen – taxes that pay for the
infrastructure, the courts, and the education of the workers upon which
their wealth depends. Ever upward climbs the national debt. The
Republican “solution” to the economic crisis? More of the same policies
that precipitated the crash of August, 2008.
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The solution to the federal budget
deficit? Screw the little guy by cutting back on Social Security,
Medicare, health reform and education. But don’t even think of raising
taxes on the super-rich. How long will the bottom 99 percent of us
tolerate this injustice until, at last, we band together and storm the
Bastille?
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More than half of the federal budget
goes to wars, past, present and projected, and to the maintenance of the
American global empire – approximately a thousand military bases
overseas.# The
military-industrial complex builds submarines and aircraft carriers to
fight an enemy without a navy, and jet aircraft to fight an enemy
without an air force. The U.S. military budget is roughly equal to the
total of all other military budgets in the world, including, let us
note, the military budgets of our allies. Yet scarcely any
politician dares suggest a cut in the so-called “defense” budget which,
with its enormous waste, fraud and abuse, is arguably a greater threat
to our “national defense” than any “enemies,” real or imagined. How
about using some of that cash for R&D in clean energy? Or for the
education of the next generation of scientists and engineers? Or in the
repair of our collapsing physical infrastructure? All of these are
clearly matters of “national defense.” Will our leaders recognize this
and act appropriately? Given the current political/economic/media
environment, not a chance.
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Modern industrial society runs on oil.
There can be no doubt about that. In a very real sense, citizens in
industrial societies “eat oil.” Petroleum products produce fertilizers
and pesticides, run farm equipment, and distribute food to the cities.
In the United States, about two percent of the population is directly
involved in food production: one agricultural worker feeds fifty
American citizens, and many more individuals abroad. And yet,
ecologist Kenneth
Watt estimates that nineteenth century pre-petroleum agricultural
methods could support a global population of from one to four billion
people. “Mankind,” writes Watt, is thus “embarked on an absolutely
immense gamble” that somehow, when the oil runs out, another energy
source will be available. When that happens, the world population, now
approaching seven billion, might well exceed ten billion.
No one will contend that the supply of unrecovered petroleum is
infinite. The controversy centers on various estimates of the remaining
reserves. Oil extraction is becoming ever-more expensive, and the last
drop of oil will be recovered at about the time that more energy is
required to extract it than is contained in the oil itself. Some experts
claim that “peak oil,” the time of maximum oil production, is now upon
us.
So what happens if and when the oil finally runs out? If alternate
energy sources are not in place and in full operation, wars and mass
starvation are certain to follow. Current efforts to avoid this
catastrophe are feeble, too little and too late. The international oil
conglomerates that effectively own the congress of the United States are
not inclined to encourage the promotion of their competitors.
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Ninety-seven percent of all active
climate scientists agree that
global warming is real, and that human activity is the primary cause.
This consensus is challenged by an array of scientifically uninformed
politicians, media celebrities and corporate lackeys, joined by the
usual “biostitutes” (Robert Kennedy Jr.’s term) – scientists for hire,
ever prepared to conjure up bogus “evidence” to support their sponsors’
corporate agendas. The climate
denier’s efforts and investments have been effective, as surveys
indicate that fewer citizens are concerned about global warming and more
citizens are inclined to be skeptical about it.
Meanwhile, the global atmosphere is proving itself to be totally
indifferent to public opinion and political inaction as it continues to
heat up, causing widespread wildfires in Russia, floods in Pakistan and
Iowa, drought in the American southwest, the shrinking of the Greenland
icecap, rising sea level, with still more horrors in store in the
future.
Oberlin College ecologist David Orr is unconstrained in his rage
over the political and corporate resistance to informed and effective
responses to climate change:
"We really don't have a name to
describe behavior of this sort... It is criminality beyond any
language, concepts or laws that we presently have. It's criminality
that places the entire human enterprise at risk. And we simply have
not been able to confront inaction that allows the entire human
enterprise to slip into catastrophic failure. It really does beggar
the imagination to understand why, given the consensus of the
scientific community on this issue, ... inaction was the order of
the day."
And finally, a little-noticed news report
that should scare the bejesus out of all of us:
Canadian scientists have discovered that the population of oceanic
phytoplankton has dropped by 40 percent since 1950 and continues to drop at
a rate of about one percent per year. This fact just might foretell a
catastrophe even greater than global warming which, as it happens, may be
the primary cause of this phenomenon.
