Simply Sustainable

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, E.O. Wilson wrote a book called “Biophilia” [1]. His thesis was that human beings have an inherent love of and preference for living things. That we are besotted by life. As Wilson put it, biophilia is “the innate tendency [in human beings] to focus on life and lifelike process. To an extent still undervalued in philosophy and religion, our existence depends on this propensity, our spirit is woven from it, hopes rise on its currents.” 


Apparently lacking the gene for cynicism that might let him see brutal inconsistency in his own thinking, Wilson claimed that our innate love for living things is a foundation for repairing and restoring the biosphere. From the damage caused by…uh…us, despite our deep feelings of oneness with all living things.


Anyway, sloppy rhetoric aside, it is clear from archeological ecology studies worldwide that human beings are very consistent when they move into a previously uninhabited area. First thing we do is start to simplify the biota. We may well be “biophilic”, but if we are, there are limits to the intensity of biodiversity we are prepared to tolerate in our neighborhood. For the millennia that there have been human settlements, wherever the residual evidence is sufficient to answer the question, we find that humans reconstruct their environment to contain fewer species and to be structured in a more-or-less orderly fashion. You can find an excellent disquisition (correct word?) of this effect in Charles L. Redman’s book Human Impact on Ancient Environments [2]. 


Redman compiles archeological evidence from human settlements worldwide, and conclusively demonstrates the suppression of biodiversity over time. More interestingly, he documents consistent patterns in this effect. By landscape modification (for everything from slash-and-burn agriculture to permanent fields and provision of space for residential and commercial growth), preferential hunting, and replacement of locally indigenous species with those already domesticated, humans reconstruct the environment to a simpler, and similarly structured, pattern wherever they settle. 


This may seem like simple coincidence, an artifact of the technological development status of human society when new lands were occupied. I’m inclined to think not. It turns out that early life on earth probably resembled single celled eukaryotes more than bacteria. Eukaryotes carry enormous complexity in their genomes, which gives them tremendous residual flexibility to deal with environmental challenges, particularly in cooler habitats where biochemical processes occur at slower rates. The downside of genetic complexity—of stretches of unexpressed genome, of random pieces of genome flopping off the chromosomes to float in the cellular fluids, of viral DNA inserts, redundant genes within and across chromosomes—makes it very easy for replication to fail. A relatively high proportion of daughter cells of such creatures are too genetically warped to survive. They are victims of a sloppy genetic system. Bacteria, it turns out, don’t put up with all the genetic slop. Bacteria retain a single, clean loop of DNA, genes are not redundant, snippets of unused DNA do not accrue. The current theory [3] is that this an artifact of life moving from cooler shallow waters to warm shallows and more importantly, warm deep ocean vent chemosynthetic environments. The high temperatures of such environs run physiological machinery at a high rate, increasing the proportion of failures. To successfully occupy the hostile warmer and biogeochemically novel environments, and to successfully manage the environment to permit long-term survival, the colonizers needed simpler, cleaner genetic systems.


Human beings, of all earthly organisms, do the most effective job of environmental manipulation. We now, and for all the time that we have lived in settlements rather than nomadic family groups, have managed the environment to do our bidding. I think it is possible that humans restructure the environment in consistent fashion because it is difficult to manage more complex ecosystems. The opportunities for failure are too great, there are too many choices to make to reformulate and operate the regional ecology without life-threatening fuck ups. 


There may be a method to our madness. We may not be “biophilic”, but we are also not “biophobic”. We are idiosyncratic, knowing what we can handle in an ecosystem, and working to make it so. 


I’ll explore this theme in more detail from here. It seems like an important clue to human interaction with the biosphere. It also may be another driving factor for war, since the invariable outcome of armed conflict is ecosystem simplification both in the combat zone and in the regions that provide the raw materials, logistics, and foodstuffs to wage war. 


Anyway, I have new material up at all sites this week, and intend to keep renewing every week from here out. If you have a moment, please visit http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/, http://docviper.livejournal.com/ , and http://theresaturtleinmysoup.blogspot.com/ . Thanks for stopping by!


Notes


[1] Easily available via Amazon and other online sources. No longer routinely easy to find in brick-and-mortar book emporiums. Or is that “emporia”… ?


[2] Redman, C.L. 1999. Human Impact on Ancient Environments. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. Widely available in paperback from Amazon and other online purveyors. 


[3] Ridley, M. 2000. Genome. Harper Perennial. NY.