Would our ancestors be proud of us?
When I think of the problems humans face today: suffering, anxiety, inequality, social justice issues, war, pollution . . . I try to put things in an evolutionary context.
On the one hand, we have come so far. We have created many wonderful ‘science’, ‘technology’, and ‘engineering’ elements that benefit individuals and society. Clean water. Sanitation. Medicine.
On the other hand, it hasn’t all been rainbows and unicorns. We can’t seem to shake our violent and gluttonous nature. We kill each other and other organisms. We soil the water that gives us life.
Individuals will fall along some continuum from ‘all humans suck and we should just die’ to ‘we are so amazing because we can hoard billions of dollars’. Most of us are in the Gaussian middle.
Many of us can agree that there is some bad shit going on that we could change. More would probably agree that our ancestors would NOT be proud of how we treat our home. Probably because we romanticize how much more humans might have been connected to nature in previous generations.
Technophiles and scientists would argue against this view that humans are more cooperative and argue that competition is more our nature.
I find it hard to not see the problems we have created (pollution, climate change, war, famine, inequality, depression) as not being — at least in part — caused by our incessant need for growth. More money. More power. More tech.
I started my brief professional career by asking big questions. I studied how atoms travel around the entire earth in biogeochemical cycles. I asked broad-scale questions that required a LOT of data. Mostly because so many variables are interacting at these scales. As opposed to bench-top laboratory science where researchers can control for most variables and isolate one or two.
Ecology is an extremely broad-scale and multivariate science. So much so that traditional scientific methods, designed for the bench top, are often criticized for being inappropriate and inefficient. In short, the more variables you add, the more wrong you can be.
The problem is, that the world is exceptionally multivariate. The interconnected nature of, well, everything means we have to consider as many variables as possible to truly understand things.
Because of my ecological training, I used to think I was a big-picture person. Since I have freed myself from calling myself a scientist (by retiring), I realize how wrong I have been.
Yes, ecology and some other hard sciences are extremely ‘big picture’ and are considered the most complex of any discipline. But we are still far from holistic.
I realize now that to truly understand these broad scale issues of human importance we have to think even BIGGER.
The episode is a beginning. This is the start of broadening Ecology to include elements of psychology, anthropology, philosophy, and sociology to forge a more complete picture of interactions. These interactions are critical to understanding the problems plaguing humanity today.
We CANNOT move forward until we broaden our scope. Work together. Cooperate.
And before we can do that, we have to work on ourselves.
I am building a path to demonstrate HOW to learn to communicate with each other to solve the biggest problems. I introduce five parts to this process:
- Measures of individual and group human fitness that will be or are being selected for evolutionarily
- Personal inventory of values, ethics, morals, feelings, and needs. This is practice, includes things like meditation, exercise, healthy eating, and self-awareness
- Social structure including government, societies, and civilization
- Resource allocation and equitability
- Adaptive management and dynamic assessment
In future episodes I will develop these and describe steps toward solutions.