Читать книгу The Ecosystemic Decision - Rita Carrizo - Страница 6

As stated in the introduction, risk and decision find a connection in the decision-maker. We will not talk about you or me as particular decision-makers. Instead, this and subsequent chapters will be devoted to gaining a better understanding of who has been and continues to be the decision-maker in the West. The idea will be to recognise what we have in common. To this end, I will use some ideas and information from an unusual history book I had the pleasured of reading some years ago, and which I find appealing for being challenging and clear, but above all, because it is written from a macro perspective. This book does not seem to be written from the eyes of someone who chooses to enter the forest and to observe every tree, plant, animal, soil and landform, but from those of someone who chooses to ride on the back of an eagle to perceive the shapes, colours and dimensions, looking for “patterns” that can only be seen at a greater height and far away from the forest inhabitants. The author who was able to make this journey is Yuval Noah Harari who, in 2014, published his book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. From him, I will borrow some ideas -in my opinion, so lucidly explained- to use as a springboard for the beginning of this work. I am very grateful for this opportunity.

Harari proposes that the history of humankind could be described in terms of three milestones or revolutions, each of which offered humans new possibilities and differential “powers”. The first one, which he dates to about 70,000 years ago, was called “cognitive” and may have occurred as a consequence of a DNA mutation in the Homo sapiens, who had already been walking the Earth for a long time.1 This extremely relevant event would have made possible new ways of thinking and communicating using imagination and language as we know it today.

Trying to learn more about this topic, I found that genetic studies carried out since the 1990s have associated the FoxP2 gene with language ability. Several investigations carried on since 2009 revealed that this gene collaborates with the brain’s ability to conceptualise -a decisive factor in the development of language. In addition, it seems that the protein of the same name that such a gene encodes contributes to the formation of neural connections linked to language. Researchers believe they work together to help the brain adjust and adapt differently to speech and language acquisition. A surprising thing about this mutation, which is currently only present in humans, is that it would be much older -having occurred more than 500,000 years ago- and that it was also present in Neanderthals. It is possible that they too could have spoken.2

In Harari’s view, this new ability of our ancestors seems to have been a differentiating power from other coexisting Homo species, granting them the ability to talk about things outside their experience and things that might not even exist; this ability would have allowed Homo sapiens to create myths. The author says about language,

It’s the ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at all. As far as we know, only Sapiens can talk about entire kinds of entities that they have never seen, touched or smelled.

Legends, myths, gods and religions appeared for the first time with the Cognitive Revolution. (Harari, 2014, p. 24)

This event had many impacts on human life. However, learning to work with others on a large scale changed the way they experienced the world. In the author’s perspective, some 30,000 years ago, these skills made sapiens the dominant species on the planet.

It could be said that, his evolutionarily favourable transformation of our species gave it the means to outcompete other similar species, with devastating consequences for them considering that none of them managed to survive.

The second milestone in human development that the author describes would have taken place approximately 12,000 years ago. By that time, sapiens hunter-gatherers, who had been experiencing the power of language for thousands of years, discovered that they were able to domesticate some varieties of animals and plants for their own benefit and realised that this meant no longer wandering in search of food. This “agricultural revolution” not only changed the way people lived at that time, but also determined how they would continue to live until modern times, domesticating the same animals and plants and, above all, securing their livelihood by settling in one place.

This time, the new power to subjugate nature provided humanity with much more food and enabled exponential growth that ensured the survival of the species. It was sapiens themselves who managed to find the tools with the power to overcome the other species on the planet and once again establish themselves as the dominant species.

According to the author, this story, that is often told as a success story when looking at human evolution, also hides collateral consequences which are not usually told. For example, the dependence on a few products -compared to the range of options that the hunter-gatherer had- exposed them to inclement weather, drought, and consequently, starvation. Later, the same “success” led them to live in overcrowded human settlements that exposed them to filth, increasing mortality in the early years of life. Not to mention the many more hours of work required to earn a living, or having a poorer diet than the hunter-gatherer’s. As a counterpart to the farmers’ success in obtaining more food, thieves appeared who wanted what they had, adding more violence to the already existing. During hunter-gatherer times, if a hunting or gathering space was contested by another group and they found themselves inferior in strength, they had the option of escape. On the other hand, for the farmers, leaving their land, their “home”, was synonymous with losing everything and risking death for themselves and their families; they had to fight to survive.

