by Rob Dunn
In the meantime, Fincher and Thornhill continue to think even more radically. They cannot help themselves. They wonder if the greater xenophobia and collectivism of cultures in high disease areas leads to boundaries between cultures and the accumulation of differences between peoples. What if, they have suggested, diseases, xenophobia, and collectivism also make democracy more difficult to attain or maintain? What if they make war more likely too? So far all of these theories find some support, but they are nascent and wild and will take more time to better understand. In every case there seem to be alternative explanations, yet these theories invite pondering, if only because, if correct, they affect nearly the entirety of human history. In the meantime, if you are intrigued, Thornhill is still taking students, but you had better be an individualist if you intend to apply.
Part VII
The Future of Human Nature
15
The Reluctant Revolutionary of Hope
If our hairy ancestors were to visit our urban and suburban lives, they would wonder how the escalators work, but also where the plants and animals have gone. What have we done with all of the birds? Of course, the answer is that many of them are geographically removed from our daily lives, far away from the majority of people. Our food is shipped to us. It comes wrapped in paper, decorated with designs and shaped by a machine. It is stamped with its contents, rather than its origin or history. Cows are milked not by hands but instead by mechanized devices. The chickens whose meat you bite into were grown indoors. Our mutualist species, living plants and animals on which we depend, have been turned into material, matter that we consume. In this regard, our cities are different from any cities that have every existed, and so too our lives are uniquely disconnected from the daily lives of the species we depend on.
What can we realistically do to restore the good elements of nature to our lives in London, Manhattan, Tokyo, or Hong Kong or, for that matter, Raleigh, Syracuse, and Albuquerque? A first answer is to recognize the importance of the structure of the city, its complex framework of buildings, dirt, roads, and pipes. The environment we create influences our interactions as much as does any individual decision we make within that environment. I began to think about the infrastructure of our lives while living in Bolivia, where many versions of the future remain possible, and where one might step back and, with sufficient appeal to reason, vision, and power, make great change. It happened at Tom’s, a small restaurant in the middle of the plaza in Riberalta in the northern Amazon. It sits at a prominent corner of the middle of nowhere. In the relative world that exists in any place, it is a den of the wealthy. A series of tables are set outside, without umbrellas. At those tables, the most affluent people in town eat meat and soup. Nothing that can be ordered costs more than a few dollars, but even this modest tithe divides the world. Perhaps one in a thousand people in town can afford a lunch at Tom’s. Even fewer can afford to lunch there often, and so to sit at the tables near the plaza where motorbikes circle en route to narrower paths is to announce oneself as fortunate.
I sat at one of Tom’s tables on the morning I met the woman who would tell me the story of the future of cities. In her telling, her father was a city planner who had lived his life in the highlands. Bolivia is divided into highlands and lowlands, and the two have been culturally divided, to different extents, for millennia. Her father was a highland man with the kind of education that earned him a seat at most tables. He was one of the most important city planners in the country. He had been tasked with planning a new city, a visionary city. In Bolivia, vision has a history. It was in Bolivia and neighboring Peru that the Incan empire rose out of mud to grandeur. The Spanish never found the golden city, but had they broadened their view of gilded to include masterpieces of architecture and urban planning, the Incan empire would have fit the bill. Given vision, grandeur could rise again.
This man’s primary task for his entire working life would be to design a city to befit the descendants of the Incas. Into this city, he drew the streets and buildings. He put in parks, pools, and apartments. He added houses and then imagined and drew the flowers to grace each garden. Hydrangeas by the wall. Roses on the hill. He added administrative buildings and plazas. He drew and redrew. Great piles of drawings were carried away each week by the garbagemen. The city was, in its stubborn way, reborn each month, year, and decade until, one day, a final draft sat on his desk, complete and wondrous.
In the process of making his final draft, the father and city planner imagined himself moving into a house with his wife. He made a restaurant on one corner, where he thought his daughter might meet a man and fall in love. It was not just that he could imagine things, but that he could, as his decisions progressed, come to control them. Making the streets narrower, he could send a bicyclist into a ditch. Widen them again and he could rescue the bicyclist and allow him to ride all the way to work. He could move benches to change where old men would sit to talk. He could point statues so as to orient their stone gestures, but also the pigeons that would come to rest on their shoulders. He could see parrots flushed from fruit trees, and fruit falling to schoolchildren’s outstretched hands. He came to know this city, his city, as a kind of orchestra. He wanted to play all the instruments just right so that the whirring music of lives being lived sounded not just good but perfect.
Because he had time to choose and rechoose, the features of the city that he planned were those that appealed to universal human wants and preferences. Habits and cultures change, morals too. Passions, society, and the need to exist with other life remain. His city would be built to please people, to make them happier and healthier for centuries. The need for a dog, the flowers, and thousands of trees, like the need for places to meet and talk, would last long beyond his life. Under the surface of these imagined lives, he penciled the other necessary layers—pipes for water and waste, and the rest of the infrastructure of persistence. Some men and women have the patience to plant oak trees and wait for their shade. This man would seed the next century and then watch it begin to grow.
