Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?

by Alan Weisman

  In lieu of tuition, students and parents plant four hundred trees and contribute four hundred hours of community service, tutoring and keeping their village and temples clean. “Our school is not just for students,” Mechai tells parents. “We guarantee that every family living near the poverty line will be out of it in nine months.” Parents are automatically eligible for micro-loans and for occupational training. In sixteen surrounding villages, students’ families are running cricket farms, purifying and selling water, cultivating mushrooms, making paper-flower wedding and funeral wreaths, and raising pigs.

  Mechai Viravaidya stands on a thatch-and-bamboo-covered bridge built on multicolored struts that leads across a lotus-filled lagoon to his school. From the water’s surface, haze and a frog chorus rise along with the temperature into the bright morning. Mild-mannered, in his usual bow tie, at seventy Mechai is slowed a bit by diabetes but still athletically fit and unremittingly engaged. He proceeds to the campus side, where the bridge’s rainbow scheme continues in dozens of painted planters cut from sections of discarded drainage pipe. Here, students grow asparagus, chilies, basil, eggplant, assorted edible greens, and lime trees, which, through clever pruning and watering schedules, they coax to fruit just when limes are out of season and scarce. Mechai watches girls and boys in uniforms they designed themselves—dark skirts and trousers, white shirts and blouses with plaid collars—water a living sculpture of discarded soda cans filled with soil and nailed to colored posts, from which sprout herbs and chives. Lettuce grows in suspended tiers of discarded PVC pipe, slit lengthwise and drip-irrigated by discarded intravenous feeding tubes connected to plastic bags that once held saline solution. Even discarded sneakers and irrigation boots have been converted to planters.

  Mango, coconut palm, banana, custard apple, and rose apple trees are spread among bamboo classrooms, where students at computer screens learn to graph growing cycles. There’s a library with bamboo furniture the students built themselves, and a toy lending library for village children, stocked with playthings that students have collected. Surrounding the campus are rice paddies, which grow an organic cash crop that pays for teacher salaries and the school’s operating budget.

  A motto embroidered on the students’ sleeves reads, “The more you give, the more you get.” Mechai sits among them in the spacious, open-sided cafeteria, kept spotless with homegrown, chemical-free cleansers made from neem tree oils and lemon grass, where students earn their meals by planting more trees. “No free lunches,” he reminds them.

  As long as they waste no food, students may eat all they want. It will take half a generation to see if these rural children—who, but for this school, might otherwise have grown up illiterate, undernourished, and impoverished—turn into the entrepreneurs and philanthropists Mechai hopes. More than half are girls, and one thing he is confident of is that they are destined, if not for careers of their own making, at least not to be sex workers—and not mothers to more children than they, their village, and their country can afford.

  “In Thailand,” says the man who got his whole country laughing by blowing up condoms, and then got everyone to use them, “we should train leaders of tomorrow, not followers of yesterday. Yesterday, we had too many births. Today, we have a more manageable number to feed and educate. With that, and with people benefiting by helping each other, there can be plenty for everybody.”

  PART FIVE

  CHAPTER 16

  Parkland Earth

  i. The Oxymoron

  In his teens, Theodore Roosevelt read Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species and decided to become a wildlife biologist. At Harvard, his career in natural science gave way to political science, but Roosevelt would eventually have an impact on biology that, at least quantitatively, approached Darwin’s epic qualitative contribution. Between 1903 and 1909, President Theodore Roosevelt created 150 national forests in the United States, including 93 in a single day, preserving an area roughly equal to France, Belgium, The Netherlands, and Luxembourg combined. He also doubled the number of American national parks (to 10; there are now 59).

  By doing so, he helped expand the concept of wildlife biology to include an applied field, which Darwin might have termed an oxymoron: wildlife management. The idea that something can be both wild and managed epitomizes our complicated human identity—suspended, as French philosopher Blaise Pascal described us, somewhere between angels and animals. Nevertheless, the fate of many species beyond our own now depends on the skills of human stewards to finesse a delicate equilibrium among prey, predators, plants, and ourselves.

