So, the question is: At what point in hominid evolution did humans begin using the concept of "TIME"? The very idea of time is invisible, an invisible tool, if you will. Other, more obvious "prime motivators" have been attributed to moving cultural evolution forward, so-called 'Great Leaps Forward'. Leaving aside for the moment the potential fallacy of teleology, some of these attributes, as proffered, are, stone tool use, division of labor, language, cooperative hunting, bipedalism, and even cooking. I believe ALL of the above are significant to establishing new neurophysiological structures and capabilities. But the one single-most important idea humans adopted in the long march of time, IS time.
There is scant evidence that our cousins, the other contemporary hominid species, Homo neanderthalensis ever operated in the conscious concept of time. There are famous sites, such as the burial with fossil pollen of flowers deposited within a grave, which is taken to mean thoughts of an "afterlife", but there is no regular, consistent demonstration of operating on a daily basis with a consciousness of temporal scheduling.
Homo Sapiens, on the other hand, gives forth, somewhere in the Magdalenian, an artifact made of the antler of Rangifer terandis, reindeer. On this antler is inscribed the phases of the moon over an extended period of a couple of months. Think about this. Tracking the changing appearance of the moon over time indicates not only that they were aware of the altered state of the off-world phenomenon, but also, that there is a regularity, a pattern discernible, which is trackable, i.e., can be EXPECTED to change day to day, through this invisible ether of time. Waiting for the next night to appear, so one can record the phase of the moon, implies that one is anticipating something recordable which is different than the state before, the night before.
Consider the implied and plotted trajectory of a cannonball fired across a field. In the plotting, the dotted line represents the prior states of the position of the cannonball. Given that dotted line, and curves in nature, it is possible to make a reasonable guess, or PREDICTION of where the cannonball will land. in order to make that prediction, one needs the neurophysiological structures in the brain, already pre-configured for operating in time, to make a predictive statement, which has not yet happened. In the future.
Speaking about things which have not happened yet, or more precisely, the ABILITY to speak about future events implies that a) you can think such things, and b) that others can understand you talking about future events. This is not a simple proposition. Understanding that someone is speaking of events not yet realized means that the audience also has the brain structures to take in the meaning of your references yet to be.
Given that this species had for many millennia been hunting, collectively, and that bands of hunters had to go away in space from the base camp, for many days at a time, only to return to share the proceeds of the
hunt, implies that everyone in the tribe understood the necessity of doing so. When the hunters returned with booty to share, rejoicing at the good fortune led to an opportunity to share tales of the hunt. This is the classic rendition of the origins of theater, where the hunters recount the exploits encountered during the several-days hunt. It has been fancied as dancing around a campfire, acting out the highlights of the hunt, with suspenseful moments, the critical actions, the missed shots, and the resolution bringing resources.
At some moment in this long march of theater, Sapiens had been unconsciously acquiring the ability to understand things which had already taken place, the recounting of which was already familiar to them. At some point, a threshold was crossed where the pre-configured neurophysiology was used for yet another contemplation of actions acted out over a temporal stage, only this time, it was yet to be realized.
Crossing this Rubicon was the moment that sapiens became the pre-ordained fittest to survive in the unbespoke competition for dominance in Pleistocene Europe. Being able to anticipate, to configure future events like next week's hunt, gave this fecund species it's advantage over neanderthalensis.The question is, when did that happen? The reindeer antler comes from about 30,000 years before present.
Parietal cave art recently discovered at Pont D'Arc on the Rhone in Provence dates to about 32,000 YBP. So, we can assume that in the neighborhood of 30-35 thousands of years ago, Homo Sapiens had already acquired the brain structures capable of operating in the invisible tool of Time, since parietal art implies a viewer of that art, displaced in time from the making. It is not unreasonable to hazard that there were several millennia of precursor development of the ability to manage things in time before the hard evidence makes an appearance.
The interesting point about working within an understanding that not everything happens at once, is that one can PLAN ahead for survival, one can configure one's environment to guarantee a modicum of success down the road. By the time of the Late Paleolithic, when humans are hunting them, reindeer herds had for countless millennia been traversing regular migration routes in their transhumance. Approaching the hunt could go two ways: Either one's tribe could be wandering to-and-fro across the earth hoping to encounter some megafaunal supper, or, one's tribe could use the invisible tool of time, with the tribal memories of the pattern of reindeer migration at certain indicated times of year, at specific places, and wait for them to come to you. This latter method is much more ergonomically efficient, and has the advantage of freeing time for other activities, in the meantime.
