Peak Everything

by Richard Heinberg

  For whatever reasons, most of us modern humans are like Mingus the parrot: we choose domesticated life. We like the cheap food, the controlled environment. Yet while life in the wild isn’t easy, it has an ecstatic quality, one that Bittner notes among the parrots, and one that early explorers observed among the Native Americans and Aboriginal Australians. It is a quality that cannot survive the routines of either civilization or the cage.

  Encampment of the Peikann Indians 1840-1843.

  So how did we arrive at civilization in the first place? It’s a long story, but one worth rehearsing periodically so as to remind ourselves why we traded away our freedom.

  Every competent hunter-gatherer knows how to survive in the wild; therefore, if anyone in the band starts to lord it over his comrades, they can simply pick up and leave. No one can threaten to withhold food from anyone who is not an infant or an invalid. The situation differs in an agriculture-supported city. As we developed food production (horticulture, then agriculture — presumably because we had gotten so good at hunting, and our populations had grown so dense, that we could no longer easily support ourselves except by planting and harvesting), seasonal surpluses provided an incentive for raids, and thus for political organization to protect from raids (or to organize them). Individuals found themselves in a social pyramid composed of peasants who produced food and paid tribute (a portion of the crop was collected and stored by a managerial elite); a middle class composed of various specialists (soldiers, accountants, traders, artists, artisans, lawyers, scribes, and religious functionaries); and the decision-making leadership made up of kings and queens and their families.

  Punca or Ponca indians encamped on the banks of the Missouri, 1840.

  Thus with full-time division of labor came a new form of political organization: the state. On one level, it justified itself by managing seasonal surpluses and redistributing them in times of famine. But at the same time, the state was a protection racket: as sociologist Max Weber argued, it is the element within society that claims a legitimate monopoly on the use of violence.4 Soldiers, police, prison guards, and executioners represent the business end of state power, without which the rest of the edifice could hardly function.

  As cities took up the space formerly occupied by untamed nature, the survival options of wild people diminished. Individuals gradually lost their ability to live outside their artificial, controlled environments. Of course, to this day everyone is still ultimately dependent on nature, but now only indirectly. We look to the social system for our sustenance; we chase money, not rabbits.

  This disconnection from wild nature was especially acute in those who were not members of the producing class — the soldiers, managers, priests, poets, and kings who didn’t work in the fields all day, and who therefore didn’t have to pay such close attention to weather, soil, birds, wolves, deer, and gophers.

  Hupa man with spear, standing on rock midstream; in background, fog partially obscures trees on mountainsides.

  At first, these specialists and overlords made up a small minority of the population. In an agrarian society, surpluses are small and the work of food production must be done by muscle power, so that lots of human labor is needed. But with the industrial revolution, fossil fuels replaced muscle power, and so ever more people could be “freed” from agricultural work. The middle classes burgeoned, while the number of producers declined.

  And so here we are today, in a human world dominated by money, news, sports, entertainment, employment, and investment — a world in which nature appears as something peripheral and mostly unnecessary. Nature is merely a pile of resources, a segment of the economy, at best something to be preserved for aesthetic or sentimental reasons.

  But in domesticating plants and animals we also domesticated ourselves. Certain personalities were selected for, others discouraged. The abilities to conform and to delay gratification were selected for (at least among the producing and middle classes); the insistence on autonomy and freedom was discouraged. Meanwhile we domesticated other animals with similar objectives in mind: we wanted docile pets or willing field workers.

  Again: we are like caged birds — except that our captors are others like ourselves. In effect, we have built our own cages.

  When Bittner occasionally comes across a parrot that he knows was hand-raised, he notices the difference between it and its wild cousins. At one point he is offered the “ownership” of a captive blue-crowned conure named Bucky. He immediately accepts the bird, hoping to have found a mate for Connor — a solitary blue-crown who has led a lonely existence in the red-crowned flock. Bucky turns out to be another male, but never mind: both birds are at first delighted to be in each other’s company. Yet gradually their relationship sours: Bucky is unsuited to life in the wild, while Connor is loath to give up his freedom. Bittner comments on Bucky’s “chronic possessiveness”:

  On rare occasions, [Connor] would spend the night out with the flock, but he always returned the next morning. Bucky didn’t want Connor going out at all. Whenever I reached into their cage to get Connor, Bucky would bite my hand and then pin Connor up against the cage wall and bite him and preen him. His meaning was intuitively clear: “Don’t go, I love you.” It was a neurotic, clinging kind of love that I think only a caged bird could have.

  On the subject of freedom versus captivity Bittner writes:

  While I don’t believe hand-reared birds should be released — they would not survive — I have a big problem with people who think they have a right to put a healthy wild bird in a cage. Birds cherish their freedom just as much as human beings do. The sick parrots that I brought inside always screamed in terror and despair at the moment of capture. Each time a parrot is taken out of the wild, a family — the members of which feel real affection for one another — gets broken up.

  If only European pioneers had harbored similar sentiments about the wild peoples they encountered.