  This is not easy. Consider one of the most famous episodes in the annals of wildlife management, the mule deer of Arizona’s Kaibab Plateau, north of the Grand Canyon. In 1906, President Roosevelt created the Grand Canyon National Game Preserve to protect deer that browse on the Kaibab Plateau’s spruce, aspen, oak, ponderosa pine, piñon, and juniper. At the time, there were an estimated four thousand deer there. The new game preserve enhanced their survival by banishing the sheep and cattle that competed for their forage, and by offering bounties on the mountain lions, wolves, bobcats, and coyotes that preyed on them. Over the ensuing decades, thousands of predators were killed—so many that the wolves were effectively exterminated.

  In 1913, when Roosevelt arrived there to hunt lions, there were so many deer that he wondered if hunting should be permitted to control their numbers. But he was no longer president, and laws he’d created prohibited harvesting the species they were designed to protect. By 1922, between fifty thousand and one hundred thousand mule deer were gobbling all the available berries, acorns, seedlings, and forage, and Forest Service personnel feared that their population was headed for a crash. Biologists and wildlife managers met to discuss taking action. Among the options were relocating some deer elsewhere, culling the herd by legalizing hunting, or doing nothing.

  But science was complicated by politics. The Kaibab Plateau was divided between two federal jurisdictions: the national game preserve, and the newly created Grand Canyon National Park. Each had different management goals—as did the young state of Arizona, which declared that keeping tourists from the Grand Canyon’s North Rim just so men with noisy guns could slaughter big-antlered tourist attractions was not going to happen.

  The surging deer population had been helped by a dozen exceptionally wet winters before 1918, which had produced bumper crops of succulents and nutritious forage like deer vetch and cliffrose that allowed does to produce plenty of milk for their fawns. Some years of normal rainfall followed—until 1924, which was particularly dry. Spring forage was way down, and low-hanging tree branches that does could reach were quickly overbrowsed.

  That autumn, defying both the National Park Service and the state of Arizona, Forest Service wildlife managers enlisted horseback cowboys in an attempt to herd thousands of mule deer off the North Rim, down into the Grand Canyon, and up the other side. Except for providing bestseller material for western writer Zane Grey, who participated, the great Grand Canyon deer drive was a grand fiasco. All it accomplished was to confirm that wild creatures do not behave like docile, domesticated cattle. Next, the Forest Service opened the game preserve to hunters, several of whom Arizona arrested. That was followed by a severe winter, and the crash that everyone feared commenced. An estimated 70 percent of Kaibab Plateau mule deer starved to death in the North Rim snows.

  Two of the twentieth century’s foremost ecologists, Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson, would later cite the tragedy of Kaibab Plateau mule deer as an object lesson in why predators are necessary to nature’s plan. Without such a natural check, a species is doomed to overpopulate its range until it eats itself out of its natural home.

  Biologist David Brown, professor of wildlife management at Arizona State University, does not disagree—except, he adds, “To say it’s just predators is an oversimplification. The controls that kept lions in check didn’t so much reduce them as prevent them from expanding with the deer during the wet years. When deer decl
ined after 1924, that’s when we started moving toward population stability. There was enough food to maintain a population, but not enough nutritional forage for it to increase.”

  By 1940, the Kaibab Plateau’s mule deer population finally stabilized around an estimated ten thousand, where it has since been maintained by both predators and controlled hunting. “The lesson,” says Brown, “was to harvest enough so that the population wouldn’t crash again in the future.”

  But to maintain stability, at times wildlife managers also boost populations, by seeding plots with a species’ favorite kinds of vegetation, or with nutritional plant mixes of fats, carbohydrates, and protein. Sometimes they artificially fertilize existing forage, or remove competing plants with herbicide or controlled burns. If they’re managing a game species, in the spring they count nibbled twigs on winter forage plants to determine how many hunting permits to issue in the fall. In low rainfall, they provide access to water with troughs or tanks, or they dam creeks or even pump to create ponds.

