U-Turn or U Die

Abstract

A lot has been written about the tragic story of Rapa Nui (Easter Island). A thriving culture, capable of building hundreds of moai, the emblematic giant stone statues, which obliterated itself due to unsustainable practices, mainly deforestation and overpopulation. The people who cut the last palm tree on the island are often mentioned. Did they understand they were committing suicide? Or were they just too concentrated on other things which they misjudged as more important than trees?

In their explorations, they encountered life in many forms and watched the workings of evolution on a thousand worlds. They saw how often the first faint sparks of intelligence flickered and died in the cosmic night.

And because, in all the Galaxy, they had found nothing more precious than Mind, they encouraged its dawning everywhere.

Arthur C. Clarke, 2010: Odyssey Two.

Technical Endnotes

14.1.1 On the Feasibility of Surviving Without Nature

Reading my Sect. 14.3, one could be tempted to object: a future version of humanity so advanced that it moulds entire planets according to its needs surely won’t depend on animals and plants for its sustenance! This, I think, is a misconception, fueled by decades of science-fiction which has accustomed us to expect marvels like synthetic food, self-aware robots, living creatures created genetically from scratch. These things are not impossible, but at the moment they definitely belong to the realm of the imagination. For example, in 70 years of research on Artificial Intelligence, we have made little progress since Turing’s groundbreaking work. Similarly, our understanding of the workings of life is extremely rudimentary: even the simplest cells are an absolute conundrum, and we are just starting to make the first timid steps towards engineering a cellular membrane. It can probably be done, it will just take a very long time to understand how. Terraforming a planet, in contrast, requires less of a conceptual breakthrough, and could well be within the possibilities of the humans of tomorrow. Creating a biosphere will then be the next step. Every species, including ours, is defined by the complex and fragile interrelations that it maintains with its environment: from the viruses, bacteria and protozoa to the flora and fauna that surround it. Its survival depends on its equilibrium with this environment. It’s not only the chemicals that are provided by exchanges with the environment: think about the fact that bacteria in our bodies outnumber human cells 10–1, and we depend on them in ways that we haven’t completely understood yet. Our success in colonizing most regions of the Earth has given us a false sense of omnipotence, as if we could free ourselves from the bonds that tie us to our Terrestrial environment and reach for the stars, providing for all our needs on our own. This is plain wrong: our diffusion over the five continents proves nothing about our ability to adapt to them. We colonized most of these lands without finding sustainable practices to provide for our needs, and if we keep our present course we will rapidly get extinct in most of these regions, which cannot really support us. We’re like bacteria in a petri dish that experience an exponential growth and assume they will do so forever. We badly need to learn how to survive—stably—on Earth, and only then we might look up towards our natural destiny: the stars.

14.1.2 On Abandoning Animal Farming

We could forbid the breeding of domestic livestock (or impose exorbitant taxes on it) and get all the meat from hunting wild animals in the forests. If we do a good job in recovering wild ecosystems, the forests will be able to sustain a reasonable, although greatly reduced, production of meat. Hunting will be necessary in any case to correct the unbalances and keep the ecosystems stable. The meat produced in this way would be way less, and consequently way more expensive. But hey, it’s a luxury you have to pay for, and it’s even bad for you. We consider acceptable to impose crazy taxes on cigarettes. I don’t see the difference with heart-disease-causing meat. The current average per capita meat consumption in the US is a disturbing 377 g/day of beef, pork and poultry (2009 data), of which 191 g come from beef and pork alone [7]. I must remark that there is a lot of pressure, nowadays, on nutritionists trying to curb the consumption of red meat in the west. To me there is absolutely no controversy about the superiority of a low-meat diet, as is proven by the better health performance of countries that rely mainly on fish proteins like Japan, or champions of the Mediterranean diet like Italy.

Of course hunting should be strictly regulated (as it already is to a large extent, in western countries); we cannot allow our forests to be subject to the same ruthless overexploitation that is devastating the oceans. Actually we should apply worldwide severe regulations on fishing as well. The European Union is moving in the right direction by imposing fishing quotas, but these measures remain insufficient, with quotas set well above the levels recommended by scientists (source: The Guardian).