![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Intelligence and overshoot
Oct. 25th, 2006 09:49 pmWhat environmentalists are asking our species to do, in terms of halting the rapid growth in the scale of the human presence on Earth, is quite literally unprecedented. In the whole history of this planet, it is virtually certain that no other species that found itself suddenly capable of hacking out an entirely new niche for itself in an unsuspecting ecology showed the slightest bit of self-restraint in exploiting that niche. Such a species always overshoots the carrying capacity of the new niche and continues to expand until limited resources bite back.
Ecologists call this a "hard landing" scenario, perhaps in acknowledgement of the simple truth that life is hard, a corollary of the fact that evolution is blind. Non-intelligent species do not actively strive toward the goal of coexistence with their ecosystems; instead, this ideal is forced upon them over many diminshing cycles of overshoot and dieoff. Only after this hard beginning can cooperative systems of symbiosis begin to form. A right-wing Iraq hawk once vandalized an antiwar poster in a Pomona College dining hall with the words, "Peace is not free--it is something created by war." In ecology, this is almost the literal truth.
But humans don't have to go that way. The notion of a "soft landing" is not just a pleasant dream, but something we can actually turn into action if we choose. The ideology of unlimited growth, in its most basic form, is telling us to go with the flow and accept the terrible price if it turns out that we can't continue finding new niches to hack out of our limited planet (and eventually, perhaps, our solar system and galaxy). But there is every reason to decide that we don't want to take that chance. Even if history provides no guidance about how else we can live, I think we're smart enough to figure it out for ourselves.
Ecologists call this a "hard landing" scenario, perhaps in acknowledgement of the simple truth that life is hard, a corollary of the fact that evolution is blind. Non-intelligent species do not actively strive toward the goal of coexistence with their ecosystems; instead, this ideal is forced upon them over many diminshing cycles of overshoot and dieoff. Only after this hard beginning can cooperative systems of symbiosis begin to form. A right-wing Iraq hawk once vandalized an antiwar poster in a Pomona College dining hall with the words, "Peace is not free--it is something created by war." In ecology, this is almost the literal truth.
But humans don't have to go that way. The notion of a "soft landing" is not just a pleasant dream, but something we can actually turn into action if we choose. The ideology of unlimited growth, in its most basic form, is telling us to go with the flow and accept the terrible price if it turns out that we can't continue finding new niches to hack out of our limited planet (and eventually, perhaps, our solar system and galaxy). But there is every reason to decide that we don't want to take that chance. Even if history provides no guidance about how else we can live, I think we're smart enough to figure it out for ourselves.