  David Brown, whose ruddy complexion reveals a man who’s spent more than four decades helping U.S. Fish and Wildlife manage bighorn sheep, elk, and pronghorns, disapproves of such water management, because, he maintains, desert-adapted ungulates handle drought much better than their predators. What concerns him more are diseases for which wild animals never evolved defenses. “It’s like Indians who didn’t have antibodies against European smallpox. Trophy hunters don’t extinguish bighorn sheep: domestic sheep diseases do.” The solution is to keep livestock away from wildlife, which has never been simple. “We don’t even know all the vectors: Prairie dogs die of plague that probably didn’t show up in this country until the 1930s. Ferrets die of canine distemper. It’s probably more of a factor than we realize.”

  With trade and transport now erasing ocean barriers that once separated human populations, we may be even more susceptible than wildlife. Nervously, epidemiologists try to stay a step ahead of the latest Ebola, SARS, and bird flu virus mutations, lest they leap continents as easily as they jump from animal species to our own. Are there lessons from wildlife management that might help humans plan our own future?

  “Absolutely none,” says Brown. “The reason we can do it with animals is that we have the massive superiority of one species managing another. That does not apply to managing ourselves. We’ve proven ourselves to be fully incapable of that.”

  He remembers being in eighth grade, seeing 1940 census figures in a textbook. “There were 120 million Americans then. It was a good number. Economists weren’t happy—we were still in the tail end of the Depression—but we had zero population growth without any battle with religion. Economics did it. It was basically a comfortable situation: few immigrants, because there were no jobs for them, and limited average family size.”

  Then came World War II. “Like with deer management, there’s always something to upset the applecart. The war ended, and the first thing we did was try to repopulate. And we didn’t want just a sustaining economy: we wanted growth. It’s in our DNA to want to grow. That’s true with Kaibab mule deer herds, or with wolves in Yellowstone. It’s part of the biological process. It would be nice to get to just the right carrying capacity of humans and maintain that number. But who’s going to do that?”

  In 1924, he says, Kaibab deer were down to skin and bones. Fawns were dying or stillborn, or does weren’t conceiving. It was tragic, but they had to die to restore a livable balance. Imagine, though, if we tried that with people.

  “It’s totally counterintuitive if you want to manage people. If you go to Darfur and see people starving, you bring them food, and their reproductive rate goes back up. Haiti has an earthquake, you bring in food and relief, and their reproduction rebounds.” He shakes his head at the irony: by replenishing the population, the suffering inevitably recurs.

  “This has been understood for a hundred years, but do we change our behavior? No. Because you can’t say screw Haiti, the place is a basket case, so we’re going to block efforts to bring them food because it’s against their better interest. Our tendency in a critical situation is to provide food. That’s what we do.”

  The notion of husbanding the human race as though we were game or livestock horrifies on multiple levels—moral, religious, and philosophical, not to mention legal. To suggest applying principles of wildlife management to our own species conjures abominations such as humans being culled like deer. Although we famously aren’t good at remembering history, attempts at thinning our ranks—otherwise known as genocide—are among our most indelible historical memories.

  Yet although we strive for the heavens, as Pascal noted, we are still mammals who, like all other Earthly creatures, require food and water—resources that we are now outstripping. Our seafood is down to dregs scraped from the ocean floor; our soils on chemical life support; our rivers fouled and drained. We squeeze and shatter rocks, mine frigid seas, and split atoms in risky places because easily harvested fuels are nearly gone. Like Kaibab deer, every species in the history of biology that outgrows its resource base suffers a population crash—a crash sometimes fatal to the entire species. In a world now stretched to the brink, today we all live in a parkland, not a boundless wilderness. To survive and continue the legacy of our species, we must adjust accordingly.

