Fear in A Handful of Numbers

By Dennis Overbye

Everybody talks about the weather, goes the saying (often wrongly attributed to Mark Twain), but nobody does anything about it. The word from scientists is that whoever said this was wrong. All of us, as we go about the mundane business of existence, are helping change the weather and every other aspect of life on this fair planet: Los Angelenos whipping their sunny basin into a brown blur on the way to work every morning; South Americans burning and cutting their way through the rain forest in search of a better life; a billion Chinese, their smokestacks belching black coal smoke, marching toward the 21st century and a rendezvous with modernization.

On the flanks of Mauna Loa in Hawaii, an instrument that records the concentration of carbon dioxide dumped into the atmosphere as a result of all this activity traces a wobbly rising line that gets steeper and steeper with time. Sometime in the next 50 years, say climatologists, all that carbon dioxide, trapping the sun's heat like a greenhouse, could begin to smother the planet, raising temperatures, turning farmland to desert, swelling oceans anywhere from four feet to 20 feet. Goodbye Venice, goodbye Bangladesh. Goodbye to millions of species of animals, insects and plants that haven't already succumbed to acid rain, ultraviolet radiation leaking through the damaged ozone layer, spreading toxic wastes or bulldozers.

A species that can change its planet's chemistry just by day-to-day coming and going has, I suppose, achieved a kind of coming-of-age. We could celebrate or tremble. What do we do when it is not war that is killing us but progress? When it is not the actions of a deranged dictator threatening the world but the ordinary business of ordinary people? When there are no bombs dropping, nobody screaming, nothing to fear but a line on a graph or a handful of numbers on a computer printout? Dare we change the world on the basis of a wobbly line on a graph? We can change the world, and those numbers, slowly, painfully -- we can ration, recycle, carpool, tax and use the World Bank to bend underdeveloped nations to our will. But the problem is neither the world nor those numbers. The problem is ourselves.

In our relations with nature, we've been playing a deadly game of cowboys and Indians. We all started as Indians. Many primitive cultures -- and the indigenous peoples still clinging today to their pockets of underdevelopment -- regarded the earth and all its creatures as alive. Nature was a whistling wind tunnel of spirits. With the rise of a scientific, clockwork cosmos and of missionary Christianity, with its message of man's dominion and relentless animus against paganism, nature was metaphorically transformed. It became dead meat.

The West was won, Los Angeles and the 20th century were built, by the cowboy mind. To the cowboy, nature was a vast wilderness waiting to be tamed. The land was a stage, a backdrop against which he could pursue his individual destiny. The story of the world was the story of a man, usually a white man, and its features took their meaning from their relationship to him. A mountain was a place to test one's manhood; an Asian jungle with its rich life and cultures was merely a setting for an ideological battle. The natives are there to be "liberated." By these standards even Communists are cowboys.

The cowboys won -- everywhere nature is being tamed -- but victory over nature is a kind of suicide. The rules change when there is only one political party allowed in a country or there is only one company selling oil or shoes. So too when a species becomes numerous and powerful enough to gain the illusion of mastery. What we have now is a sort of biological equivalent to a black hole, wherein a star becomes so massive and dense that it bends space and time totally around itself and then pays the ultimate price of domination by disappearing.

Modern science, a cowboy achievement, paradoxically favors the Indian view of life. Nature is alive. The barest Antarctic rock is crawling with microbes. Viruses float on the dust. Bacteria help digest our food for us. According to modern evolutionary biology, our very cells are cities of formerly independent organisms. On the molecular level, the distinction between self and nonself disappears in a blur of semipermeable membranes. Nature goes on within and without us. It wafts through us like a breeze through a screened porch. On the biological level, the world is a seamless continuum of energy and information passing back and forth, a vast complicated network of exchange. Speech, food, posture, infection, respiration, scent are but a few pathways of communication. Most of those circuits are still a mystery, a labyrinth we have barely begun to acknowledge or explore.

The great anthropologist and philosopher Gregory Bateson pointed out 20 years ago that this myriad of feedback circuits resemble the mathematical models of thinking being developed for the new science of artificial intelligence. A forest or a coral reef or a whole planet, then, with its checks and balances and feedback loops and delicate adjustments always striving for light and equilibrium, is like a mind. In this way of thinking, pollution is literal insanity (Bateson was also a psychologist). To dump toxic waste in a swamp, say, is like trying to repress a bad thought or like hitting your wife every night and assuming that because she doesn't fight back, you can abuse her with impunity -- 30 years later she sets your bed on fire.

Some of these circuits are long and slow, so that consequences may take years or generations to manifest themselves. That helps sustain the cowboy myth that nature is a neutral, unchanging backdrop. Moreover, evolution seems to have wired our brains to respond to rapid changes, the snap of a twig or a movement in the alley, and to ignore slow ones. When these consequences do start to show up, we don't notice them. Anyone who has ever been amazed by an old photograph of himself or herself can attest to the merciful ignorance of slow change, that is, aging -- Where did those clothes and that strange haircut come from? Was I really that skinny?

We weren't born with the ability to taste carbon dioxide or see the ozone layer, but science and technology have evolved to fill the gap to help us measure what we cannot feel or taste or see. We have old numbers with which, like old photographs, we can gauge the ravages of time and our own folly. In that sense, the "technological fix" that is often wishfully fantasized -- cold fusion, anyone? -- has already appeared. The genius of technology has already saved us, as surely as the Ghost of Christmas Future saved Scrooge by rattling the miser's tight soul until it cracked. A satellite photograph is technology, and so are the differential equations spinning inside a Cray supercomputer. There is technology in the wobbly rising trace on a piece of graph paper. There is technology in a handful of numbers.

The trick is to become more like Indians without losing the best parts of cowboy culture -- rationalism and the spirit of inquiry. We need more science now, not less. How can we stretch our nerves around those numbers and make them as real and as ominous as our cholesterol readings? Repeat them each night on the evening news? We need feedback, as if we were the audience in a giant public radio fund-raising drive hitting the phones and making pledges. Like expert pilots navigating through a foggy night, we need the faith to fly the planet collectively by our instruments and not by the seat of our pants. In the West we need the faith and courage to admit the bitter truth, that our prosperity is based as much on cheap energy as on free markets. A long- postponed part of the payment for that energy and prosperity is coming due if we want to have any hope of dissuading the Chinese and the rest of the Third World from emulating us and swaddling the planet with fumes and wastes.

What if the spirit doesn't hit? We can't afford to wait if we want to survive. While we are waiting for this sea change of attitude, we could pretend -- a notion that sounds more whimsical than it is. Scientists have found that certain actions have a feedback effect on the actor. Smilers actually feel happier; debaters become enamored of their own arguments; a good salesman sells himself first. You become what you pretend to be. We can pretend to be unselfish and connected to the earth. We can pretend that 30- ft.-long, black-tinted-glass, air-conditioned limos are unfashionable because we know that real men don't need air conditioning. We can pretend that we believe it is wrong to loot the earth for the benefit of a single generation of a single species. We can pretend to care about our children's world.

The air has been poisoned before, 3 billion years ago, when the blue-green algae began manufacturing oxygen. That was the first ecological crisis. Life survived then. Life will not vanish now, but this may be the last chance for humans to go along gracefully.