EcoGeek of the Week: Daniel Quinn - What gives him hope for the future?

[greyl]

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EG: It does seem we are headed for certain disaster if we keep living the way we do now. What gives you hope for the future?

DQ: Only the prospect of worldwide mind-change gives me hope for the future. It has happened before, in the Renaissance. It happened in the Soviet Union, bringing about its collapse. It can happen again, and it must -- or indeed we are doomed. What gives me hope is the fact that the curve of awareness as measured by the number of books published and read on the subject has risen steadily. I (and a relatively small number of others) have AS YET been unable to shake the commonly held Malthusian vision of the relation between population growth and food production. So it continues to be seen that it is completely inevitable that our population must continue to grow to 8 billion, 10 billion, 12 billion. If this happens, I'm afraid I see no hope for our species. The world's biologists now concur that we have entered a period of mass extinction as great as any such period of the past. Sustaining 6.5 billion of us costs the world as many as 75, 100, or 200 species a day (the United Nations recently offered the lowest of these estimates). Eventually, the ecological structures that sustain human life will collapse if this continues. This disastrous trend (which will grow worse as our population grows) is reversible; but only if people in general come to understand that it MUST be reversed, for the sake of our own survival.

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EG: You've often stated that it's not a new technology or "program" that will sustain humanity into the next century, but rather massive a sea change in the way that we think and live. What strategy do you use when trying to win over people who don't see any advantage to changing?

DQ: I have no strategy for such a thing. I don't know how to make the blind see.

EG: Regardless of what you may think, many of us have found your work to be eye-opening. When do you think the tipping point for environmental consciousness, for sustainable living, will be reached? When will it become mainstream to "save the world"?

DQ: What I've said is that if there are still people here in 200 years, they won't be living the way we do, because if people go on living the way we do, then there will be no people here in 200 years. If there are still people here in 200 years, they won't be thinking the way we do, because if people go on thinking the way we do, then they will go on living the way we do, and there will be no people here in 200 years. You could probably cut that down to 100 years. I would say that the tipping point is probably going to have to occur in the next 25 to 50 years, more likely 25 than 50.

EG: Since you stress mind-change so heavily as an element of future survival, can you point to a single change that seems to you key?

DQ: One idea that survived the middle ages, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment to flourish into the present age is this: that humans belong to an order of being that is separate from (and higher than) the rest of the living community. This is, to my mind, the most dangerous idea extant today, and it's literally going to kill us if we don't get rid of it. Earthworms are more important to the life of this planet than humans are, and if earthworms disappear, we humans will follow very soon after. It's vital that we get it into our heads that we are members of a community and dependent on that community the same way every other member is. We cannot exist apart from it. We don't "own" that community. We aren't custodians of it (it takes care of itself and did so successfully for billions of years before our appearance). We need it, absolutely and forever; it doesn't need us. If there are still people here in 200 years, they will know this without the slightest doubt.
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the entire interview

[Stargazer99]

1. It is time to kick those "Christian Fundies" that forbid

abortion, sex education/condom use, etc right where it hurts..since facts are just too difficult to "get". It wouldn't be so bad if they just practiced their views within their religion but no they got to legislate their religious views with this administration. Man has multipled already, it is time to put the brakes on it. Just the understanding that the planet will die if the Fundies keep refusing to take up the command to be responsible in their stewardship of God's creation. What in the hell does man use for brains?

[greyl]

2. True, but I think the very idea that humans are qualified to be Earth's stewards a key problem.

I think that myth arose with Fundamentalist thinking and has seeped into the unexamined assumptions of our culture.
It began with the view that Earth was divinely created specifically for humans to conquer and rule, therefore, Earth and its community of life would take whatever we give it, as long as we were fulfilling that divine destiny. It wasn't until Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in 1962 that our culture began to become aware of the damage we were doing to the very systems that support our particular grand experiment in civilization. Until 19th century discoveries in paleontology, our culture assumed that man was born as a city builder and that indigenous tribal peoples were somehow just not evolved.
So, when you ask "what does man use for brains?", I say that there are thousands of examples of other successful human cultures which show that humanity at large is not born as a scourge of the Earth, as Fundamentalists would have us believe.