Preface to Keeping Things Whole
Wholeness is the key theme of this anthology of the environment. We are at one with the natural world, not just with the millions of other living species with whom we share it but also with the elements of air, water and earth of which we are composed. Sometimes we need to stand back, and look at a long perspective from the beginnings of our universe to the littleness of our affairs. Olaf Stapeldon once wrote:
"I perceived that I was on a little round grain of rock and metal, filmed with water and with air, whirling in sunlight and darkness. And on the skin of that little grain, all the swarms of men, generation by generation, had lived in labour and blindness, with intermittent joy and intermittent lucidity of spirit. And all… was but a flicker in one day of the lives of the stars."
It is that lucidity of spirit which is celebrated in this book. Over the centuries and from many vantage points, people have tried to understand and make sense of their lives and circumstances. There is indeed increasing illumination: from creating an intellectual methodology to seeing the interconnectedness of the whole earth system, living and non living, in its measureless complexity. Where in this are humans? Physicists point out that our bodies, which look so solid to the eye and touch, are mostly empty space at the atomic level, and the atoms themselves are mostly space as well.
Then look at our prized source of selfhood. Are we each of us one person or many? Our individual decision-making process has been described as a boardroom of quarrelsome directors, some apparently rational but others pushing deeper agendas. Is awareness of self a convenient illusion, changing as often as the cells which make up our bodies? Perched on our little round grain, we forget that inside as well as outside us are countless billions of mites, all profoundly connected in mutual dependencies. Without them, or their ancestors now embedded within us, we could neither move, nor breathe, nor eat. The dry weight of a human body is 10 percent bacteria.
Charles Darwin put the point very well when he wrote:
"we cannot fathom the marvellous complexity of an organic being, but … each living creature must be looked at as a microcosm, a little universe, formed of a host of self propagating organisms, inconceivably minute, as numerous as the stars in heaven."
From these insights, well explored in this book, comes increasing realization of the damage that humans can do not just to themselves but also to the earth system as a whole. Indeed our proliferation in the last couple of centuries can be seen as a case of malignant maladaptation in which a species, like infected tissue in an organism, multiplies out of control, affecting everything else.
As was brought out in a paper by Warren Hern in 1994, there has been rapid growth of one such species - our own - leading to its invasion and destruction of adjacent ecosystems, colonization of all available niches, and, in terms of its behaviour as well as biology, increasing similarity of appearance, function and social structure. In terms of factors of increase within the last century, human population rose by four, air pollution by around five, water use by nine, sulphur emissions by thirteen, energy use by sixteen, carbon dioxide emission by seventeen, marine fish catch by thirty-five, and industrial output by forty.
These points were brought out in a recent book by John McNeill on the 20th century entitled Something New Under The Sun, and made general in a Declaration made by over a thousand scientists from the four great global research programmes at Amsterdam in July 2001. This stated squarely that:
"Human activities have the potential to switch the Earth's System to alternative modes of operation that may prove irreversible and less hospitable to humans and other life … the Earth's System has moved well outside the range of the natural variability exhibited over the last half million years at least… The Earth is currently operating in a no-analogue state.
and
"The accelerating human transformation of the Earth's environment is not sustainable. Therefore the business-as-usual way of dealing with the Earth's System is not an option. It has to be replaced - as soon as possible - by deliberate strategies of management that sustain the Earth's environment while meeting social and economic development objectives."
It is no wonder that the present geological epoch, usually known as the Holocene, may have to be subdivided so that, following the industrial revolution, it becomes known as the Anthropocene, or the epoch of the human impact.
There can be no area more important in public education than better understanding of these issues, and Keeping Things Whole brings together a wealth of contributions which together lay out a basis for looking forward as well as back. As always, part of the problem is to ask the right questions, and from that, with minds as open as possible, to discuss priorities, to see how present trends might be redirected, and to look for new social and economic as well as scientific values to guide us in the future.
In spite of recent increases in understanding, environmental science is still in its infancy, not least because so many of the interconnections between biological and physical processes have yet to be put together. Interdisciplinarity is never easy, but never more necessary. This book is a real contribution towards it.