Why should we care about the fate of these microscopic plants? Because
phytoplankton are the foundation of the oceanic ecosystem – the base of the
food pyramid that sustains all marine life. No phytoplankton, no fish, and
the seas become biotic deserts.
And that’s not even the worst of it. Phytoplankton produce half of the
world’s atmospheric oxygen and absorb that carbon-dioxide that we are
spewing into the air in dangerous super-abundance. This raises a question
that I’ve neither read about or heard: is it just possible that the loss of
phytoplankton might suffocate us all? Without oxygen, we all die. Plain and
simple. Where’s the outrage? Where’s the alarm? Are there any proposals to
reverse this trend? And if we suppose that we can survive without the oxygen
supplied by the phytoplankton, then pray tell us how this is possible.
Perhaps the Canadian scientists are mistaken. If so, then a threatened
humanity pleads with the dissenting scientists to present their evidence and
deliver their refutation. However this investigation might proceed, one fact
remains unassailable: our fate is inexorably bound with that of the
phytoplankton.
III
Are we, like the fruit flies in the
bottle, predestined to meet a horrible fate due to forces beyond our control
– beyond our control because we cannot overcome the blind economic interests
which dominate our political processes and which own the mass media that
misinforms the public?
I am sadly inclined to believe that this is the case. But I am not entirely
convinced, for history also provides examples of how, facing pending
emergencies, societies and nations can act responsibly.
-
On December 6, 1941, a majority of the
American public was pacifist, demanding that we stay out of “those
foreign wars.” Two days later, that same public was in solid support of
President Roosevelt’s declaration of war. And the United States
military, at that time one of the weakest in the world became, within
months of total mobilization, the strongest.
-
When in 1974, physicists Sherwood
Rowland and Mario Molina published a paper in the scientific journal
Nature, linking the erosion of the atmospheric ozone to the
artificial chemical compounds, chlorofluorocarbons, the chemical
industry responded with an all-out public relations campaign to debunk
them. Eventually, the international scientific consensus prevailed
resulting in the Montreal Protocol of 1989, banning the production and
release of these substances. In 1995, Molina, along with Paul Crutzen,
was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this discovery.
-
In 1964, U.S. Surgeon General Luther
Terry released a comprehensive government report linking cigarette
smoking to lung cancer. The tobacco industry replied with
a volley
of quasi-scientific rebuttals. Now the good news: after relentless
effort by medical and public interest groups, brutal truth has broken
through the tobacco industries’ PR campaigns. In 1965, 42% of American
adults were cigarette smokers.
In
2005, less than half that number of Americans were smokers.
-
"You can't keep an empire abroad and a
republic at home," wrote Mark Twain. Chalmers Johnson agrees:
“Empire vs.
Democracy...” Faced with this choice sixty years ago, Great Britain
chose democracy. It remains to be seen how the United States will
choose. At the moment, the indications are not favorable for democracy.
-
Japan, with one of the highest
population densities in the world, has managed to keep 74% of its land
mass forested – the highest percentage of all first-world countries.
(Diamond)
-
While the fossil fuel public relations
behemoth continues to convince the American public and politicians that
renewable energy sources are “impractical” and “too expensive,” foreign
countries such as Denmark, Iceland, Germany and China forge ahead with
their research, development and installation of alternative energy.
True, electricity from the sun costs more than energy from coal. But as
R&D progresses, those costs are plunging while fossil fuel costs are
rising. The cost curves are certain to cross in the near future, at
which time coal-generated electricity will become obsolete. In fact,
when such “externalities” as health and environmental effects are
factored in, fossil fuel energy today is vastly more expensive than wind
and solar energy. Europe and China’s message to American industry:
lead, follow, or get out of the way. But we are not waiting for your
reply!
Jared Diamond’s book, Collapse, is
a monumental study of how societies from around the world – in Easter
Island, in Pre-Columbian Central and North American, in Greenland – are
demolished by the heedless destruction of the sustaining environment. And
yet, in the final page of this book, Diamond closes on a hopeful note: “we
have the opportunity to learn from the mistakes of distant peoples and past
peoples. That’s an opportunity that no past society enjoyed to such a
degree.”
It remains to be seen if we seize upon this opportunity.
