A Darwinian Survival Guide: Hope for The Twenty-First Century III

The remainder of the book was not particularly stunning to me, though I do think that the backgrounds and views of Brooks and Agosta are among the most suitable ones for this particular subject. One of my concerns with the press, voters, political leaders and public policy is that when environmental changes occur, from a scientific standpoint, the best solutions may take decades to implement simply because the belief systems held by the public are not amenable to rapid adjustment. The authors repeat the idea that I mentioned earlier while discussing the essay Biological Extinction, that GDP is not the appropriate measure to use when conditions such as climate change and mass extinctions are occurring. At the moment, the developed world is obsessed with business growth and military power, with the political leaders in the U.S. and elsewhere focusing on the economic advancement of their countries while ignoring significant changes in their habitats that could result in their deaths. It doesn't help that, from a biological standpoint, we are just a current element in the biosphere, and that our belief systems, which may have had some value thousands of years ago, do not necessarily today. Men and women who are obsessed with becoming rich and famous are, in the end, just large mammals who, like other mammals, just happen to be alive now. As Brooks and Agosta aptly point out, we are a transient part of the biosphere, which is far more resilient than any existing species; it will be around long after we're gone. The biosphere itself can't survive forever and will disappear within about five billion years. I might add that if some of the tech bros think that they can circumvent death by transforming themselves into electronic or other entities, it is my view that any departure from our familiar lives as organisms is itself a kind of death.

Brooks and Agosta do not support conventional conservation measures and have their own ideas:

...nature is not fragile. It is robust because it copes with change by changing. The notion of a delicately balanced nature is antithetical to an evolutionary system. In evolution, change is the fundamental mechanism that allows living systems to persist. The biosphere is dynamic, not static, and resilient, not brittle. Most biologists readily accept this, recognizing that any appearance of stasis in nature is an illusion. Still, the message seems to have been missed by much of conservation biology, including researchers and policy makers, and the public, which looks to conservation biology for insight and understanding. This is exemplified by two misconceptions that permeate conservation efforts. The Gaia hypothesis represents the idea that the biosphere acts as a set of coordinated subsystems working to maintain a system-level homeostasis—that mythic balance of nature. This reinforces the idea that without human interference, the biosphere would somehow exist in a timeless, unchanging state of perfection. From this emerges such nonevolutionary ideas as "returning nature to the way it was"—the rewilding of the planet typically inspired by a nostalgia for idyllic nature in a past state of "perfect balance" that never actually existed. The butterfly effect is another popular metaphor for describing the biosphere. It rests on the common misconception that ecosystems are so delicate, the extinction of even one species can cause entire ecosystems to collapse. Meteorologist Edward Lorenz proposed the metaphor in 1972 as a thought experiment in the context of predicting the weather. The idea is that small changes in one part of the system—like a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil—could have large effects on the whole system—such as causing a tornado in Texas. The butterfly effect metaphor was co-opted by environmentalists as a true description of the delicate balance of nature. It represents a dire warning about the loss of any species, and the need to urgently maintain nature in its current or even some previous state. Yet nature is a complex evolutionary system, so the butterfly effect is an extremely poor metaphor to portray it.

The authors also question the ideas presented by E.O. Wilson in Half-Earth: Our Planet's Fight for Life. They don't go into much detail, but they seem to disapprove of it. Though I think that it is possible that Wilson's idea, i.e. making about half of the planet a wilderness, could work in terms of preserving biodiversity, as a practical matter it would be extremely difficult to implement. And humans might continue to damage the environment. Brooks and Agosta seem to draw heavily from their experiences at the Área de Conservación Guanacaste in Costa Rica, which they consider to be "a spectacularly successful experiment in growing an evolutionary commons and avoiding neoprotectionist approaches to conservation." Thus, their recommendations revolve around the development of human habitats in rural locations where the local ecosystems can be healthy while simultaneously supporting humans who are following sustainable practices. Drawing from history and current events, they consider cities unsustainable. Besides the fact that cities tend to make people less cooperative, they are subject to military attack (Gaza, Beirut, Tehran and Kyiv). Above all, large cities generally have unstable ecosystems, and the ones in coastal regions may soon flood due to climate change.

Actually, I was already following their recommendations without having read the book. This is easy to do if you de-civilize yourself a little and follow your hunter-gatherer instincts. The book itself is hardly a textbook on survival practices for the Anthropocene, but I think that it is a good starting point. I have no difficulty imagining a world governed by AI-assisted field biologists.