Brief:
I wrote the following article because I was broke and The Economist along with Shell were running a contest where the winner would get 20 thousand dollars. I know that is not a lot of money but in Colombia it is a lot of money. The average person here makes $300 dollars a month, 20 thousand dollars at the current exchange rate, 2,700.00 pesos per dollar, would amount to 54 million pesos, divide that by 12 months, and I would instantly become an upper middle class citizen with a pretentious $4,500,000. pesos per month.
Strangely I did not win, I did not make the finalist list. Why? Mi Rosa thinks that Shell oil and the Economist have such genetic make up that they were never going to allow people like me to win the contest. There is probably a contradiction about caring for the environment and sucking oil and profits out of every thing; but I kind of thought my article made it clear that exploitation not butterflies were what was important for the survival of our species.
Besides that, I have been a religious reader of The Economist, I am not proud about that fact but they are so good at being the good side of the bad side that I can not help myself; but that aside I have easily paid them close to 20 thousand dollars at the newsstand rate. So if I had won I would have merely gotten reimbursed for my twenty + years of dedication as an Economist reader, but hey, even funding my own winnings, I still didn’t win!
“Do we need nature?”
I don’t myself remember, nor did I know it for this forty-four years of life, but for my father that recently came back to his homeland, Colombia, that I was in an incubator for life support, when I was but eight months old, for a period of eight days. My father is of the opinion that it was all those pins and needles, tubes, artificial air, with all the sterility of a hospital that made it possible for me to have a natural fear of the world and all of its thundering noises.
It is true that when the door bell and the phone ring I acquire a certain anxious preoccupation that doesn’t go away with the proper identification of the inquirer. It is as if my environment had been cursed by a violent force. Still I am pleased, and I am sure Dad is equally pleased to still be alive because of an artificial environment; the incubator was a very nice artifice.
One could argue that modern technology kept me alive, and that in Victorian times without the incubator and the sterility of that environment I would not be alive. In Victorian times there was no room for babies that required special medical treatment, you had, for the most part, to be willing to carry yourself to adulthood, and to meet the demanding expectations of your inadequate surroundings, the mortality rate was high, no one questioned that reality.
But was that a reality? in other words was that a real world? a real environment?
There are many ways to gauge an artificial construct, if humans make it one could argue it is artificial. It seems to be the key gauge of AI (Artificial Intelligence), that it is conjured by the analog human brain makes the digital workings of a computer artificial. that is, nature by itself would not produce the Personal Computer with all its accompanying software. Is that a sign that nature is not artificial? I don’t think so, nature produces the human that divines the computer and the results are then an abstracted natural contraption, not possible without the priori of a human being, arguably a pure natural creation.
When I came into this life I was doomed, by some strange illness, to stay alive only through artificial means, but the truth is that my artificially propped existence began before that. You see my mother was adopted, the concept of adoption is very much an artificial environment, my mother’s adoptive parents were not her real parents, her real parents gave her up for adoption for very much the same reason that I was placed in an artificial environment, to survive. That is, my mother was not going to survive with her natural parents because they did not have the resources to keep her, they could have abandoned her but instead they gave her up for adoption, thus she survived and thrived because of her adoptive parents that we could easily call artificial parents; making her artificial home, giving her artificial parental care so that she would not feel abandoned.
When an astronaut goes into outer space, or when an aquanaut submerges into the deep sea both individuals are trespassing into non human territory through the use of an artificial environment. They are both bubble children immersed into an unknown and accomplishing the feat by bringing with them a part of their atmosphere, and a made up, exhaustible contraption of their endemic environments.
But superficial environments are not just subject to physical properties, as we have seen a home can be created around adoptive parents, which assimilates the perhaps natural condition of a nuclear family. But there are other less seemingly obvious artificial conditions. Freud created an artificial world when he created the world of psychology. Many people today make their living from psychology, many people are being treated through the psychological process, and live their lives purely in a psychological construct. Woody Allen, for example, could no more live outside of Manhattan, than he could live outside of the psychological world which he so willingly inhabits. One has to conclude that Freud and Jung are Woody Allen’s true parents and that without them, and Manhattan, he probably would not exist.
So many people live in the artificial world of psychology with all of its psychological rules. And there are other artificial worlds, such as the stock market. Again many people make their living and many more are affected by the movements of the stock market more than by the movement of the stars or the change in climate. The stock market is however an artifice contrived to reflect a perceived value so as to determine if it warrants investment, or attention, or if it should suffer a quick demise. Stock holders don’t pick apples, apples are very tangible items, stock holders pick stocks; and if the general audience judges them correct it values the stock asset by placing an inordinate amount of attention upon it. If for some reason the market does not pay attention to the stock, the perceived value collapses and the stock plummets, and with it the reputation of those that gambled upon the artifice of stock.
When a stock collapses because its value has suffered a perception change the value change is real, but the company may actually have not suffered any change in its natural value, its natural value being the more accepted value of its assets, which generally have a more concrete acceptance of their value; however the natural value of assets is equally a capitalistic artifice.