All that is required is an understanding that there is such aching as predictability of a pattern operating in a timeline. Such periodicities are abundant in nature, if one follows the idea of regularity. Regularity, of course, is written over time; knowing the pattern allows planning ahead for resource exploitation, and better survival.
Much, if not all of cultural evolution is predicated on anticipating perturbations in otherwise dependable natural patterns, and mitigating for those disturbances. If you rely on annual flooding to lay down fresh soil which gives rise to an abundance of harvestable crops, even before the Agricultural Revolution, in the Horticultural Era, and you have the advantage of tribal memory which tells that there is periodicity to wet/dry years, of say, seven years, then you can adjust your migratory trafficking to accommodate the fluctuation. You can wander over a wider circuit in dry years to supplant the lowered expectations of harvest in any given area. This insures a better survival rate for your tribe. Knowing the perturbations in the periodicity helps to plan for compensation to the variable flux.
So knowing how to operate within the invisible tool of time helps to succeed in the struggle for survival. This ability becomes increasingly important as culture becomes more complex and complicated, until today, it is corporations with a good handle on logistics and "JIT" manufacturing systems that succeed. Much of our lives are consumed by being at the right place at the right time; we are driven by temporality.
Much of our success is not even conscious of managing in the context of time, but the lessons learned over the vast stretch of human millennia come down to us as a sequence of three large-scale methodologies which operate in the background of human activity. These are roughly sequential in evolutionary utility, although they can operate contemporaneously and in concert.
The three methods are, Mitigation, Moderation, and Modulation. One could add, for completeness, another method deriving from these, as "Mini-Maxing". But the latter is, properly, a refinement of the others. How these work in real time, is seen in most human affairs, particularly in large scales, and is consistent with the adage that 'ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny'.
Viewing these methods, or approaches to natural conditions is best seen in a more primitive, or simpler, context, such as a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, where the number of influential factors is fewer, and thus more discernible, if still already complex.
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Communion
The rain was hammering on the windshield, in those huge drops the wipers could barely stay up with. Since early the previous day, the storm clouds had been chasing me north as I headed deep into the Olympic Peninsula. ‘So this is why they call it a rainforest,’ I thought to myself, the endless conifers whipping by. It was a blanket of green, cut only by this two-lane strip of macadam and the occasional muddy side road. Essentially, it was just my van barreling down the lonely highway, on which nobody in their right mind would be out today. Even for storm-pounded western Washington, it was a major weather event.
Was it just me, or were storms getting more fierce over the last two decades? Certainly the previous winter in Santa Barbara had flooding from a massive “pineapple express’ that was off the charts, of all time. The entire lower Laguna Street for ten blocks in any direction had been knee deep in floodwaters overflowing from Sycamore Creek. And the highway out at the airport was shut for a couple days due to overflowing mud deposits. I had gone down to take pictures of the cars literally piled up by Mission Creek jumping its banks at the bridges; they were buried up to the headrests in mud.
I was slowly winding my way up the Pacific Coast, by the oceanside roads, with all their twists and turns, sleeping in my van, sometimes in below zero temps. And now I was rushing into one of the biggest storms of the year, on New Year’s Day, because I wanted to see the archaeological site of Ozette on a fierce winter day, the closest I could get to Early Holocene conditions at the end of the Wisconsin ice age eleven thousand years ago. Ozette was on the coast at the northwest tip of the Olympic Peninsula, sort of defiantly sticking its jaw out into the Pacific, inviting insult. Not an easy place to make a living, even ten millennia ago.
When I got “there,” I still had a two-hour hike through the actual rain forest, just to get to the beach where the site was. There would be no prehistoric artifacts or evidence still lying about because the Park Service had excavated the site several years before, but the site itself, the situation in ecological context would still be evident. I needed to stand where they had stood, looking out at what they saw every day for centuries – it would be the closest I could get to time travel, for a while anyway.
