Communicating

Education

Let us never stop communicating. With those around us. Through local talks, articles, books...

Communicating and exchanging ideas is the only way to evolve and move forward.

Let us calmly spread around us all these habits that do us good.

These life habits take time to put in place at first. On the other hand, once they have become reflexes, we no longer have to think; we are once again quick and effective. And above all: we are in better health, and happier. We feel an inner coherence that shows on the outside, and which is the only sign of the social status of success.

Finally, the larger the world's human population grows, the more disastrous the impact on biodiversity. Forests in the front line. And the closer a human being's way of life is to the Western way of life, the more it contributes to climate disruption and to the pollution of the resources vital to the survival of the human species.

Let us have fewer children.

If we choose to have children — failing the ability to prevent the negative impact on biodiversity — let us at least teach them to live moderately, starting by setting the example ourselves: let us live in a measured way.

Let us nevertheless take time to reflect before deciding to have children. From the moment we know that in the coming decades the lack of oil will no longer allow 8 billion human beings to be fed, once we know almost for certain that there will be shortages of drinking water, famines, and therefore millions of deaths in the decades to come, deciding to have children is knowingly bringing into the world other human beings who will suffer in their turn. Do we really wish for that? Is it truly a gift to them to bring them into the world when we know in advance that they will suffer?

Adopting a measured way of life also means remaining measured as to the size of the human population, so that there are enough of the Earth's resources, with time to renew themselves, to ensure our subsistence.

Let us recover our reason. Let us take care of the resources without which the human species would not exist.

Understanding the past to blaze the trails of the future

Preserving the resources on which the survival of the human species depends

Large regions of the ancient Fertile Crescent are now desert or semi-desert zones, steppes, or heavily eroded or salinised land unfit for agriculture. The current fleeting wealth of certain nations, founded on the sole non-renewable resource of oil, masks the region's fundamental, enduring poverty and its difficulty in feeding itself.

In Antiquity, however, a good part of the Fertile Crescent and of the eastern Mediterranean, including Greece, was covered in forests. Palaeobotanists and archaeologists have elucidated the transformation of the region from fertile wooded country into eroded scrubland or desert. The forests were felled for the needs of agriculture, to obtain timber or firewood, or even to make plaster. Owing to low rainfall and low primary productivity (in proportion to the rains), the vegetation could not regenerate as fast as it was destroyed, especially in the presence of a large population of goats. With the cover of trees and grasses thus gone, erosion progressed and the valleys silted up, while irrigation agriculture in a low-rainfall environment resulted in an accumulation of salt. Begun as early as the Neolithic era, these processes have continued into modern times.

...

Thus, the societies of the Fertile Crescent and the eastern Mediterranean had the misfortune of arising in an ecologically fragile environment. By destroying their resource base, they committed ecological suicide. As each eastern Mediterranean society undermined itself in turn, beginning with those of the east (the Fertile Crescent), power shifted ever further west. If northern and western Europe escaped this fate, it is not because its inhabitants were wiser, but because they had the good fortune to live in a more robust environment endowed with more abundant rainfall, where vegetation regrows faster.

Guns, Germs, and Steel - Jared Diamond

Territories of moderate cohesion enabling the flourishing of ideas and technology

Why did China lose its technological lead to a Europe once so far behind?

...

In China, the difference came from the fact that the entire region was politically unified. A single decision was enough to halt maritime expeditions across all of China. Thus a temporary decision became irreversible, because no shipyard remained to build the ships.

...

The consequences of European disunity form a sharp contrast with those of China's unity. Time and again, the Chinese court decided to halt various activities: it abandoned the development of a water-powered spinning machine, stepped back from the threshold of the industrial revolution in the 19th century, demolished or virtually abolished mechanical clocks after having led the way, and turned its back on mechanical systems and technology in general after the end of the 15th century. These potentially deleterious effects of Chinese unity manifested themselves again in modern China, notably in the 1960s and 70s with the madness of the Cultural Revolution, when a handful of leaders decided to close the entire school system for five years. China's unity and Europe's perpetual disunity both have a long history.

...