IV
A few corporate public relations geniuses
with limitless budgets have convinced large portions of the American public
that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was in league with
al Qaeda, that their president was foreign-born and is a practicing Muslim,
and that global warming is a hoax perpetrated by a vast conspiracy of
climate scientists with motives still unknown. Now these same geniuses have
taken on the task of convincing us that the solutions to our energy,
economic and environmental problems are to continue the policies that
created these crises in the first place.
This, of course, is the clinical definition of insanity. And so, to borrow
Albert Einstein’s reflection upon the atomic bomb, everything “has changed
.. save our modes of thinking, and we thus drift toward unparalleled
catastrophes."
The immediate result of a policy of “more of the same” will be a securing of
the vast wealth and political power of those who have benefited from this
policy. As for the remaining 99% of us in the disappearing middle class and
the growing serf class, we’re on our own. No doubt, in the calamities that
follow, the oligarchs and kleptocrats of tomorrow will eventually be
consumed as well.
To prevent which, here are a few strategies of survival:
-
When you find yourself in a hole, stop
digging. If you are heading straight for a cliff, stop and change
direction.
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“For a successful technology, reality
must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be
fooled." (Richard Feynman)
The best means
of discovering and validating truth is science. Propaganda,
skillfully and ruthlessly practiced, can deceive an entire nation. But
it can not abolish fundamental physical laws. “Facts,” said John Adams,
“are stubborn things.”
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Invest in education -- at all levels. “In the conditions of modern life, the
rule is absolute: [the nation] that does not value trained intelligence
is doomed.” (Alfred North Whitehead). A nation that dismantles its
public schools, impoverishes its universities, and makes advanced
education unattainable to its brightest young people, is a nation
engaged in collective suicide. “If a nation expects to be ignorant and
free, ... it expects what never was and never will be.” (Thomas
Jefferson).
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Promote the common good. There are
public interests and social benefits distinct from the summation of all
private interests. Ayn Rand was profoundly and dangerously mistaken when
she proclaimed that “there is no such entity as ‘the public,’ the public
is merely a number of individuals. On the contrary,
that which is
good for each, may not be good for all. United we stand, divided we
fall.
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No civilized society has existed
without a rule of law and sanctions to enforce the law, which is to say,
no society has existed without a government. The choice, then, is not
between government or no government, but between worse or better
government – between government of, by, and for the privileged few, or
government of, by and for the people. “To secure these rights,
governments are instituted among men.”
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The ballot is the beating heart of
democracy. The citizens’ ballot must be secret, but not the method of
counting it. Neither should the counting and compiling of votes be in
the hands of private companies with partisan affiliations. An
unverifiable vote is an invalid vote.
There is
abundant evidence that recent elections in the United States have
been fraudulent, yet the politicians have refused to investigate and the
media has refused to report this evidence.
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In a free society access to public
office, legislation, and judicial decisions can not be bought and sold.
“Privatized popular government” is an oxymoron. When privatization of
government and an unrestricted market obtain, the inevitable result is
oligarchy and despotism. The remedy was clearly enunciated by the
founders of our republic when they declared our independence: “When a
long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same
object, evinces a design to reduce [the people] under absolute
despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such
government, and to provide new guards for their future security.”
The task before us is momentous, and the
outcome is uncertain. Quite frankly, I am inclined to agree with the
pessimists that humanity is about to enter into dreadful and prolonged dark
age.
There is no greater task before us than to dedicate ourselves to proving
pessimists such as myself to be ultimately wrong. As the great Andrei
Sakharov reflected:
“There is a need to create ideals even
when you can’t see any route by which to achieve them, because if there
are no ideals then there can be no hope and then one would be completely
in the dark, in a hopeless blind alley.”
Copyright 2010 by Ernest Partridge
PostScript: Last month, with the death of Stephen Schneider, climate
science lost one of its most eloquent and informed spokesmen. And I lost a
personal friend. (For
more, see my "Farewell to a Friend: Stephen Schneider.")
** Original link broken. New citation needed.
REFERENCES:
Diamond, Jared: Collapse, Viking, 2005.
Kolbert, Elizabeth: “The Scales Fall,” The New Yorker, August 2,
2010.
Tuchman, The Guns of August. Random House, 1962
Watt, Kenneth E. F.: "Whole Earth," Earth Day, The Beginning, Arno
Press, 1970, pp 9-11)
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