Population size was also affected by the above-mentioned revolutions. According to Harari, by 10,000 BC, before the shift to agriculture, the Earth was home to some 5-8 million nomadic hunter-gatherers. By the 1st century AD, there were 1-2 million hunter-gatherers left (mainly in Australia, America and Africa), compared to the 250 million farmers worldwide; this growth represented a 50-fold increase in the population.

Rereading and reflecting on the transformative power that language and this new revolution had on the human way of life, the discovery of agriculture must have shown them that it was possible to change the world they inhabited. Perhaps humans discovered for the first time that they had the power to manipulate what was around them at will and for their own benefit; a power that even today, they seem to feel they own.

Along the same path, but many, many years later, humanity was the protagonist of a new and unprecedented event: the “scientific revolution,” which Harari places about 500 years ago. At that time, people began to question the supposed truths with which religions and powerful classes had ruled them until then. Such questioning led them to recognise that these truths were no longer sufficient to explain the world in which they lived, that they had to declare themselves ignorant of such a world and that they had to go out and seek new answers through science. In this new revolution, the mere declaration of ignorance became the new “power” seeking to resolve many and varied problems that were once the responsibility of the “gods”.

As science began to solve one unsolvable problem after another, many became convinced that humankind could overcome any and every problem by acquiring and applying new knowledge. Poverty, sickness, wars, famines, old age and death itself were not the inevitable fate of humankind. They were simply the fruits of our ignorance. (Harari, 2014, pp. 187-188)

This new approach to problems sparked the race for progress and development, resulting in stark contrasts for many people. For example, the quality of life increased greatly for some sections of the population, while others were condemned to misery. The peasantry disappeared as people abandoned the farming life they had been leading for almost 12,000 years to live and work in industrial cities and thus were exposed to all the ills of overpopulation, such as filth, disease, exploitation and more poverty.

According to the author, in the year 1700, there were about 700 million humans in the world (almost three times the population of the 1st century AD). In 1800, there were 950 million people (30% more in 100 years). Only 100 years later, in 1900, there were 1.6 billion people, six times the population of the 1st century AD. In 2000, the figure quadrupled to 6 billion. Today the population is very close to 7.8 billion. Just to rub my eyes one more time, I constructed the table below, where, beyond the staggering number, what is impressive is the annual average.

Year	Population (in millions)	Number of years	Exchange rate	In %	Annual average
10000 BC	8	-	-	-	-
1 AD	252	10000	31,25	3025	0,30
1700 AD	700	1700	2,80	180	0,11
1800 AD	950	100	1,36	36	0,36
1900 AD	1600	100	1,68	68	0,68
2000 AD	6000	100	3,75	275	2,75
2020 AD (*)	7780	20	1,30	30	1,50

(*) Source: https://www.worldometers.info/es/ - 21.04.2020

To conclude this journey through Harari’s work, the author makes a strong judgement on the cost to humanity and the planet of the revolutions and progress mentioned above, a cost that currently threatens their very existence. In his words,

Humans cut down forests, drained swamps, dammed rivers, flooded plains, laid down tens of thousands of kilometres of railroad tracks, and built skyscraping metropolises. As the world was moulded to fit the needs of Homo sapiens, habitats were destroyed and species went extinct. Our once green and blue planet is becoming a concrete and plastic shopping centre. (…) Global warming, rising oceans and widespread pollution could make the earth less hospitable to our kind, and the future might consequently see a spiralling race between human power and human-induced natural disasters (Harari, 2014, p. 245)

Again, and called to reflect on what has been said, I would like to offer an additional interpretation. If the first revolution gave humans the language and power to become the only surviving Homo species, and the agricultural revolution was like eating from the tree of knowledge, making them aware of their own power over nature and other species, the third of the revolutions seems to have given them the right to make intensive use and abuse of everything on the planet.