By comparison, Europe never came close, even vaguely, to political unity: it was still fragmented into a thousand small independent states in the 14th century and half a thousand in 1500; by the 1980s, this number had fallen to 25 states, but it is approaching 40 as I write this sentence. Europe has 45 languages, each with its own modified alphabet, and is characterised by even greater cultural diversity. The disagreements that continue today to thwart even modest efforts at European unification within the framework of the EEC are symptomatic of this European culture of disunity. To understand how China lost its political and technological pre-eminence to Europe, we must therefore understand China's chronic unity along with Europe's chronic disunity.

...

China's cohesion eventually became a handicap, because the decision of one despot was enough to halt an innovation — as happened many times. Europe's geographical balkanisation, on the contrary, resulted in dozens, even hundreds, of small independent, competing states and centres of innovation. If one state did not pursue a particular innovation, another did, forcing neighbouring states to follow suit or risk being conquered or left economically behind. Europe's barriers were sufficient to prevent political unification, but insufficient to prevent the spread of technology and ideas. Unlike China, Europe never had a despot capable of locking everything down.

These comparisons suggest that geographical cohesion has had both positive and negative effects on the evolution of technology. In the very long run, technology has thus probably developed fastest in regions of moderate cohesion — neither too strong nor too weak.

Guns, Germs, and Steel - Jared Diamond

Returning to a human population size that preserves resources and life on Earth

Today's hunter-gatherers are in good health, suffer from practically no diseases, enjoy a very varied diet, and do not experience the periodic famines that strike farmers, who depend on a fairly narrow range of cultivated plants.

Hunter-gatherers enjoyed a varied diet, including adequate quantities of proteins, vitamins and minerals, whereas farmers obtained most of their food from carbohydrate-rich plants. Farmers thus obtained the calories they needed with less effort, but at the price of an impoverished diet.

Nowadays, just three carbohydrate-rich plants — wheat, rice and maize — provide more than 50 per cent of the calories consumed by the human species. Because of this dependence on a small number of cultivated plants, farmers have been exposed to a higher risk of famine than hunter-gatherers whenever one of the crucial plants failed to yield the expected harvest, as happened to millions of peasants when disease or drought devastated the crops that constituted their fundamental food resource.

Most of humanity's current major infectious or parasitic diseases only became established after the transition to agriculture. These causes of mortality persist only in societies where individuals are very numerous, malnourished and sedentary, for in these conditions infectious agents circulate.

Besides malnutrition, famines and epidemic diseases, agriculture also had another negative consequence: social stratification. Hunter-gatherers possess few, if any, food reserves, and their food sources never occur in concentrated form, as orchards or herds of cattle can. They subsist on the wild plants and animals they gather or hunt daily. Everyone, except infants, the sick and the old, takes part in the search for food. Consequently, among them there are no kings, no people specialised full-time in a particular trade, no class of social parasites living off the means of subsistence taken from others.

In the eyes of most American or European readers, the thesis that hunter-gatherers probably led more enviable lives than ours today may seem like nonsense, because most people living in today's industrial societies enjoy better health than most hunter-gatherers. That would be to forget that Americans and Europeans represent an elite in today's world, whose existence is ensured through the import of oil and other materials from other countries, where vast populations of peasants experience far more precarious health conditions.

While it gave rise for the first time to the division of society into classes, agriculture may also have exacerbated pre-existing inequalities between the sexes. Women were very often allotted a greater share of the toil; they were exhausted by more frequent pregnancies, and therefore suffered poorer health.

As the density of hunter-gatherer populations began to increase slowly at the end of the Ice Age, the tribes had to choose, as it were, consciously or not, between feeding more mouths by embarking on the process that led to the agricultural revolution, or finding certain ways to limit population growth. Some chose the first solution, insofar as they were incapable of foreseeing the later drawbacks of agriculture. Moreover, they were initially encouraged to persist down this path because they did indeed experience a transitory state of abundance, so long as the growth of their population had not yet cancelled out the benefit of the growth in food production. The numbers of these tribes then became far higher than those of the tribes that had chosen to remain hunter-gatherers; and the former therefore pushed the latter back into regions poorly suited to agriculture, or exterminated them: indeed, ten malnourished farmers are nevertheless stronger than a single healthy hunter. It is not true that the way of life tied to hunting and gathering was abandoned; rather, the human beings who were perceptive enough to decide to continue living that way were driven out of every region except those the farmers did not want. Today's hunter-gatherers persist mainly in various regions of the world unsuited to agriculture, such as deserts or the Arctic.