VOOOOOOSH ---- Suddenly my vision, already impaired by blinding rain, was clouded by blackness and motion. An eagle, with what had to be a six foot wingspan, had just buzzed my windshield, swooped down in front of me at forty miles an hour, pulled up to the left, gaining rapid ascent, and lofted to the left into an open clear-cut. He rose gently to the far side of the clearing hundreds of feet away, and settled onto a high branch, turning to look at my reaction. There had been a few clear-cuts along the way, but seldom close to the road. This one was extensive, and ugly. Probably an entire quarter- quarter had been sliced to shin height, and was ugly with its debris and absence. An American tragedy allowed by some chicanery between a government agency and the exploiters, spoilers of the Commonweal, for profit, and short-term thrills.
I brought the van to a halt; there had been no cars on this road for over a half hour, and I had the lights on. I sat there, watching the Bald Eagle watch me. And there was no doubt he was watching me, our eyes locked over the naked yards of missing forest. He was inviting me to witness the destruction of his home. The felled stumps still smelled of freshly cut timber, a smell I had grown to love as a kid when my grandfather took me at his knee into the giant kilns he supervised as a lumber engineer. The creosote was putrid, but fresh sawdust was intoxicating, opening the nasal passages. But now, fully grown, and having worked in timber country as an archaeologist for years, I could only feel sad at evidence of each new felling, each parcel of the wilderness falling away from the once proud oldgrowth blanket of green which had, before Yankee Imperialism, covered the West. Now it’s all about conservation, at best, a thumb in the dyke.
I whipped out my telephoto on my old manual Nikon (I like to do the thinking about settings for myself). The eagle continued to watch me, and I him. Now, I’m not prone to spooky things, but I swear we were connecting on an astral plane, and he was pumping me full of the built-up invective he had for whatever bandits had ripped down his neighborhood. Rip-and-run, they invaded, obliterated, and left the scene of the crime. He was not a happy camper, and he was letting me know it.
“Look at this mess; how would you like this to happen to your home?” I could hear him saying. “It’s going to take a century or more to fix this mess,” he continued, burning into my neurons from somewhere. It occurred to me that he was swearing, in this church, this cathedral of evergreen. I could only concur. Eventually he calmed down in my head, and we were agreeing, and becoming fast friends, sharing a religious experience together, across the void, across the missing forest, through the rain in the missing rainforest.
I took several pictures, telephoto and tragic wide angle. I even scratched my glasses because the rubber cup thingy was missing, but I didn’t care; it was the rarest of rare, sharing a trans-species moment of religion with a rare and beautiful raptor. But by now, I had gotten the message. A Hopi elder had once told me to listen to the Earth Mother and find my mission, it would find me. The eagle was the messenger. We shared a moment out of eternity, an eternal bond, brothers under the storm clouds, eyeing each other across the vastness of environmental insult, and knew what we must do, each of us. Voosh, he had gotten my attention; he had transmitted the message, and we resolved to be related, forever. “All my relations,” the ancient Native American phrase of prayer suddenly had immediate significance. All my relations meant protecting ALL my relations, not just humies. It meant, especially, protecting the relations out in nature who cannot speak for themselves, like Eagle, and the others living in his former neighborhood. I suppose he was chosen because he could have impact, make me listen. He sure got my attention. Like I said, I’m not prone to spooky stuff, but I listened that day.
- 1145 –
Was it just me, or were storms getting more fierce over the last two decades? Certainly the previous winter in Santa Barbara had flooding from a massive “pineapple express’ that was off the charts, of all time. The entire lower Laguna Street for ten blocks in any direction had been knee deep in floodwaters overflowing from Sycamore Creek. And the highway out at the airport was shut for a couple days due to overflowing mud deposits. I had gone down to take pictures of the cars literally piled up by Mission Creek jumping its banks at the bridges; they were buried up to the headrests in mud.
I was slowly winding my way up the Pacific Coast, by the oceanside roads, with all their twists and turns, sleeping in my van, sometimes in below zero temps. And now I was rushing into one of the biggest storms of the year, on New Year’s Day, because I wanted to see the archaeological site of Ozette on a fierce winter day, the closest I could get to Early Holocene conditions at the end of the Wisconsin ice age eleven thousand years ago. Ozette was on the coast at the northwest tip of the Olympic Peninsula, sort of defiantly sticking its jaw out into the Pacific, inviting insult. Not an easy place to make a living, even ten millennia ago.
