Head Home Previous Next Last
 

Is Humanity Suicidal?

Roy Christman is a retired political science professor and has a farm in Pennsylvania.

Biologist Edward O. Wilson asked that question in his book, In Search of Nature, published in 1996. If he were writing today, he might change the word order to Humanity Is Suicidal, since we certainly have more evidence to back up that idea.

It is true that civilizations have risen and died out in the past. The Anasazi, the people who built the impressive cliff dwellings of the Southwest, had declined by 1300. Easter Islanders, who erected those giant heads, cut down all their trees and witnessed a population crash even before the arrival of European diseases. The Mayan collapse dates to about 800 CE. The early Norse settlement on Greenland died out completely.

One defining feature of previous collapses or extinctions is their localism. While the Anasazi were going down, the Lenapes of the Delaware Valley were going strong. While the Easter Islands were cutting down their last trees, the Hawaiians were thriving.

In less than a century, that has changed. Cut down all the trees on Easter Island and the Easter Islanders die. Cut down all the rain forests and the boreal forests and keep producing greenhouse gases, and we all die.

The Covid-19 virus illustrates just how connected and how vulnerable we are. A tiny organism that doesn't even have a rudimentary brain can kill over 100,000 people in the U.S. and spread to all fifty states in a few short months.

I might also mention nuclear weapons. The United States and Russia possess over two-thirds of the approximately 14,500 warheads and bombs, but the nuclear club also includes the UK, China, France, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea. A few years ago, I would have written that the weapons under the control of the U.S. and Russia were in safe and mature hands, but I would no longer say that for either country.

As the dominant species on earth, we may also be the only species with an awareness of our own deaths. While I don't have any absolute proof, I doubt if a dog or a lion has any conception of its mortality. For many people this impending death is too scary to accept, so we invent gods and an afterlife and eternal paradise, and then we kill people who have invented other gods, because my imaginary friend is better than your imaginary friend.


Layer on top of that the accumulating evidence that the world's population is getting dumber. The number of people who believe conspiracy theories on Facebook is shocking, especially since one of them is the President of the United States. The number of people willing to vote for that President may be even more shocking. The number of people who don't want to wear a mask to protect others is frightening. (Again, I mention our President.)

While humans may be on the apex of intelligent life forms, we really aren't that important for the future of the planet. Imagine some science fiction scenario where a small meteor carrying a deadly virus lands on earth and within a year wipes out humanity.

The earth would begin to heal. Plants would start growing in the cracks in the freeways, Monarch butterflies would rebound, elephants would no longer be killed for their ivory or sharks for their fins. In just a few months of the Covid-19 economic shutdown, greenhouse gas emissions dropped

If that same meteor landed with a virus that killed off invertebrates like ants, bees, corals, flies, worms, and beetles, within a year we would lose most of the birds, fish, amphibians, and mammals. While humans would survive longer on stored food, eventually we too would perish.

We need to get over ourselves. We simply aren't that important. And because of that, we had better start to act like the intelligent people we are supposed to be and start thinking about our future and the future of this planet.

~ Roy Christman

 

 


 

 

Last page
Next page
Previous page
Home page