Archaeologists studying the origins of agriculture have managed to reconstruct the broad features of the moment when we made one of the most crucial decisions in human history: forced to choose between limiting population growth or increasing food production, we opted for the second term of this alternative, from which resulted famine, war, social division and tyranny. Yet the same choice faces us now — with the difference that we can now draw on the lessons of the past.

The way of life practised by hunter-gatherers is the one that has been most successful and has persisted longest since our species has existed, whereas we are still struggling with the problems into which agriculture has plunged us, and we do not know whether we will be able to solve them.

...

Our species is now at the pinnacle of its demographic numbers, of the extent of its geographical range, and of its capacity to act upon the world. Furthermore, it currently captures the greatest share of the global flow of energy and matter produced on the planet. All this marks an unprecedented rise. Yet all these gains we are now calling into question far more quickly than we obtained them. Our capacity to act upon the world threatens our very existence. It may be that we exterminate ourselves at a stroke — unless we perish slowly, through global warming, pollution, the destruction of habitable environments, the growth in the number of inhabitants alongside the diminution of food resources, and the disappearance of the other species from which the latter derive.

...

We possess scientific knowledge and we have books. We know how to calculate the admissible population growth as a function of the rate of exploitation of resources. We can read in books everything that is known about the ecological disasters of the past. The past rested on ignorance, whereas our present is a leaden age, whose pillar is wilful blindness. It is unimaginable to see modern society repeat the suicidal errors of ecological management committed in the past. It is as if we had not seen this scenario play out many times in human history and did not know its inevitable outcome.

...

Until recent years, no one worried about whether our children or grandchildren would be able to enjoy a livable planet. We are the first generation to ask the question of the future of the species.

...

Today, we monopolise a great share of the materials and energy produced on Earth, we exterminate species and destroy our environment at an ever-faster pace, and this cannot continue for another century. One might object that around us there is no obvious sign that we are approaching a climactic moment in our history. In reality, awareness can only come to us through extrapolation from the signs already present: famine and malnutrition, pollution and destructive technology keep growing; arable land, the ocean's food resources, other natural products, as well as the environment's capacity to absorb our waste, keep shrinking.

Since more human beings, endowed with ever more powerful means, are fighting over dwindling resources, some obstacle will inevitably block the rise of the species.

The scenarios for the future invite pessimism. Supposing all human beings currently alive were to die suddenly tomorrow, the damage the species has already inflicted on its environment is so great that the degradation would continue for decades more. Countless species have disappeared or are on the way to doing so, their populations having fallen below the level at which natural renewal is possible.

Despite all our track record in the domain of self-destruction, from which the lesson could be drawn, neither environmental destruction nor population growth appears to everyone as a real scourge — to say nothing of the state of misery of populations forced into mere survival, for whom ecological concerns are properly a luxury. The steamroller of destruction is moving at such speed that nothing will be able to stop it: the human animal, the third chimpanzee, is now, as a species, itself under threat. Its future is scarcely brighter than that of the other two chimpanzees.

The Third Chimpanzee - Jared Diamond - 1991 (the Internet was only in its infancy)

The disrupted climate, generating more and more droughts and floods, causing the growing aridity of soils and rising waters, is making more and more regions uninhabitable all over the world: more and more of us will be forced to migrate to survive, forced to migrate regularly to find our subsistence. We will become nomads again by force of circumstance. Without the help of oil, which will have become exceedingly rare, we will no longer have all these machines that allow us to move about and feed ourselves so easily.

Let us anticipate, so that too many human beings do not suffer.

Let us be reasonable about the number of children we bring into the world.

Let us be respectful of the Earth's resources that ensure our survival.