The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire
Why Our Species Is on the Edge of Extinction
Henry Gee
Having read it
★★★★☆
An interesting and easy to understand book that everyone should make an effort to read . . . so at least, Put this at the head of your reading lists immediately, people. Before it’s too late
as Eric Idle is quoted as saying of the book . . . then make sure you actually read it!
If you do, you’ll get a better appreciation of the difficulties that us humans have made being the dominant animal on planet Earth in a niche of our own making.
Humans have been shaking things up since well before recorded history, creating a niche for themselves that now encompasses the entire planet. As [archaeologist Nicole] Boivin and colleagues say, ‘“Pristine” landscapes simply do not exist and, in most cases, have not existed for millennia. Most landscapes are palimpsests shaped by repeated episodes of human activity over multiple millennia.’ Human niche construction has been, and continues to be, ‘a major evolutionary force on the planet’.
By the book’s final chapters the possibilities for extending our existence could, if not should, happen, especially with more realistic (and enforceable) rules, regulations and technological frameworks so as to lessen competition and bolster collaboration and communities . . . as well as a doing away with GDP as a benchmark of success and progress as it works against the reality of our planetary home being a finite resource . . . if your foundations are shaky and susceptible to collapse, what hope is there for the future?
A good passage
Only after the invention of agriculture, and a more settled life, could populations accumulate in such a way as to permit such exchange of ideas. Suddenly, things appeared that had been rare or completely absent in the long span of prehistory – metalwork, pottery, the written word. To be sure, settled life had its costs epidemic disease, large-scale war), but without it, and the expansion of population that it fostered, Homo sapiens would have been a hunter-gatherer for ever, living in small populations where the accretion of new ideas would have been painfully slow.
A second good passage
Migration is, of course, the natural state of humanity. Before the invention of agriculture and the beginnings of sedentary life, which accounts for only about three per cent of the entire time our species has been on the planet, bands of Homo sapiens never settled anywhere for long, always moving on to where the grass was greener. The same was true for its ancestors.
A third good passage
When the conquistadores arrived at the end of the fifteenth century, their diseases were heralds of their arrival. By the time Western eyes first looked on the Amazon, the ancient civilizations of the jungle had all but disappeared, reclaimed by forest. So, what we think of as the pristine wilderness of Amazonia is anything but – it is a product of human activities stretching back more than 12,000 years, to when Homo sapiens first came to this part of the world.
This realization forces one to look upon one’s own environment with fresh eyes. That landscape of tidy fields and bare hillsides dotted with sheep is artificial, too, an entirely human-generated scene, as industrial, in its way, as strip malls and smokestacks. Campaigners who object to new developments such as wind or solar farms on the grounds that they spoil the beauty of the countryside often forget that the countryside we affect to love so much is far from natural. It is entirely human-made and can be maintained as such only by ceaseless vigilance. Left to itself, the trees would reclaim it.