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 Ecology Level Four, Is There a Master Plan?
Viewing contemporary events from a
pre-ecological paradigm, we missed their significance. From an ecological
paradigm we can see that fewer members of the species Homo colossus than of the
species Homo sapiens can be supported by a finite world. The more colossal we
become, the greater the difference. What we called "pollution," and regarded at
first as either a mere nuisance or an indication of the insensitivity of
industrial people to esthetic values, can now be recognized as a signal from
the ecosystem. If we had learned to call it "habitat damage," we might have
read it as a sign of the danger inherent in becoming colossal. Even if the
world were not already overloaded by four billion members of the species Homo
sapiens, it does not have room for that many consumers of resources and exuders
of extrametabolites on the scale of modern Homo colossus. In short, on a planet
no larger than ours, As we move deeper into the post-exuberant age, one of the keen insights of a passionately concerned and unusually popular sociologist, C. Wright Mills, will become increasingly important to us all. It was an insight by which he tried to help his contemporaries read the news of their times perceptively. We will need to be at least as perceptive to avoid misconstruing events that will happen in the years to come. Although the paradigm from which Mills wrote was pre-ecological, in one of his most earnest books he transcended archaic thoughtways enough to note that only sometimes and in some places do men make history; in other times and places, the minutiae of everyday life can add up to mere "fate." Mills gave us an unusually clear definition of this important word. Infinitesimal actions, if they are numerous and cumulative, can become enormously consequential. Fate, he explained, is shaping history when what happens to us was intended by no one and was the summary outcome of innumerable small decisions about other matters by innumerable people. In a world that will not accommodate four billion of us if we all become colossal, it is both futile and dangerous to indulge in resentment, as we shall be sorely tempted to do, blaming some person or group whom we suppose must have intended whatever is happening to happen. If we find ourselves beset with circumstances we wish were vastly different, we need to keep in mind that to a very large extent they have come about because of things that were hopefully and innocently done in the past by almost everyone in general, and not just by anyone in particular. If we single out supposed perpetrators of our predicament, resort to anger, and attempt to retaliate, the unforeseen outcomes of our indignant acts will compound fate. In precisely Mills's sense, the conversion of a marvelous carrying capacity surplus into a competition-aggravating and crash-inflicting deficit was a matter of fate. No compact group of leaders ever decided knowingly to take incautious advantage of enlargment of the scope of applicability of Liebig's law, or subsequently to reduce that scope and leave a swollen load inadequately supported. No one decided deliberately to terminate the Age of Exuberance. No group of leaders conspired knowingly to turn us into detritovores. Using the ecological paradigm to think about human history, we can see instead that the end of exuberance was the summary result of all our separate and innocent decisions to have a baby, to trade a horse for a tractor, to avoid illness by getting vaccinated, to move from a farm to a city, to live in a heated home, to buy a family automobile and not depend on public transit, to specialize, exchange, and thereby prosper.
Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann
LAURAMIT, a scientist
wasn't satisfied and wanted more. |