  As Bittner points out in his book, ornithologists are unsure about the descent of parrots, which have no clear relatives among other birds and must have diverged from some unknown common avian progenitor many millions of years ago. There are about 330 recognized parrot species in the world (most are endangered) — birds large and small, displaying nearly every color of the rainbow. All share the defining characteristics of hooked bill, the presence of a cere (a band of flesh above the upper mandible), and zygodactylic feet (two toes point forward, two backward).

  As all parrot lovers know, these birds are eerily intelligent and endlessly entertaining. They are natural clowns, spending much of their time in play and other social behavior.

  Captive parrots can, of course, be trained to talk. But there is some controversy as to whether their speech is necessarily limited to mere mimicry, or whether it can develop into genuine communication of concepts and abstractions. For many years Dr. Irene Pepperberg of the University of Arizona has worked with an African grey parrot named Alex who has learned to describe unfamiliar objects, ask for what he wants, and verbalize his own emotional states in English.5 Alex has become famous for his abilities, but critics have suggested that he is merely a fluke. So Pepperberg and her graduate students are using their methods to train other parrots to do the same things. They are also using rigorous controls to avoid cueing the birds via the “clever Hans” effect. Alex and his avian colleagues evince numeric cognition, categorization and word comprehension among other abilities previously assumed to exist perhaps among the great apes, but certainly not among birds.

  “What matter is orange and three-cornered?” Pepperberg asks Alex.

  Alex is permitted to examine several objects on a tray before answering. They consist of differently shaped pieces of cloth and other materials in varying colors.

  “Want a nut,” he says.

  “I know, I’ll give you a nut,” replies Pepperberg.

  “Wanna go back,” says Alex, meaning into his cage.

  Pepperberg loses patience. “C’mon Alex,” she implores.

&
nbsp; Alex replies, “I’m sorry.”6

  In San Francisco the cherry-headed conure is a non-native species. What would happen if it proliferated there? That’s a fair question. After all, look at what has befallen North American songbirds because of the starling, another bird that was introduced by humans — in this case, from Europe (Mozart was reputed to have had a pet starling of which he was particularly fond). Starlings crowd out the natives in cities and suburbs across the continent. One could imagine a local ecological horror story in the case of parrots as well. Suppose the San Francisco wild conures were to thrive, finding niches throughout the West Coast. Might they displace towhees, goldfinches, or hummingbirds?

  That’s not likely to happen: few introduced species are as successful as the starling. And if the conures of Telegraph Hill do manage to survive, they will have achieved a certain poetic justice. After all, it’s not as if parrots are entirely strangers to North America. The continent once had its own native parrot, the Carolina parakeet, which was driven to extinction in 1918 by farmers and sportsmen who shot the birds by the tens of thousands. From a parrot’s point of view, the conures’ colonization of San Francisco’s urban ecosystem might be seen as making up for lost territory.

  Of course, the most threatening non-native species of all is Homo sapiens. The vast majority of successful colonizing species have arrived in their new habitats because of deliberate or inadvertent human action. And humans themselves — by killing “pests” and “weeds” and encouraging the growth of the few plants and animals they (we) have domesticated — take up the ecological space of thousands of creatures.

  Invasive species typically don’t follow the local ecological rules by which native species have evolved. Relatively undisturbed ecosystems tend to reach a climax phase, characterized by balanced predator/prey feedback loops that keep population fluctuations within a moderate range and give rise to what appears to be widespread cooperation among species. Invasive plants or animals upset these balances and often compete ruthlessly with natives. Invaded ecosystems have to adjust to the intruders, and this can take years, decades, or centuries.

  We humans have upset habitats everywhere we have gone, starting in the Pleistocene. Twenty or thirty thousand years ago we managed to get pretty good at making and using weapons like spears and spear throwers, which enabled us to kill big animals such as mammoths and mastodons. As we spread around the world we killed off one species of megafauna after another. Only after staying in particular places for millennia did we learn the local limits and develop cultural forms that enjoined us to conserve. Evidence suggests that the Native Americans and Aboriginal Australians did-n’t start out as intuitive ecologists; they learned that attitude as the result of trial and error.

  I’ve been spending a lot of time in airports and airplanes lately as I travel far and wide to spread information about Peak Oil, so I tend to spend less time at home. I do get to meet interesting people, but the wear and tear is undeniable. Indeed, much of this essay was written on planes and buses, in airports and hotels.

  These are about as “unnatural” as any environment one can find. Here it is difficult to take Gary Snyder’s words, quoted above (p. 97), seriously: there is little or no evidence of wildness in the conventional sense to be found in any of these places (when I was in the Tucson airport recently I noted some wayward sparrows chirping anxiously in the rafters of the ticketing lobby; while it was a pleasure to hear and see them in that sterile environment, I feared for these lost creatures). Of course, in the broadest sense, as Snyder argues, everything people do is “natural,” including building and inhabiting airports, since people are no less biological organisms than are bacteria, scorpions, possums, sparrows, or parrots.