  Inevitably—and, we must hope, humanely and nonviolently—that means gradually bringing our numbers down. The alternative is letting nature—the new nature we’ve inadvertently created in our own image—do that for us.

  How might nature do so? Probably in a number of cascading ways, as one loss ignites another. The fish we eat are no longer threatened simply because we crave them to the point of disappearance: Because we’ve dug up and burned millions of years’ worth of excess carbon buried by nature in less than three centuries, the waters they dwell in now grow warmer than some of them may be able to bear. Decreased oxygen levels and increased metabolic rates in warming waters are already decreasing body sizes of North Atlantic cod and haddock faster than models had predicted.

  As oceans absorb our excess carbon dioxide, they become less alkaline. And although our seawater is not yet so acidic that it’s turned into salty Perrier, higher levels of dissolved CO2 corrode developing shells of young mollusks and crustaceans. Warm waters expand, melting ice adds more volume, and the specter of rising seas becomes a certainty as it grows likely that Earth’s average surface temperature is headed beyond the 2°C (3.6°F) increase over preindustrial levels proposed as the threshold we dare not pass.1

  At our present rising rate of greenhouse gas emissions, however, we will eclipse a 2°C increase in the next two to three decades. With two-thirds of the world’s population living within two hundred miles of a seacoast, and with most of the world’s economy concentrated in coastal cities, the potential swamping of civilization as we know it, should these places flood, overwhelms our ability to fathom. Current budgetary traumas will seem trivial next to the prospect of erecting dikes to protect, in order of population, the likes of Tokyo, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Karachi, Mumbai, Manila, Istanbul, Buenos Aires, Kolkata, Rio de Janeiro, Tunis, Jakarta, New York, Los Angeles–Long Beach, London, Lagos, Hong Kong, Ho Chi Minh City, Miami, Singapore, Barcelona, Sydney, Melbourne, Alexandria (and the entire Nile Delta), Athens, Tel Aviv, Lisbon, Naples, Tripoli, Casablanca, Durban, San Juan, Dubai, Havana, Houston, Beirut, Perth, Marseilles, Stockholm, Odessa, Doha, Boston, Vancouver, Oslo, Macau, Copenhagen, Abu Dhabi, and Honolulu, as well as hundreds more cities the size of New Orleans and smaller, but no less precious to those who live and work there.

  We were far fewer, and living far less densely and intensely, when the Black Death killed approximately one-fourth of all humans in the mid-fourteenth century, and also when the 1918–20 Spanish influenza knocked our species, then numbering less than 2 billion, back by an estimated 50 million. In today’s tightly bound 7-billion-and-growing world, our antibiotic armor is being breached by mutating, resistant strains of infections from gonorrhea to strept
ococcus. Like every other monoculture that replaces a diverse ecological mix, the one known as Homo sapiens is more vulnerable to opportunistic pandemic than ever.

  Unintentionally, we have also spawned our own micro-threats, for which neither we nor anything alive have defenses. The crisis in Tel Aviv’s biggest sperm bank—just one man in one hundred now qualifies to be a donor—warns that Israel’s transformation of deserts into gardens may have depended too heavily on pesticides. The damaged semen may be due to endocrine disruptors found not just in agro-chemistry, but in pharmaceuticals, household cleaners, detergents, plastics, and even cosmetics and sunscreens. Mounting evidence links them to rising rates of breast and prostate cancer, autism, ovarian cysts, attention-deficit disorder, heart disease, autoimmune deficiency, obesity, diabetes, learning disabilities, and—if that weren’t alarming enough—scrambled sexuality in fauna, ranging from fish to frogs to alligators, polar bears, and humans. In some cases, this means sex ratios skewed far beyond than those perpetrated by ultrasound in India or China: In the Saskatchewan River basin, up to 90 percent of a common minnow are now female. Many more fish, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals are being born as hermaphrodites, with intersexual mixtures of male and female genitalia that bode darkly for reproduction.