When I got “there,” I still had a two-hour hike through the actual rain forest, just to get to the beach where the site was. There would be no prehistoric artifacts or evidence still lying about because the Park Service had excavated the site several years before, but the site itself, the situation in ecological context would still be evident. I needed to stand where they had stood, looking out at what they saw every day for centuries – it would be the closest I could get to time travel, for a while anyway.
VOOOOOOSH ---- Suddenly my vision, already impaired by blinding rain, was clouded by blackness and motion. An eagle, with what had to be a six foot wingspan, had just buzzed my windshield, swooped down in front of me at forty miles an hour, pulled up to the left, gaining rapid ascent, and lofted to the left into an open clear-cut. He rose gently to the far side of the clearing hundreds of feet away, and settled onto a high branch, turning to look at my reaction. There had been a few clear-cuts along the way, but seldom close to the road. This one was extensive, and ugly. Probably an entire quarter- quarter had been sliced to shin height, and was ugly with its debris and absence. An American tragedy allowed by some chicanery between a government agency and the exploiters, spoilers of the Commonweal, for profit, and short-term thrills.
I brought the van to a halt; there had been no cars on this road for over a half hour, and I had the lights on. I sat there, watching the Bald Eagle watch me. And there was no doubt he was watching me, our eyes locked over the naked yards of missing forest. He was inviting me to witness the destruction of his home. The felled stumps still smelled of freshly cut timber, a smell I had grown to love as a kid when my grandfather took me at his knee into the giant kilns he supervised as a lumber engineer. The creosote was putrid, but fresh sawdust was intoxicating, opening the nasal passages. But now, fully grown, and having worked in timber country as an archaeologist for years, I could only feel sad at evidence of each new felling, each parcel of the wilderness falling away from the once proud oldgrowth blanket of green which had, before Yankee Imperialism, covered the West. Now it’s all about conservation, at best, a thumb in the dyke.
I whipped out my telephoto on my old manual Nikon (I like to do the thinking about settings for myself). The eagle continued to watch me, and I him. Now, I’m not prone to spooky things, but I swear we were connecting on an astral plane, and he was pumping me full of the built-up invective he had for whatever bandits had ripped down his neighborhood. Rip-and-run, they invaded, obliterated, and left the scene of the crime. He was not a happy camper, and he was letting me know it.
“Look at this mess; how would you like this to happen to your home?” I could hear him saying. “It’s going to take a century or more to fix this mess,” he continued, burning into my neurons from somewhere. It occurred to me that he was swearing, in this church, this cathedral of evergreen. I could only concur. Eventually he calmed down in my head, and we were agreeing, and becoming fast friends, sharing a religious experience together, across the void, across the missing forest, through the rain in the missing rainforest.
I took several pictures, telephoto and tragic wide angle. I even scratched my glasses because the rubber cup thingy was missing, but I didn’t care; it was the rarest of rare, sharing a trans-species moment of religion with a rare and beautiful raptor. But by now, I had gotten the message. A Hopi elder had once told me to listen to the Earth Mother and find my mission, it would find me. The eagle was the messenger. We shared a moment out of eternity, an eternal bond, brothers under the storm clouds, eyeing each other across the vastness of environmental insult, and knew what we must do, each of us. Voosh, he had gotten my attention; he had transmitted the message, and we resolved to be related, forever. “All my relations,” the ancient Native American phrase of prayer suddenly had immediate significance. All my relations meant protecting ALL my relations, not just humies. It meant, especially, protecting the relations out in nature who cannot speak for themselves, like Eagle, and the others living in his former neighborhood. I suppose he was chosen because he could have impact, make me listen. He sure got my attention. Like I said, I’m not prone to spooky stuff, but I listened that day.
- 1145 –
Saturday, February 3, 2007
Holocene trajectory
I shook hands with Al Gore last night, briefly, in passing. He was arriving at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival's awards ceremony of the Richard Attenborough Award for environmental filmmaking. He exited a short (non-ostentatious) limo, greeted a few major players in SBIFF, then generously headed for the common folks behind the railing. After a few pictures, I thrust my hand out and he shook it, thanking me. I thanked him, sir.
He made himself available to the media, taking time to answer all their questions before moving to the next. The media were swarming; you can't blame them: he had just been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize the day before. He spent time with each of the major videojournalists, then spied more common folks behind him, and shared time shaking more hands before heading to the official, ritual red carpet, pausing to give time to photgraphers accompanied by director of "An Inconvenient Truth", Davis Guggenheim, actress Elizabeth Shue, "Titanic" director and bathymetrist James Cameron. They all generously spent more time answering questions, seemingly unhurried, before heading into the Arlington Theatre for the awards ceremony.