For the sake of further exploring the decision-maker and the ecosystem duo, I will present some studies that summarise in numbers various aspects of this relationship.

Starting with species destruction, the Informe Planeta Vivo (2018)3 reports a decline in global vertebrate population size of sixty percent between 1970 and 2014; especially in South and Central America, the decline was 89%. Given what we now know about human health, our food and safety depend critically on biodiversity. As Dr. Edward Wilson says in some of his work, humans do not yet know all the species that sustain life on earth. Contrary to expectations, this ignorance, which should have led to caution, greater awareness and learning, seems to have clouded their understanding.

The race for progress and development has also led humans to hyper-production to satisfy hyper-consumption. Today, it seems that we cannot (or do not know how to) live without consuming certain goods, services, and technology, and the consequences this has had at a global level are serious. The main one is global warming and the greenhouse effect on the planet, on which the United Nations (UN) continuously urges to comply with the Paris Agreement, signed in 2016, in order to implement mitigation and adaptation policies. A report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) shows that from 1880 (pre-industrial times) to 2012, the global average temperature increased by 0.85°C.4 Even if the pact commitments were to be met, the average global temperature is projected to rise by 3.2 degrees Celsius by the end of this century. If this were to happen, it would have near catastrophic effects, which is why the 2019 climate change summit called for new commitments to limit the rise to 1.50 degrees Celsius.5

On the side of imbalances and contrasts in development, the concentration of the world’s wealth on a few individuals, economic groups, and countries occupies a privileged place. There are no longer nobles, commoners, and slaves, but there are the absurdly rich, the rich, those who earn for a living, the poor, the very poor, and the absurdly poor. According to World Bank data from 2019,6 the extreme poverty rate has fallen from 36% in 1990 to 10% in 2015 (this rate is measured by the number of people living on less than $1.90 a day -yes, you read that right! $1.90 a day, which is almost impossible for me to imagine). Although this is good news, the improvements or gains were not uniform: East Asia and the Pacific, with 47 million extremely poor people, and Europe and Central Asia, with 7 million, reduced extreme poverty to less than 3%. Nevertheless, more than half of the extremely poor population lives in Africa, south of the Sahara. There, the number of poor people is on the rise, with a total of 413 million people in 2015, almost twice the population of Brazil to date. If the observed trend continues, by 2030, 9 out of 10 extremely poor people will live there.

But the imbalance does not only take the form of poverty, it also takes the form of slavery: how do those who cannot, or do not know how to, deal with what progress brings? One market has emerged to alienate many and enrich others: drugs. The 2018 report by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime7reported that in 2017 some 271 million people (5.5% of the world’s population aged 15-64) used drugs, a figure similar to 2016 but 30% higher than that in 2009. The most widespread drug is cannabis, with 188 million users. The report mentions that drug trafficking moves some 320 billion dollars a year, of which the substances that generate the most money are cocaine, with $85 billion, and opiates, with $68 billion. The majority of cocaine money is generated in the United States ($35 billion) and Western Europe ($26 billion), which are the drug’s two largest markets.

This story may not be news given the amount of information available and the many organisations following these issues, but for average people like this author, all this information together can trigger an avalanche of emotions and body sensations. This seems to be the current state of the relationship between decision-makers and the ecosystem. A scenario that shows us not only how our actions have affected the world we live in, but how it seems to be turning like a boomerang against humanity itself. Looking at this, I feel compelled to ask: what kind of evolution and development have human beings experienced since language appeared in their lives that led them to make such poor decisions? What happened to the ignorance that moved them to question and learn? Or, did the awareness of their power over nature make them arrogant and blind at the same time?

Perhaps the statement made 500 years ago was insufficient, considering that individuals acknowledged being ignorant of what was happening around them. However, they were unable to realise how ignorant they were -and still are- about themselves, about their actions, and about being the main cause of their own evils.

Such questions propose a great deal of enquiry, the kind that I encourage the reader to undertake because it treads paths that we, average people, do not usually tread and can lead to a comprehensive understanding of the power of language in our lives, especially through the choices we make.