There are many values that we no longer question which have become endemic parts of our civilized society but equally there was a time when they were not real, because they did not suffer from acceptance, hence the reason why they did not exist. There was a time when the stock market did not exist. There was a time when a legalized marriage did not exist. There was a time when democracy did not exist. Neither the stock market nor democracy appear to be requirements for human existence. They are nice, they seem to work well among well defined civilizations, but there is nothing inherent in either that can lay claim to being native to our sense of being nor to our origins.
Today’s city dwellers are hardly natural embodiments of their precursors. The further back in time we go the less civic and city life played a role in our lives. The civilized male or female is actually a very rare specimen, most of the world actually lives under uncivilized conditions, a nomadic life is really still the norm, there are 6 billion earth inhabitants less than one billion of them inhabit any significant form of civilization. By an large the world does not read The Economist, nor do they confine themselves to family planning and socially minded activism. We can say that most of the world lives a natural existence, I mean by natural that it requires the littlest amount of input by human, that is that it is not contrived by them.
Humanity by an large has demonstrated an incredibly adaptive ability to live under some of the most extreme conditions and endure. It seems incredible but humans survived concentration camps demonstrating an ability to adapt to incredibly repressive, torturous and harmful environments. Even ghettos, repressive regimes, famine and rampant disease have demonstrated time and again the resilience and persistence of our humanity.
It would be difficult to imagine a future with nature in it.
Nature as we know it has been persecuted not only by us, but also by catastrophe; environmentalist would have attempted to save the dinosaur but whatever killed all the dinosaurs wouldn’t have it. The archeological record demonstrates that more things have gone into extinction than are alive today. That would indicate that extinction is the norm and not the exception. Climate change is the norm, not the exception. The question is not “Do we need nature?” The question is are we being realistic in assuming that nature is an imperative? Can our future possibly have nature in it? And if the future does have nature will it be a nature garden wholly contrived by our will to carry nature forward much as we have done with cows?
The nuclear family is an artificial environment, will it survive into the future or will it be better to have a social human being that strictly adheres to values based on systematically civic minded ideals instead of familial tides?
The record of any given civilization over time proves a lack of persistence, civilizations change but the human race thrives against the odds. The environmental archeological record amply demonstrates that to save mother nature from us we will probably have to first save it from itself.
In many ways our quest for air-conditioning, electricity, internet, artificial intelligence, and scientifically flavored foods, genetically modified crops, are proof positive that we have the ability to live in wholly artificial environments; and that, like Disney or Hollywood these environments are tolerable and more interesting; once inside of an artificial world we are disoriented as to its boundaries and limitations.
The odds that humanity will save the environment are insignificant in stature, we better be prepared to go at it alone. A world without trees and squirrels might seem horrible but as the generations pass so do the memories. Our sentiments for saving the environment are betrayed by population growth and consumption. The most sophisticated nations, which claim to be environmentally friendly, are causing exponential harm to the environment through a multiplicity of factors such as consumption and waste. The harm done to the environment by carelessly polluted underdeveloped nations is insignificant by comparison.
Are we willing to prevent further population growth? My parents were certainly pleased to have me and five other children. Do we have the power to stop the gracing-hunter meat eater human from conquering every natural resource and dwindle it into extinction. Oil is not an infinite resource but if we preserve it is nature going to preserve it too? or are we going to lose it in some geological upheaval? Even oil is in danger of being done in by the forces of nature. We and the greens may try to save nature from us but that doesn’t prevent the probability that nature will do us in. Earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, violent temperature changes, a well placed asteroid could make pointless any attempt we have of saving mother nature from us or from itself.
It is important to note here that we as humans are not prone to tolerate sudden and violent environmental changes. We are fragile, our temperature tolerating potential is plus or minus a few degrees. It is no coincidence that the nearest and most obvious planets appear to be lifeless for life doesn’t truly tolerate a lot of variance. This points to the limitations of our bodies which are the space suits that our souls, at least for those of us that have souls, posses. Our soul’s body-suit is a high maintenance device that requires incessant attention, just check out how important the technicians and industry that maintain it have become. Most of us spend an inordinate amount of our lives trying to feed and maintain the soul’s body-suit.
It would be absurd to imagine that our habitat will continue to host us indefinitely, future generations will have to accept limiting and artificial environments. With video games, software desktops, artificial nutrition and fake plants we are slowly being adapted to future artificial worlds and space stations.
Do we need nature? Today we need nature, its beauty is pleasing to the senses but nature and even entire species disappear with the growth of sentient beings. Our ability to adapt and to manipulate the environment has given us the edge over nature and its contents. We have come to greater and greater independence from nature through the ages by building damns and nuclear power plants.
The beauty of civilization is largely artificial, the arts, literature, architecture, philosophy, politics, etc, these are all artificial constructs which, like justice, only have validity in human perception. According to quantum physics we are the construct of defined observations. Nature exists because of its interaction with us, if trees and tigers stop rubbing against us they will cease to exist. A tree that falls in the forest doesn’t make a noise if we are not near.
Our species has been successful because of its fundamental ability to modify nature, if nature wants to continue to exist it will have to be more observant of our needs and wants, and it will have to continue to provide resources which will call our interest. Otherwise, to the future, we might only take the cows with us for they produce juicy and delicious prime rib.
RC
