Let’s get real about the stories we tell ourselves.
October 2024
I think that we need a new story about the world we live in. The old story about progress, growth, GDP, and profit may soon be irrelevant. Rational talk, pandemics, ‘natural disasters”, and political polarization may give sway to emotional reaction. We may become less and less able to face the future when we see our civilized lifestyle threatened by breakdowns in social, economic, and political life as well as in the physical world in which humans evolved. A “New Normal” is not likely to be a version of “the Good Life.” Instead, it is increasingly filled with human-caused changes to climate, plant and animal extinctions, ocean acidification and pollution, and other symptoms of the distress in the natural world. I suggest that the new story must recognize that humans are not the masters of the Earth, but are, indeed, merely a small segment of the great evolutionary and ecological systems that is Nature; and that the physical world has existed and will continue to exist whatever stories we may tell ourselves. Our new story must recognize this fact.
Most important in all new stories is the recognition that humans are animals and thus a part of the world of Nature. As such the human animal is bound in the extraordinary intricacies of ecological webs and fully participates in the processes of biological evolution. We are linked, as are all organisms, with the complexities of unique and ever-changing environments. And as with all organisms, the human animal reproduces and grows until it is limited by environmental restrictions. However, our cultural, social, economic, and political stories are human creations and are not based in physical reality.
For most of its existence, the human species had its place within Nature just as did other mammals. But with growing consciousness and technology, such as language, fire, plant and animal domestication, writing, and a vast array of other tools, humans have concocted supernatural tales to explain their lives. These stories, including the those of great, world religions, were adequate as long as natural limits could be overcome by moving to new lands, conquering less technologically advanced peoples, or inventing new technologies that depended on solar energy. Today, however, natural environmental limits to the expansion of the human race have become evident with disasters both physical and cultural.
Even with the invention of science and technologies that were based only on the flows of air and water, human impacts on the natural world could be ignored. Populations could grow gradually and not exceed the carrying capacity of the agricultural production of the Earth, especially when new lands were available to master. Malthus, who introduced the concept of carrying capacity, correctly questioned that premise. But as technological changes in agriculture kept altering the facts of production, Malthusian ideas were relegated to the dustbin for decades.
Science, technology and industry in the early nineteenth century discovered new sources of energy, first of coal and then of other fossil fuels. This set the stage for new human manipulation of life on earth, seemingly without physical environmental limits. Nevertheless, existing stories of humanity’s relations with nature remained dominated by the supernatural and concerns for the eternal. With new technologies, the limitations imposed by solar energy were exceeded. Ideas of growth, progress, and seemingly unlimited sources of energy made it possible to focus on the here and now. Economic and political stories that supported the new sources of energy came to dominate modern life.
However, energy and other ‘natural’ resources are part of Nature, whose scientific story is evolution and ecology. Darwin and von Humboldt, among others, initiated different stories than the economic and political stories that were created by humans to support the new, fossil fuel-based energy base. Evolution questioned the religious stories of its time and the successes of longer lives, better living conditions, and freedoms from the drudgeries of working, simply to survive, were so great that resources were thought of as part of the modern cultural stories. Only recently have evolution and ecology attracted public attention because ‘bads’ and pollution, such as climate change and the loss of biodiversity, contradict the marvels of modern life.
Natural resources, which are cultural ideas, have become divorced from the realities of the natural world. The ecological systems of today differ from those of the millennial ages in which fossil fuels were formed. In contrast, the rapidity of the burning of fossil fuels puts great stress on the ecosystems in which humans evolved. The energy released by the human use of fossil fuels is unlike any previous natural process. The burning of fossil fuels has radically altered current, large-scale natural ecosystems: i. e. oceans, atmosphere, water cycles, and organic ecosystems. A few humans are increasingly becoming aware that these ecological disruptions don’t fit into the modern stories they have found satisfying. Nevertheless, the secular stories of modern culture persist. As long as humans speak of economic growth and development as fundamental to life, modern cultural stories continue.
Technological solutions, the bases of the success of modern life, are cultural stories. The use of fossil fuel resources has temporarily allowed technology to extend human lives, create a rich, global economy, make travel and both physical and artificial communication easy and common, produce goods and services beyond the wildest dreams of anyone born before the 20th century. These cultural accomplishments are basic to the stories we tell ourselves today. But technology cannot solve problems that arise in the world of Nature. Technology does not address the more fundamental stories of evolution/ecology. Technology is a cultural story; it is not based in the real world of Nature. Today’s dominant stories no longer explain the world in which we live. They ignore the natural ecological networks in which we human animal are embedded.
As much as we would like to believe that the Earth’s resources are limitless and that human ingenuity can continue to expand the uses of these resource, we are unable to face the reality that the rapid rise of human population has decreased the quality of the atmosphere, the oceans, the soils, the forests, and water to the point that the biological carrying capacity of the Earth for humans was reached over 50 years ago. Malthus basically had the right idea; but it has taken over 200 years for us to realize it.
A new story that recognizes the real world in which we live could not have been told until recent decades. Even now, very few people have been able to assemble the ideas that make it explicit. Only with the rise of physical and natural science in the 19th century and its great expansion in the 20th century have the elements of the new story been available. Technology underlies the great economic, cultural, and political growth of the modern age. However, the understanding of evolution and ecology, the basic elements of a new scientific story based on physical realities, has not been incorporated into the dominant cultural stories of today. An understanding of energy and entropy, of ecology and evolution, of environment and exponential growth must come together to form the bases of a new story if the human animal is to play a major part in its survival.
The two stories I describe have crashed: the modern story of growth and progress with its goods and services, is colliding head-on with the environmental story of Nature with its bads and pollution. The two stories must be recognized together unless Nature’s story rapidly overwhelms the hubris of humanity.