Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
There's a term for the human tendency to look at the biosphere, maybe even the universe, as
though it's all about us:
anthropocentrism
. Up to a point, this is an understandable and even in-
evitable propensity. Every person, after all, is the center of her own universe, the star of his own
movie; why should our species as a whole be less egocentric? Other animals are similarly obsessed
with their own kind: regardless of who furnishes the kibbles, dogs are obsessively interested in
other dogs. But there are healthy and unhealthy degrees of individual and species self-centeredness.
When individual human self-absorption becomes blatantly destructive we call it
narcissism
. Can a
whole species be overly self-absorbed? Hunter-gatherers were certainly interested in their own sur-
vival, but many indigenous forager peoples thought of themselves as part of a larger community
ally” (as an economist might put it) as we bulldoze, deforest, overfish, and deplete our way to world
domination.
However, history is not a steady ramp-up of human hubris and alienation from nature. Periodic-
ally humans were slapped down. Famine, resource conflicts, and disease decimated populations that
were previously growing. Civilizations rose, then fell. Financial manias led to crashes. Boomtowns
became ghost towns.
Ecological slap-downs probably occurred relatively frequently in preagricultural times, when
humans depended more directly on nature's variable productivity of wild foods. The Aboriginals of
Australia and the Native Americans—who are often regarded as exemplar intuitive ecologists due
to their traditions and rituals restraining population growth, protecting prey species, and affirming
humanity's place within the larger ecosystem—were probably just applying lessons from bitter ex-
perience. It's only when we humans get slapped down hard a few times that we start to appreciate
other species' importance, restrain our greed, and learn to live in relative harmony with our sur-
roundings.
Which prompts the question: Are the Lean-Green Anthropocene prophets our species' early
warning system whose function is to avert catastrophe—or are they merely ahead of their time,
preadapting to an ecological slap-down that is foreseeable but not yet fully upon us?
Throughout history, humans appear to have lived under two distinct regimes: boom times and dark
ages. Boom times occurred in prehistory whenever people arrived in a new habitat to discover an
abundance of large prey animals. Booms were also associated with the exploitation of new energy
resources (especially coal and oil) and the expansions of great cities—from Uruk, Mohenjo-daro,
Rome, Chang'an, Angkor Wat, Tenochtitlan, Venice, and London, all the way to Miami and Dubai.
Boom-time behavior is risk-seeking, confident to the point of arrogance, expansive, and experi-
mental.
Historians use the term
dark ages
to refer to times when urban centers lose most of their pop-
ulation. Think Europe in the fifth through the fifteenth centuries, the Near East after the Bronze
Age collapse around 1200
BCE
, Cambodia between 1450 and 1863
CE
, or Central America after the
Mayan collapse of 900
CE
. Dark-age behavior is conservative and risk-averse. It has echoes in the
attitudes of indigenous peoples who have lived in one place long enough to have confronted envir-
