There are three great threats to our ephemeral comfort as rulers of this extraordinary planet.
Overpopulation
Climate change
Chemical saturation
As I lounged on embarrassingly high thread count sheets in my climate-controlled hotel room freshly full of W room service summoned to my door with a mere phone call, after flying across the continent in a gravity-defying aluminum tube, sipping water from a plastic bottle containing tapwater filtered by coca cola and sold to me for more than the per-volume price of gasoline, I watched a tv show about the zombie apocalypse on my iPad with noise canceling headphones insulating me from the world outside both physically and mentally. There could be a blizzard / hurricane / drought outside, but I have glass and steel and climate control to protect me.
The plight of the main characters in my viewing choice, frantically seeking refuge from predators, lamenting their curse of civilization loss and genuinely considering suicide because "there is nothing left," while clearly a deliberate call for audience reflection, is at once effective and absurd. Not 100 years ago the vast majority of the human population, and even today the entirety of the animal kingdom (save household pets), considered those very circumstances simply to be life. Constant fear of predators, endless focus on security and the source of the next meal, no protection from disease or the misdeeds of others -- what are now points of conflict in apocalyptic scripts were so recently everyday reality for all of us. Refrigeration, vaccination, antiseptics, food supply chains, electricity, flight and automotive travel, instant communication, news networks -- all just a few generations old.
Our collective obsession with comfort and convenience, as we descend Maslov's hierarchy of needs to ever-less important territory will inevitably be our undoing. Flying east from Seattle past Mt. Rainier and into the Cascades on a sunny spring day offering a view from the heavens, I'm struck by the percentage of windowshades pulled down in favor of the on-board entertainment system.
Have we become so detached from our world that living without microwaves and Netflix constitutes rationale for suicide?
Yes we've become soft. That's inevitable. But we need not lose our connection to life -- the force that enables out consciousness, not the series of petty annoyances and responsibilities we concoct in suburbia. Life is the breathing, feeling, looking, walking, hearing, digesting, surviving beat of participating in being a creature. It's not the pursuit of the range rover, 6,000 sq ft house, trip to the dry cleaner, soccer practice, and yoga. It's your lungs expanding in your chest. It's adrenaline coursing through your body.
In so many ways, we have conquered life. Most North Americans move through their daily existence without any fear of predators, calamity, or finding their next meal. The needs that haunt 99% of life on this planet are simply covered by modern civilization, but that may -- nay will -- become our undoing.
It's just math. New, terrifying diseases are statistical certainties. The more people we make, the more likely it becomes that one of them will become the petrie dish that cultivates something apocalyptic. It's unlikely that any one person would be that host, but if it's a 1/6,000,000,000 chance, then it's already happened. I read in an airport recently that there are more people alive today than in the combined history of the species.
It's obvious from the sky. Fly over the US and witness the scarring. Witness how we've carved our initials into the very face of the planet, paving it, taming it, at once making it both more and less hospitable.
Thousands of people talk about ecological balance. It's a great idea, but it just isn't possible with 6B of us. We've crossed the tipping point. The chemicals of convenience -- a fun, fancy term for the byproducts of our civilized lives like CO2, mercury runoff, sulfur dioxide, PCBs, BPA, -- will continue to accumulate in our food supply, our environment, and our very own tissue until supersaturation. The compound effects of all of them cannot be calculated or understood in finite detail, but they will continue, cumulative and irreversible. Genetic mutation, allergic sensitivity, and outright system failure will accelerate beyond even the striking levels of 2014.
Our brains are built for survival. The very instincts that helped us survive 200 years ago -- competitiveness, achievement of greater luxury and station than peers, relentless accumulation, pursuit of convenience, stockpiling of food and shelter and warmth -- were essentially Darwinian mandates in a life focused on bracing against a stiff, cold wind, dodging predators, and competing for a suitable mate. Those same instincts will be our doom.
The problem is that our mastery of those things has outpaced our brains' adaptation. 200 years ago, that primal instinct that drove us to build the best house to protect against the elements, hunt and gather efficiently to protect against the winter and starvation, control our environment to eliminate predators, and compete with our peers to breed and continue the species kept us alive. Those same instincts today don't translate well in a life in which those threats cease to exist. Those instincts today manifest in a bigger SUV built from metals carved from the earth and melted from ore, coated with skins torn from animals and tanned with toxic chemicals synthesized in city-sized refineries, non-degradable rubbers and plastics harvested from rain forests and petroleum reserves at unimaginable environmental cost, and powered by ancient fluids pulled from the sea and desert floor, transported across virgin landscapes, and brought to the surface by injecting toxic slurry into the groundwater and fracturing the very ground beneath our feet. Thirst for those fluids leads to war, which leads to development of new weapons requiring more chemicals and more destruction, and endless strife that pits us against each other.
We just aren't built to be this smart. We are designed as fundamentally selfish creatures to help our own survival, but now that such survival is all but assured for ever-expanding life expectancies, that design is starting to turn on itself. We don't know what to do with our energies, so we create a world in which our strawberries grow from genetically modified seeds, get doused in chemicals, wrapped in plastic, and shipped 6,000 miles so we can burn 3 gallons of fuel to drive a 4,000 pound hunk of lamb-skin-wrapped steel across town to the climate controlled Whole Foods because they have the "freshest" berries rather than bending down and picking one from our own backyard.
Despite the irony of the term, it's our very nature that will eventually doom us. I don't know there is much we can do beyond waiting for the next thing, and adapting to our new condition, but in the meantime, we should steel ourselves against the inevitable challenges that will evolve to replace the ones we've solved. Rising sea levels, climate change, more allergies, increased autism rates, more traffic, more war, food shortages, new diseases spreading at alarming rates. And less beauty.
I'm not planning to build an underground bunker, stock it with canned goods, ammunition, and board games, but I'm starting to get why some do. So back to my no-foam, non-fat latte in the paper cup with the ring of corrugated cardboard to protect by moisturized and manicured fingers from the near boiling liquid inside paid for with my rare-metals-containing smartphone connected to some data center via radio-waves and strands of glass buried in the ground as I now sit in a pleather chair atop a synthetic carpet with rubber backing to protect my delicate, leather-clad feet and wool-adorned back from the stiffness of the underlying steel and concrete construction of this particular airport where I will re-enter the magic aluminum tube to spirit away at 500 mph at 35000 feet while burning a swimming-pool's worth of Jet-A and creating a couple tons of CO2 so I can drive my steel/leather/plastic machine back across 30 miles of asphalt to my brick, gypsum, wood, rubber, copper, and fiberglass house filled with plastics and metals and chemicals but also filled with the love of my family for whose simplest comfort and protection I would happily pollute the planet, out-compete my fellow man, and continue to play my part in our unstoppable march "forward."