As I sat at Tom’s, I was intrigued by this story and what it meant about the potential scale of one’s dreams. But it presented me with a problem. I knew of no city like the one being described, not in Bolivia, not anywhere. Yet the daughter waved her hands and spoke of it as if it were finished. She spoke as though she had fallen in love in the restaurant on the corner, as if her father had in fact pulled the bicyclist out of the gutter by the force of his design, sent the pigeons flying, brought the singing birds to roost in the president’s trees, and ripened the fruits on every orchard tree. So I asked, “Donde esta la ciudad?” but even as the words stumbled around in my mouth, I knew the answer. The city was never built. It would never be built. Her father had come to know that too, yet he spent nearly every day of his life in his office designing a city that he knew was only a place of imagination. In its purity and grandeur, this woman’s story is a thing of beauty, a kind of architectural novel. In it, the plot is about the extent to which we have the ability to change the fates of lives, both those of other humans and of other species, but the subplot is, of course, that even when we plan, we do not always succeed. Yet we go on planning, putting pencil to paper, and dreaming.
This woman’s story about her father is what separates us from the other societies. The ants may make networks of roads that are more optimal than our own. They may work with far more efficiency. They may use their resources in ways that are more sustainable, and may even live in societies in which a greater diversity of life thrives, and yet they lack what this man had, the ability to sit back and plan a vision on the basis of our collective reason. The ants lack the ability to take hold of their fate and, in doing so, to make a change.
We do not always dream or decide consciously. Many days we are rather like the ants, pushed this way and that by our urges and conditions. Collectively though, we have the ability to learn and extend beyond our individual limits. We have the ability to develop a plan and on the basis of th
at plan to enact change that affects not just our own lives, or even those of our own species, but instead all of our lives and all species. We have the ability to pick up the drawing pad on which the future will be laid out and sketch the streets, the houses, and the people, our descendants, moving back and forth, and to decide whether they walk or drive, but also how they interact with each other and the rest of life. What I will leave you with is not a set of answers, a how-to book for the biological future, but instead the story of a few other visionaries with pencils, individuals different from the Bolivian urban planner only because what they have sketched out may yet come to be.
Dickson Despommier did not mean to become a revolutionary, or to plan the future of a city. He just wanted to be a scientist. He grew up like many of us. He caught dragonflies off his mother’s clothesline and put them in big mason jars, where he would watch them trying to will themselves out of the jar. He gathered snakes. He poked at nature and explored in the way that any child might do, trying to find, if not truth, amusement. Those days of fumbling with life led to graduate school and a postdoctoral fellowship, and then on to a career studying parasites and in particular a worm, Trichinella spiralis, that Despommier still finds, for lack of a better word, beautiful. It is also terrible, of course, because it causes trichinosis, but in the elaborateness of its sinister ways, it is also elegant. Fumbling with life led Despommier to this worm and so he spent twenty-seven years with it. In doing so, he learned much about its life and the life of parasites generally. He became an elder statesman of parasitology even before he was elder. He invented a rapid blood test to detect whether humans are infected with Trichinella spiralis.1 All of this proceeded as he might have hoped, probably better than he might have hoped. He saved lives and had big insights. Then in 1999, at the age of fifty-nine, he found himself in a new situation. He could not get funding, not from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, or anyone else.
Times can change and leave scientists behind. New fields gain traction, whether or not they represent progress or truth, and then the old fields disappear, either permanently or just for a while. These fields’ diligent geniuses go unfunded and ignored in the defunct arenas that face the same fate. Despommier was watching the birth of the field of genomics, a particular kind of industrialized genetics, and with it the quieting of the study of how species actually live and work in the world. He applied for one more round of funding and then another and another, before finally deciding to focus on teaching. Up until that point in his career, he had not really thrown himself into teaching, but now, with time and energy (and no money) on his hands, he would. He would focus the intensity he had once reserved for discovery on the minds of the graduate students of Columbia University. They were students, on average, with a sense of entitlement, but also a high probability of future lives of consequence, and so he would turn to them.
Despommier began to teach two classes for graduate students. One was an environmental health course called Medical Ecology. The other was Ecology 101. It was while teaching Medical Ecology that his life began to change. The course proceeded reasonably, some students excited, others disinterested, some students friendly, others passive, some students sleeping, most awake. It was, in other words, a typical class, at least until Despommier made a decision that would cause him to lose control of the scope of his life.
Dickson Despommier was walking his class through the ways in which the world is collapsing. By 2050, the world is expected to be occupied by 9.2 billion people. It will be hotter and harder to farm. Diseases caused by pathogens will once again be a key problem, not just for developed countries but for the whole world, and all of these issues will coexist with our modern problems that seem to be getting worse rather than better: obesity, immune diseases, social discontent, and the extinction of thousands, maybe millions, of species. “Feeding this future world and keeping it healthy is beyond current abilities,” he would tell his students. By 2050, with current farming practices, “we will need an area of additional agricultural land the size of South America. It just does not exist! Not on Earth!” Despommier said this, all of which is true to the extent that it is knowable, and the students reacted. They started complaining.*
Students do that. It is their nature, which is to say human nature, a nature of mild discontent. These students were insistent. They were sick of hearing about doom and gloom, sick of hearing about how the world into which they were maturing was falling apart. They were filled with youthful expectation and wanted, simply, but perhaps too simply, to talk about something more hopeful. They were the ones paying (or at least their parents were). It was “their class.”