Now, I'm not much of a celebrity chaser, although I count among my lucky fortune to have also been in the photojournalist hoarde covering Bill Clinton and later, Hillary Clinton when they came to Santa Barbara in years past. What makes this encounter of particular import in the pantheon of my lifetime events is that I am similarly inclined toward considering the human condition in great sweeps of time, particularly late Pleistocene times, as we are now in. The Holocene is the last ten-thousand years, since the steep incline in global warming following the Wurm IV glaciation, or more popularly known as the last Ice Age.
Yup, we've been here before. Since the glacial maximum last seen at 18 KYBP (thousand years before present), we've been on a warming climb globally, which accelerated around ten thousand BP. That put us into a moderate temperate regime, which was interrupted from about seven to four (roughly) thousands of years ago, when we experienced what is called the Altithermal. It was over three thousand years of hot, dry times, requiring massive modifications in the way humans made their livings on the planet. Some places on Earth experienced more dramatic conditions than others. The American West was one of the more severely impacted.
One way we know this is that archaeologically, the hunter gatherer populations of the West who had been tracking and eating large game such as wapiti (a big, elk-like beastie) which provided good eating for a family of five for about, say, two weeks, gradually found themselves having to hunt smaller and smaller game as various large species died out. They died out not so much from over-hunting as the decline of traditional nutrient foliage which was declining in extent and abundance.
In mid-Altithermal times, target game had been reduced to deer, antelope and rabbit. Waterways, particularly swampy areas in the western flyways had also been subjected to dessication and retreat, but still provided waterfowl as edible resources. Hunting ducks became high art during the dehydrated Altithermal period. This was a dismal shadow of the glory days of megafaunal captures, such as mastodon, bison antiquus, giant sloth, camel, horses and megalo-type antlered dinner-on-the-hoof. The catalog of omnivoration had shifted to the meagre side of the curve. There was not much from which to make a meal, anymore. Populations declined as resources became scarce.
It was during those days that the diet of aboriginal peoples shifted towards processing more and more grains, and tending the natural locales of edible vegetable matter. Think you need more fiber in your diet? What if it became compulsory? Other sources of protein extraction became exploitable; who was the first guy to eat freshwater snails, because he had to? What does lizard taste like, or grubs?
Eventually, of course, the Altithermal reverted to being the Medithermal, and gave us the moderate temperate times we know as normal, once again. If something happens often enough, for a long enough time, we come to accept it as normal. But normal is changing. Normal is on the way out. The inconvenient truth is that we are descending rapidly into an era of global warming, with all the accoutrements of such an altithermal shift. Most people figure we have time to adjust, but then, most people don't understand the magnitude of the problem. 'So what if the temperature rises a few degrees, I'll just turn on the air-conditioner some more.' Most people don't understand the problem.
The interconnectedness of the components that contribute to climate (not to be confused with 'weather') is something that even the best among us, the academics, the military, NOAA, palaeoclimatologists, oceanographers and atmospheric historians, still don't understand very well yet. You can bet your red pumps that those who try to understand such processes will see a swelling of the ranks in the near future. Not that it will do much good.
According to geochronologist George Gamow and others, like Milutin Milanković, the Earth is headed into a warming trend for the next twenty-thousand years, irrespective of any conribution humans make to modifying the carbon-dioxide components of the atmosphere. In other words, it's getting hotter anyway, leave alone global warming because humans are polluting their own nest. The Milankovitch cycles derrive from astronomical cycles beyond our manipulation.
There are essentially three major factors which determine what our destiny is regarding mean temperature of the planet, whether ice-age or an uncomfortable dessication. These range in periodicities from 23 thousand years, to 40 thousand, to 100 thousand years. That is just what we can consider the background variability to which we must pay obescience involuntarily, in any event. ON TOP OF THAT, we humans, as a species lately on the scene of evolution, have fouled the nest for all species, forcing all of us, irrespective of cultural level, or religion, or political allegience, or distance from centers of intrigue, into suffering the fate of those who screwed up the environment for all of us.