  At the same time, the distinction between “natural” and “unnatural” does make sense at some level. At the core of the category of the “unnatural” is the human social construct described above (p. 103) — that of full-time division of labor in a context of agricultural production and city-building.

  Why have no other animals built equivalent civilizations? Why no parrot skyscrapers, symphonies, or supermarkets? For better or worse, we humans have certain unique genetically endowed abilities. We are omnivorous — so, like other omnivores (crows, raccoons, rats, cockroaches) we are clever and adaptable. We have a descended larynx that enables us to make a wide variety of vocal sounds — hence language. And we have opposable thumbs that enable us easily to make and use tools. With language and cleverness we get the abilities to generalize and to plan ahead. Combine those abilities with ever-evolving tool systems and the results are formidable.

  While parrots can be trained to speak in context, most linguists would say that this is still qualitatively different from human verbal communication. And of course it is. But contemplating what that difference is and how it might have arisen brings up the questions: Did humans develop language and tools because they are special and different from other animals? Or did humans become special in their own eyes because they developed language and tools? Most people assume the former, but doing so just seems to widen the gulf between ourselves and the rest of nature.

  It is easy to dislike human beings in the aggregate. Hearing about the endemic torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the global destruction of species (about a quarter of mammals and birds are now threatened), or any of a thousand other outrages, one can catch oneself hoping that Earth will simply be rid of our kind soon.

  But Bittner reminds us there is more to humans than this. He tries to remain an objective, detached observer of parrots in order to gain credibility, but eventually he has to admit to himself (and his readers) that the reason he spends time with the birds is that he loves them — and not merely in some abstract spiritual or aesthetic sense. It is love that keeps him interested in the daily lives of specific birds with which he forms life-long bonds. It is love that keeps the flock together, love that enables it to grow. Human society is similar: without affection, we couldn’t overcome our competitiveness long enough to accomplish much of anything. Moreover, it is our ability to extend this bond of empathy, compassion, interest, and fellow-feeling across species barriers that may offer us one of our last opportunities for escape from our self-designed cage, and one of our last chances to veer away from our ecocidal path. This sounds pretty sappy, I know. We’ve all heard it a million times: it’s love that gives us meaning and that makes life worthwhile. And people are capable of extraordinary displays of love in a myriad of forms. Maybe it takes a flock of parrots to drive the point home.

  At the end of the book and film we are treated to a pleasant surprise: Mark finds a girlfriend. He has also become a successful author and the subject of a documentary film. He has achieved success — though by a long, circuitous, and initially unpromising route. He has stuck to his vision and his principles. He has (mostly) avoided the cage.

  Both the book and the film tell us as much about ourselves as they do about parrots. We are a peculiar species of ape, evidently not closely related to birds (genetically, we’re closer to voles than to parrots). Yet in the conures of Telegraph Hill we see reflections of ourselves — as we are, as we were, and as we may once again be. And we are reminded just how lonely it can be to confine our attention solely to the solipsistic human matrix, when so much more is going on around us.

  6

  Population, Resources, and Human Idealism

  URINETOWN is a funny, smart, Tony award-winning musical. Its action takes place in a city of the future where, as the result of severe and ongoing water shortages, private toilets have been banned. A giant corporation, the Urine Good Company (UGC for short), is in charge of all pay-per-pee services. The gradually escalating price is still affordable to a well-off few, but teeming masses of the poor have to scrape together piles of spare change every day in order to take care of their private business. This, announces policeman-narrator Officer Lockstock, is “the central conceit of the show.”

  The cast includes a greedy villain (Caldwell
B. Cladwell, the CEO of UGC), a courageous hero (Bobby Strong, a poor lad who works for UGC collecting fees at a down-scale public toilet), and a big-hearted heroine (Hope, Cladwell’s daughter). Bobby and Hope fall in love; Bobby leads a rebellion against UGC; “terrorists” take Hope hostage. She sings the uplifting “Follow Your Heart,” assuring herself and everyone else that love will win the day, but every line is tongue-in-cheek. Though Bobby is soon killed by UGC minions, Hope manages to gain ultimate power, disposing of her father and telling her followers that the time of deprivation is over. In the last scene she sings the fervent anthem “I See a River,” envisioning a new era when all can pee as much as they like, whenever they like, wherever they like. However, by the end of the scene the entire cast — excepting the narrator — has perished in an ecological catastrophe brought on by overpopulation. Officer Lockstock’s epilogue tells the sorry tale:

  Of course, it wasn’t long before the water became silty, brackish, and then dried up altogether. Cruel as Caldwell B. Cladwell was, his measures effectively regulated water consumption.... Hope, however, chose to ignore the warning signs, choosing instead to bask in the people’s love as long as it lasted. Hope eventually joined her father in a manner not quite so gentle. As for the people of this town? Well, they did the best they could. But they were prepared for the world they inherited.... For when the water dried up, they recognized their town for the first time for what it really was. What it was always waiting to be...

  The Chorus sings: “This is Urinetown! Always it’s been Urinetown! This place it’s called Urinetown!” And with their unison cry of “Hail Malthus!”, the curtain falls.