The natural thing would have been for Despommier to remind the students that he was the one teaching, and that much of what he had seen of the world was not particularly hopeful. He might have offered some examples of positive change, and then moved on. Or he might have retaliated and made even clearer to the students the magnitude of the doom. “You have not seen the half of it,” he might have said, like the archetypical elder on the porch. But a mood struck him. He decided to look for causes for hope, or at least make the students do so. “Hope away,” he thought to himself as he asked the students if they could think of a way to solve some of the problems he had, by that time, already laid out, problems that affect billions of humans and more and more each year. So it was that at an age when his colleagues had begun to talk about retirement, the seed of Dickson Despommier’s new life as a hopeful revolutionary was planted. Out of it, a new future would grow.
The students were faced with the problem that faces all of us: what to do about the ecological situation in which we find ourselves, a situation in which we are removed from the kind of nature that once plagued us, but also the kinds that once benefited us. They looked around for hopeful solutions and decided to study green rooftops, the patches of flowers, trees, and even crops seeded on the flat tops of city buildings. Green rooftops exist already in many urban centers, patches here and there of vegetables, grass, or other photosynthetic life seeded in the dirt on roofs or balconies. Some green rooftops develop accidentally. In tropical countries, any roof left untended for a few days will tend toward rebirth, but in other cases they are sown. Dirt is carried up steps or elevators, positioned, and then tended to as though it were any other ground. Green rooftops were, to Despommier, a boutique answer to a big, grisly problem. But he humored the students.
The idea of green rooftops and rooftop gardens is old. The hanging gardens of Babylon, if they existed at all, were a kind of rooftop garden. Nebuchadnezzar II is said to have built the gardens in 600 BC to satisfy the cravings of his wife, Amytis of Media, for the trees and plants of Persia. Clearly, rooftop gardens, whether they are in Babylon or elsewhere, have costs. Roofs must be strong and waterproof, and often water must be carried or pumped up. The gardens though also accrue benefits beyond those of simply producing food and pleasing spouses. They sequester toxins from the air. They filter and collect storm water and reduce sewer overflow. They reduce building heating and cooling costs. At the scale of cities, they have been argued to reduce temperatures on hot days. Then, of course, they make us happy. For Amytis of Media that happiness was being reminded of her home in what is now Iran. For us, today, it is being reminded of those billions of years that we lived in the wild.
Recently, green rooftops have increased in popularity. In 2008, the number of green rooftops in North America increased 35 percent relative to the year before, and this growth appears to be continuing. Even New Yorkers, who are particular about the aesthetic of their city, an aesthetic that tends toward shades of black and gray over avocado, do not seem to mind them. A rough-and-tumble tenement building on the Lower East Side is now green on top.2 Pace University is seeding grass over shingles. In Chicago, City Hall is now green, as are hundreds of other roofs, millions of square feet. As you fly over cities, you might see them, the patches of leaves, pockets of life where little might be expected, rising out of the gr
ay patchwork of the modern world.
The benefits of rooftops extend not just to humans, but also to other species. Green rooftops offer testimony to the extent to which nature, or at least some of it, abhors a vacuum and overcomes a distance. Despite being suspended in midair, the brown patches on rooftops quickly fill with life, whether or not anyone tends to them. Seeds arrive along with hundreds of bee and wasp species. Spiders extend loops of silk with which they ride. Nor is it just that species colonize these spaces. They move among them, the way they might move among fields of tall grass. Winged animals fly from building to building unaware that anything they are doing is unusual. In Japan and New York, beekeepers depend on such rooftop life for the production of honey. The bees fly among buildings gathering nectar that they bring back to provision both their brood and (unintentionally) their keepers. That green rooftops become ecosystems is beyond question, but that gardens on roofs could actually prove useful at a scale that mattered to humans was a separate matter, one about which Despommier would continue to hold his tongue.
When the students began, they knew they faced a challenge even if Despommier did not explicitly discourage them. It is one thing for rooftop gardens to be a beautiful and interesting element of a city, living gems scattered here and there. It is quite another to feed thousands or even millions of people. For Christians, Jesus fed the masses out of a single loaf of bread. The students wanted to do it out of asphalt and sky, if only to keep Despommier from telling them how bad things were. No one had really “gone big” when it came to green rooftops. No one was seriously advocating for whole cities of green roofs. Perhaps, the students began to think, it was just that no one knew how valuable they might be in remedying pollution and producing crops. So they decided they would figure out how great a role such rooftops might play if they really caught on. What scale of problems could they really solve? The students thought that the answer must be, whatever it was, a large number.