I am reminded of the parable of the Boston Commons, which in colonial days served as a free, public resource for the temporary caching of cloven beasts for savoring the sweet grass growing there. Anyone could herd their flocks and chatel there for lingering in the meadow, enjoying the fresh greens. But some greedy types took advantage of the offering by excessively exploiting the forage, and ruined the regenerative properties of the vegetation. They ruined it for everyone by being greedy. So too, it is with the atmosphere and exploitable resources on the planet.
Too much toxic waste spewing into the collective breathing pool, too many trees burned for too long a time in the Amazon and Borneo, too much jetsom sewage poured into the waterways and oceans, too many killings of already precious species either extinguishing the species altogether or sinking the numbers below the threshhold of recovery, and too much boinking going on leading to overpopulation. (Have you ever stopped to consider what happens now that the growth curve of human poplulation has reached vertical?)
It is not simply a question of which nation leads the world in percentage of fuel consumption; it is not simply a matter of which nation exceeds its percapita carbon footprint; it is not simply a matter of which nation can outstrip the others in exploiting resources before the whole collapes. It is beyond that now. It's too late.
Now we are in an era that needs to look beyond the nation-state. The nation-state as a concept, as a workable entity, looking out for its own self-interests, is an antiquated concept. The most remarkable image that unifies the peoples of the native rock we all call home is the first photo taken from Apollo 8 looking back at the Earth on the way to the Moon. It was the first time in human history that we could all now see that the Earth was just a blue ball in space, devoid of boundaries, whole, finite and lonely. Intellectually we could understand that there were ants down there, driving around in their wheeled vehicles, scurrying to and fro, busy with their own agendas. But for just a moment, one had to catch one's breath and consider, however briefly, that all the ants shared one thing in common, a commonweal, a unified home, and each was responsible for caring for it, in their own way.
I don't know; maybe it was just celebrity thrill or something petty and transitory. Or maybe it was an electric moment, transcending time, sharing a dream, sharing an alarm, sharing a concern for one's home planet, knowing the plight of humans and others through the ages, from darkest glaciation through dessicated interpluvials. Somehow Al Gore's handshake was also shaking the hand of the Cro Magnon who placed his pawprint on the wall of caves in the Magdalenian during a time of rapid glacial fluctuation. It was probably that very same rapid climatic fluctuation that pushed hominid neurophysiology beyond its native capacities in the Late Paleolithic.
It was probably during that Late Paleolithic that humans first learned how to use The Invisible Tool, time. The first artifactual expression of temporal consciousness makes its appearance as an antler carved with phases of the moon. Why should that be? Why should humans, for the first time in time, suddenly begin demonstrating that they are aware that things are taking place in the context of this invisible stream they perceive as flowing? Why are things not all happening at once? Why do things change, after all? Why are there seasons, with ripening resources here, but not there, or not all the time? If we PLAN carefully, we can exploit things here, now, and there, later.
PLANNING, or anticipating changes coming in the future, becomes all the rage. Humans now have a new tool, an invisible tool, in the quest for survival. Being able to predict when herds of reindeer will travel through our valley, when root crops will be ripe, when fruits will flourish at certain, remembered, locales quickly became a huge component of thought. We were not just 'being here, now', but being then, and later. We could anticipate, make plans, schedule maximum exploitation of the environment. Scheduling became an imperative, a raison d'etre.
We were now Homo temporalis, timely man, embracing woman. We belonged to the Universe, which was happening in time, not all at once. The heavens were moving, changing. In fact, everything was changing. The world was mutable, including ourselves. Our salvation was to see this change, to understand that all was happening in time, and that we were not trapped in the moment. There was hope for improvement. We could make things better, in time. We had time on our side. We had the invisible tool of time, and the power it gave us to work things out for ourselves, our survival.
We find ourselves now in a similar predicament. We have to figure out how to make it through the "punctuated equilibrium" stage of transition embroiling us, collectively. We need to be smart, and diligent. We need to take measures, collectively, as a planet, as a species responsible for the mess.
But the good news is that we have the tribal memory of acting in time, or being able to anticipate and respond to problems within the context of time. But the time is now. It is time to anticipate, and plan and work out the steps to a better world.
Become the change you want to see.
