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Persona Digital Books
Readings from
Surviving Human Nature
by Stephen Gislason
Dr Gislason's Preface
20th Century
Climate Change
Cities and Sustainability
Living on the Edge
Fighting
Conflict and Destruction
Denial of Human Nature
Freedom and Capture
Killing
Capitalism
Munitions Industry
Guns at Home
Delusions, War and Economics
Future of Human Rights
Idealist's Fantasy
Responsibility to Protect
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Climate Changes
Humans also die from calamities of their own
making. The changes we are causing in the Earth's biosphere will return to harm
some of us individually and collectively through unwelcome changes in weather, climate,
food and water supplies. The cost of these adverse changes will continue to grow
and will exceed the cost of effective remedial action. An indulged European,
American or Canadian is still living on borrowed money and a debt from
environmental degradation that is yet to be paid. The plight of rich coastal
cities is good model to examine for solutions. One idea is to build massive
constructions to contain and drain extra water from these cities. A more
realistic idea is to stage a gradual retreat of these cities from vulnerable
coastlines. The retreat would involve renewing coastal wetlands to absorb extra
water, to reduce the urban population and to move citizens at risk to land that
is significantly higher than the highest high water level expected in the next
200 hundred years.
When I was a University student in the sixties, I
joined an early environmental organization called "Pollution Probe" and the main
idea was "Either you are part of the problem or part of the solution".
In an ideal world, everyone would seek personal
wealth, heath and well being, but at the same time would strive to restore the
health of planet earth. Smart people realize that no personal benefit will
survive long in a world that is ailing, polluted and careening toward more
man-made disasters.
The really sad part of our current predicament is
that all the right ideas have been around for decades and have been clearly
articulated in many forms by a host of intelligent people. The right ideas
involve unselfish and compassionate behavior. The right ideas involve long-term
planning, conservation and a deep commitment to preserving the natural world.
Without a healthy natural environment, there will be few or no healthy humans.
In the past three decades, working as a
physician, I encountered more and more patients who want to flee from city life,
air pollution, and chronic illnesses which they suspect comes from polluted
environments and bad food. One professional man, for example, explained that he
and his wife had moved to a semi-rural suburban community and commuted to work
over the past 20 years - they went to separate destinations and drove two cars.
They were driving to a city that grew out to meet them. The population tripled.
When they started commuting, his journey took less than 30 minutes; 20 years
later, the trip each way took 60 minutes on average; sometimes, when the traffic
was bad, they each spent 90 minutes or more in the car, one-way. Both had become
progressively ill. Both decided they would move to a small town and never
commute again.
The decision to drive one or more cars every day,
long distances to work may have been a common one among working couples in North
America in the past 40 years. Cities grew larger. The development of suburbs
often placed homes far from work places; massive road construction encouraged
extravagant car use. In retrospect, it was clear to this couple that it had been
a terrible mistake and they should stop commuting. Their mistake had health and
economic consequences for them personally and for every other inhabitant of
planet earth.
If you were an environmentally conscious God
watching their behavior, you might be properly annoyed - who gave them the right
to burn all that fossil fuel, pollute the air and water, cut down all those
trees, kill all those animals, pave all those forests and farmers' fields? Why
didn't they move closer and walk to work everyday? Of course, God is likely to
have a longer-term view and while lamenting the current folly of humans will
probably recall that planet earth undergoes continuous change and from time to
time, cataclysmic events alter the entire planet. Perhaps our folly is seen as
just another natural phenomenon - what if 200 years from now, God enters a note
into her journal " Humans on Planet Earth had the chance to get it right but
they didn't make it - main problems: self-destructive, short term planners and
tragically selfish -soiled their own nest."
Even the best of our infrastructure was built in
a hasty manner to last only a few years and is deteriorating as we speak. Most
human settlements have a temporary look. A glance at almost any street in the
modern world will tell you that our housing, transportation and communication
paths are still primitive and temporary. We still string wires on poles in a
makeshift manner. The poles and wires look ugly and fall down with the slightest
provocation. I watched as local technicians for the cable company replaced
bundles of copper wire with a small fiber optic cable, a distinct improvement in
the information path, but they still hung the fiber optics from aging wooden
poles, competing for space with a profusion of old-style telephone and
electricity wires. Buried fiber optic cables and wireless communication would
rid the land of these ugly and archaic wire networks but involve technical
difficulties and expense that remains to be overcome.
Tornadoes, hurricanes and earthquakes are
real-life tests of the infrastructures and human constructions routinely fail.
Affluent countries such as the US and Canada have limited ability to compensate
victims of natural calamities and rebuild, but most countries of the third world
are unable to recover even minimal levels of housing and services.
I am convinced that the age of
"do-whatever-you-want" is over. One major task in the 21st century is to rebuild
human infrastructures that work better and last longer. At the end of the
20th-century, the issue of quality versus quantity, hotly debated at the
beginning of the century, takes a new twist. Humans have become expert at
short-term, hasty and improvised technologies that are cheap to replicate. The
short-term technologies are often irresponsible and consume resources that are
difficult or impossible to replace. We need new ideas in high quality materials,
architecture, construction, and transportation. We need to build a more
substantial and enduring infrastructure. We need sustainable agriculture without
toxic chemicals. We need enforceable birth control, excellent pre- and
post-natal nutrition, and superb education for new children.
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Surviving Human Nature |
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Surviving Human Nature is published by Persona Digital Books. All
rights to reproduction by any means are reserved. We encourage readers to quote and paraphrase
topics from Surviving Human Nature published online and expect proper citations
to accompany all derivative writings. The author is Stephen Gislason. The date of publication is 2010.The URL to the
book description is http://www.personadigital.net/Persona/Survival/
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