knows?”)
In Christianity, the Earth melts, but a new one is born. Since it needs no sun—the eternal light of God and the Lamb having eliminated night— it’s clearly a different planet than this one.
“The world exists to serve people, because man is the most honorable of all creatures,” says Turkish Sufi master Abdulhamit Cakmut. “There are cycles in life. From the seed comes the tree, from the tree comes the fruit we eat, and we give back as humans. Everything is meant to serve man. If people are gone from this cycle, nature itself will be over.”
The Muslim dervish practice he teaches reflects the recognition that everything, from atoms to our galaxy, whirls in cycles, including nature as it continually regenerates—at least until now. Like so many others— Hopis, Hindus, Judeo-Christians, Zoroastrians—he warns of an end-time. (In Judaism, time itself is said to end, but only God knows what that means.) “We see the signs,” Cakmut says. “Harmony is broken. The good are outnumbered. There is more injustice, exploitation, corruption, pollution. We are facing it now.”
It’s a familiar scenario: Good and evil finally spin apart, landing in heaven and hell, respectively, and everything else vanishes. Except, Abdulhamit Cakmut adds, we can slow this process—the good are those who strive to restore harmony and speed nature’s regeneration.
“We take care of our bodies to live a longer life. We should do the same for the world. If we cherish it, make it last as long as possible, we can postpone the judgment day.”
Can we? Gaia theorist James Lovelock prophesies that unless things change soon, we’d better stash essential human knowledge at the poles in a medium that doesn’t require electricity. Yet Dave Foreman, founder of Earth First!, a cadre of environmental guerrillas who had all but given up on humans deserving a place in the ecosystem, now directs The Rewilding Institute, a think tank based on conservation biology and unapologetic hope.
That hope both includes, and depends on, the consecration of “mega-linkages”—corridors that would span entire continents, where people would be committed to coexisting with wildlife. In North America alone, he sees a minimum of four: they would span the continent’s dividing spine, the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, and the Arctic- boreal. In each, top predators and large fauna absent since the Pleistocene would be reinstated, or the closest things possible: African surrogates of America’s missing camels, elephants, cheetahs, and lions.
Dangerous? The payoff for humans, Foreman and company believe, is that in a re-equilibrated ecosystem, there’s a chance for us to survive. If not, the black hole into which we’re shoving the rest of nature will swallow us as well.
It’s a plan that keeps Paul Martin, author of the Blitzkrieg extinction theory, in touch with Kenya’s David Western, fighting to stop elephants from downing every last drought-stressed fever tree: Send some of those proboscids to America, pleads Martin. Let them again eat Osage oranges, avocados, and other fruit and seeds that evolved to be so big because megafauna could ingest them.
Yet the biggest elephant of all is a figurative one in the planet-sized room that is ever harder to ignore, although we keep trying. Worldwide, every four days human population rises by 1 million. Since we can’t really grasp such numbers, they’ll wax out of control until they crash, as has happened to every other species that got too big for this box. About the only thing that could change that, short of the species-wide sacrifice of voluntary human extinction, is to prove that intelligence really makes us special after all.
The intelligent solution would require the courage and the wisdom to put our knowledge to the test. It would be poignant and distressing in ways, but not fatal. It would henceforth limit every human female on Earth capable of bearing children to one.
The numbers resulting from such a draconian measure, fairly applied, are tricky to predict with precision: Fewer births, for example, would lower infant mortality, because resources would be devoted to protecting each precious member of the latest generation. Using the United Nations’ medium scenario for life expectancy through 2050 as a benchmark, Dr. Sergei Scherbov, who is the research group leader at the Vienna Institute of Demography of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and an analyst for the World Population Program, calculated what would happen to human population if, from now on, all fertile women have only one child (in 2004, the rate was 2.6 births per female; in the medium scenario that would lower to about two children by 2050).
If this somehow began tomorrow, our current 6.5 billion human population would drop by 1 billion by the middle of this century. (If we continue as projected, it will reach 9 billion.) At that point, keeping to one-child-per- human-mother, life on Earth for all species would change dramatically. Because of natural attrition, today’s bloated human population bubble would not be reinflated at anything near the former pace. By 2075, we would have reduced our presence by almost by half, down to 3.43 billion, and our impact by much more, because so much of what we do is magnified by chain reactions we set off through the ecosystem.
By 2100, less than a century from now, we would be at 1.6 billion: back to levels last seen in the 19th century, just before quantum advances in energy, medicine, and food production doubled our numbers and then doubled us again. At the time, those discoveries seemed like miracles. Today, like too much of any good thing, we indulge in more only at our peril.
At such far-more-manageable numbers, however, we would have the benefit of all our progress plus the wisdom to keep our presence under control. That wisdom would come partly from losses and extinctions too late to reverse, but also from the growing joy of watching the world daily become more wonderful. The evidence wouldn’t hide in statistics. It would be outside every human’s window, where refreshed air would fill each season with more birdsong.
----------- Medium UN scenario: fertility declining from 2.6 children per woman in 2004 to slightly over 2 children per woman in 2050. Source: Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations Secretariat (2005).
_________ Scenario assuming that all fertile women are henceforth limited to 1 child. Source: Dr. Sergei Scherbov, research group leader, Vienna Institute of Demography, Austrian Academy of Sciences.
If we don’t, and thus let our numbers increase by half again as projected, could our technology stretch resources once more, as it did for a while back in the 20th century? We’ve already heard from the robot contingent. Relaxing on the deck of the
“We could try using lasers, or some similar particle-wave beams, to actually build things remotely on other planets, or in other solar systems. That would be much faster than actually sending something there. Maybe we could code for a human, and build a human in space. The life sciences will probably provide the ability to do that. Whether physics will allow it, I don’t know. But it’s all just biochemistry, so there’s no reason why we couldn’t construct it.
“Unless,” he allows, “there really is something called a spark of life. But it’s going to take something like that, because there’s no evidence that we could actually move from here in any reasonable time frame.”
If we could do that—find a fertile planet somewhere big enough for all of us, holographically clone our bodies, and upload our minds across light-years—eventually the Earth would do fine without us. With no more herbicides, weeds (otherwise known as biodiversity) would invade our industrial farms and our vast monocultured commercial pine plantations— although, in America, for a while the weeds may mostly be kudzu. It’s only been around since 1876, when it was brought from Japan to Philadelphia as a centennial gift to the United States, and eventually something is bound to learn to eat it. In the meantime, without gardeners endlessly trying to uproot the ravenous stuff, long before the vacant houses and skyscrapers of America’s southern cities tumble, they may have already vanished under a bright, waxy green, photosynthesizing blanket.
Since the late 19th century, when, beginning with electrons, we got down to manipulating the most fundamental particles of the universe, human life has changed very fast. One measure of how fast is that, barely a century ago—until Marconi’s wireless and Edison’s phonograph—all the music ever heard on Earth was live. Today, a tiny fraction of 1 percent is. The rest is electronically reproduced or broadcast, along with a trillion words and