He made himself available to the media, taking time to answer all their questions before moving to the next. The media were swarming; you can't blame them: he had just been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize the day before. He spent time with each of the major videojournalists, then spied more common folks behind him, and shared time shaking more hands before heading to the official, ritual red carpet, pausing to give time to photgraphers accompanied by director of "An Inconvenient Truth", Davis Guggenheim, actress Elizabeth Shue, "Titanic" director and bathymetrist James Cameron. They all generously spent more time answering questions, seemingly unhurried, before heading into the Arlington Theatre for the awards ceremony.
Now, I'm not much of a celebrity chaser, although I count among my lucky fortune to have also been in the photojournalist hoarde covering Bill Clinton and later, Hillary Clinton when they came to Santa Barbara in years past. What makes this encounter of particular import in the pantheon of my lifetime events is that I am similarly inclined toward considering the human condition in great sweeps of time, particularly late Pleistocene times, as we are now in. The Holocene is the last ten-thousand years, since the steep incline in global warming following the Wurm IV glaciation, or more popularly known as the last Ice Age.
Yup, we've been here before. Since the glacial maximum last seen at 18 KYBP (thousand years before present), we've been on a warming climb globally, which accelerated around ten thousand BP. That put us into a moderate temperate regime, which was interrupted from about seven to four (roughly) thousands of years ago, when we experienced what is called the Altithermal. It was over three thousand years of hot, dry times, requiring massive modifications in the way humans made their livings on the planet. Some places on Earth experienced more dramatic conditions than others. The American West was one of the more severely impacted.
One way we know this is that archaeologically, the hunter gatherer populations of the West who had been tracking and eating large game such as wapiti (a big, elk-like beastie) which provided good eating for a family of five for about, say, two weeks, gradually found themselves having to hunt smaller and smaller game as various large species died out. They died out not so much from over-hunting as the decline of traditional nutrient foliage which was declining in extent and abundance.
In mid-Altithermal times, target game had been reduced to deer, antelope and rabbit. Waterways, particularly swampy areas in the western flyways had also been subjected to dessication and retreat, but still provided waterfowl as edible resources. Hunting ducks became high art during the dehydrated Altithermal period. This was a dismal shadow of the glory days of megafaunal captures, such as mastodon, bison antiquus, giant sloth, camel, horses and megalo-type antlered dinner-on-the-hoof. The catalog of omnivoration had shifted to the meagre side of the curve. There was not much from which to make a meal, anymore. Populations declined as resources became scarce.
It was during those days that the diet of aboriginal peoples shifted towards processing more and more grains, and tending the natural locales of edible vegetable matter. Think you need more fiber in your diet? What if it became compulsory? Other sources of protein extraction became exploitable; who was the first guy to eat freshwater snails, because he had to? What does lizard taste like, or grubs?
Eventually, of course, the Altithermal reverted to being the Medithermal, and gave us the moderate temperate times we know as normal, once again. If something happens often enough, for a long enough time, we come to accept it as normal. But normal is changing. Normal is on the way out. The inconvenient truth is that we are descending rapidly into an era of global warming, with all the accoutrements of such an altithermal shift. Most people figure we have time to adjust, but then, most people don't understand the magnitude of the problem. 'So what if the temperature rises a few degrees, I'll just turn on the air-conditioner some more.' Most people don't understand the problem.
The interconnectedness of the components that contribute to climate (not to be confused with 'weather') is something that even the best among us, the academics, the military, NOAA, palaeoclimatologists, oceanographers and atmospheric historians, still don't understand very well yet. You can bet your red pumps that those who try to understand such processes will see a swelling of the ranks in the near future. Not that it will do much good.
According to geochronologist George Gamow and others, like Milutin Milanković, the Earth is headed into a warming trend for the next twenty-thousand years, irrespective of any conribution humans make to modifying the carbon-dioxide components of the atmosphere. In other words, it's getting hotter anyway, leave alone global warming because humans are polluting their own nest. The Milankovitch cycles derrive from astronomical cycles beyond our manipulation.
There are essentially three major factors which determine what our destiny is regarding mean temperature of the planet, whether ice-age or an uncomfortable dessication. These range in periodicities from 23 thousand years, to 40 thousand, to 100 thousand years. That is just what we can consider the background variability to which we must pay obescience involuntarily, in any event. ON TOP OF THAT, we humans, as a species lately on the scene of evolution, have fouled the nest for all species, forcing all of us, irrespective of cultural level, or religion, or political allegience, or distance from centers of intrigue, into suffering the fate of those who screwed up the environment for all of us.
I am reminded of the parable of the Boston Commons, which in colonial days served as a free, public resource for the temporary caching of cloven beasts for savoring the sweet grass growing there. Anyone could herd their flocks and chatel there for lingering in the meadow, enjoying the fresh greens. But some greedy types took advantage of the offering by excessively exploiting the forage, and ruined the regenerative properties of the vegetation. They ruined it for everyone by being greedy. So too, it is with the atmosphere and exploitable resources on the planet.
Too much toxic waste spewing into the collective breathing pool, too many trees burned for too long a time in the Amazon and Borneo, too much jetsom sewage poured into the waterways and oceans, too many killings of already precious species either extinguishing the species altogether or sinking the numbers below the threshhold of recovery, and too much boinking going on leading to overpopulation. (Have you ever stopped to consider what happens now that the growth curve of human poplulation has reached vertical?)
It is not simply a question of which nation leads the world in percentage of fuel consumption; it is not simply a matter of which nation exceeds its percapita carbon footprint; it is not simply a matter of which nation can outstrip the others in exploiting resources before the whole collapes. It is beyond that now. It's too late.
Now we are in an era that needs to look beyond the nation-state. The nation-state as a concept, as a workable entity, looking out for its own self-interests, is an antiquated concept. The most remarkable image that unifies the peoples of the native rock we all call home is the first photo taken from Apollo 8 looking back at the Earth on the way to the Moon. It was the first time in human history that we could all now see that the Earth was just a blue ball in space, devoid of boundaries, whole, finite and lonely. Intellectually we could understand that there were ants down there, driving around in their wheeled vehicles, scurrying to and fro, busy with their own agendas. But for just a moment, one had to catch one's breath and consider, however briefly, that all the ants shared one thing in common, a commonweal, a unified home, and each was responsible for caring for it, in their own way.
I don't know; maybe it was just celebrity thrill or something petty and transitory. Or maybe it was an electric moment, transcending time, sharing a dream, sharing an alarm, sharing a concern for one's home planet, knowing the plight of humans and others through the ages, from darkest glaciation through dessicated interpluvials. Somehow Al Gore's handshake was also shaking the hand of the Cro Magnon who placed his pawprint on the wall of caves in the Magdalenian during a time of rapid glacial fluctuation. It was probably that very same rapid climatic fluctuation that pushed hominid neurophysiology beyond its native capacities in the Late Paleolithic.
It was probably during that Late Paleolithic that humans first learned how to use The Invisible Tool, time. The first artifactual expression of temporal consciousness makes its appearance as an antler carved with phases of the moon. Why should that be? Why should humans, for the first time in time, suddenly begin demonstrating that they are aware that things are taking place in the context of this invisible stream they perceive as flowing? Why are things not all happening at once? Why do things change, after all? Why are there seasons, with ripening resources here, but not there, or not all the time? If we PLAN carefully, we can exploit things here, now, and there, later.
PLANNING, or anticipating changes coming in the future, becomes all the rage. Humans now have a new tool, an invisible tool, in the quest for survival. Being able to predict when herds of reindeer will travel through our valley, when root crops will be ripe, when fruits will flourish at certain, remembered, locales quickly became a huge component of thought. We were not just 'being here, now', but being then, and later. We could anticipate, make plans, schedule maximum exploitation of the environment. Scheduling became an imperative, a raison d'etre.
We were now Homo temporalis, timely man, embracing woman. We belonged to the Universe, which was happening in time, not all at once. The heavens were moving, changing. In fact, everything was changing. The world was mutable, including ourselves. Our salvation was to see this change, to understand that all was happening in time, and that we were not trapped in the moment. There was hope for improvement. We could make things better, in time. We had time on our side. We had the invisible tool of time, and the power it gave us to work things out for ourselves, our survival.
We find ourselves now in a similar predicament. We have to figure out how to make it through the "punctuated equilibrium" stage of transition embroiling us, collectively. We need to be smart, and diligent. We need to take measures, collectively, as a planet, as a species responsible for the mess.
But the good news is that we have the tribal memory of acting in time, or being able to anticipate and respond to problems within the context of time. But the time is now. It is time to anticipate, and plan and work out the steps to a better world.
Become the change you want to see.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
