That humans have always altered landscapes is a given. From our nomadic days 200 hundred thousand years ago through our city-building beginning under 10,000 years ago, we used as we desired or needed, often without a sense that our actions often bred consequences for other life-forms. Desires and needs: The former driven by hormones and culture; the latter, by body and mind working sometimes separately and sometimes together for self-preservation.
Both desire and need drive individuals and groups to act without considering complex ramifications. But that is understandable. Regardless of how we try to anticipate the consequences of living, we cannot see the complexities of our future. The first drone pilots, having fun with the invention and thrilled by its potential for both entertainment and practical use, probably did not anticipate that so small an object could by its failure wipe out an entire generation of terns. And as in so many previous incidents involving failed technology, the drone’s crash, and not its successful flight, initiated the small disaster. We have a history in Chernobyl and Fukushima of technological failures, two relatively recent events that like the drone’s crash, caused immediate dire consequences. And we have a history of filling needs that have altered the planet initially to our advantage and then to our disadvantage, like irrigating soils in arid lands that subsequently become more saline and less productive or like robbing water reserves, such as the Aral Sea, a body of water that went from being an inland sea to being a puddle in just a few decades.
Desire and need. Would you say that both are never more closely related than they are in the context of peace? We desire peace, don’t we? We need peace, don’t we?
Remember Maslow’s hierarchy of needs? Second in importance after physiological needs is the need for peace (security and safety). Calls for peace echo through history. Calls for peace echo through diplomacy. Calls for peace echo from temples, churches, and mosques. Peace. Given peace, we can live harmoniously in communities; given peace diverse communities can coexist; peace eliminates most anxieties.
But again, what we desire and what we need can negatively affect other life-forms, and ironically, that applies to peace. Being human and living human always seems to disturb non-human existence. Even peaceful living.
Take this headline as an example: “Peace accord in Colombia has increased deforestation of biologically-diverse rainforest.” ** Imagine: Peaceful living can ironically bring about destruction and death. The study by Oregon State University on the effects of the 2016 peace agreement that ended the six-decade civil war in the Andes-Amazon region shows a “40% increase in conversion from forest to agriculture.” The negotiators of the 300-page peace agreement failed to consider the landscape of the conflict. No one thought about the consequences to the diverse life-forms and their rainforest habitat.
But what could be so bad? Didn’t the people of Colombia gain peace and food production, two of the most fundamental human needs? Isn’t that a good result? Sure, but in the process people did what our species has always done, they set in motion an alteration of landscape that negatively impacts other life-forms.
Desire and need. Seems that we’re trapped in the irony of human life on a complex planet. Should we change the name of our world to Planet Irony? Maybe not. Irony implies humor, and a lost generation of seabirds or a lost Ukrainian or Japanese city seem to be serious matters. So, what about changing the name to Planet Paradox? We invent. Our inventions destroy. We advance technologically. Other life-forms succumb to our intrusions into their way of life.
It is possible that the terns might return to breed again next year. Disrupted flocks elsewhere have returned. But unless bird populations learn that drones aren’t predators, through an educational process that seems unlikely in both the short and long term, the next crashing drone—or overflying one—will disrupt the cycle of their lives. Even when our intentions are driven by seemingly harmless desires and innocent needs, we can alter the status quo of any natural or artificial phenomenon. And there’s no guarantee that those who dedicate their lives to protecting the life in a public reserve can stop every drone pilot from scaring off the terns.
The future holds no change in the processes of pursuing desires and fulfilling needs that ultimately change the world, sometimes temporarily for our good, sometimes temporarily for the good of other life-forms, but often to the detriment of both us and the other critters that share the planet.
According to David M. Raup in Extinction: Bad Genes or Bad Luck? terns will have their turn at going extinct. We will also have our turn. Raup estimates that only about “one in a thousand species” [that ever existed] is still alive.*** Count up today’s living species if you want. No one knows the exact number, but estimates run as high as forty million. If terns—and humans—make up only two of the current unknown number of living species, neither species has, in terms of Earth history, long to live. The number of extinct organisms might lie between five and fifty billion. Imagine. If today’s species number five million, that means billions of species have come and gone, and all our current neighbor species will, like the terns and us, have their turn at extinction.
Extinction is inevitable for many reasons, disease, comet or asteroid strike, extensive volcanic eruptions, changing climates, and nowadays, nuclear war. The crash of a single toy drone shows how easily the scale of survival can be tipped unfavorably for any species. In 2020, the world braced for a devastating pandemic. Fortunately, we had the wherewithal to provide medical care and vaccines. Seems that we can handle disease—at least we handled this one enough to reduce the loss of life. But the next one…Ah! That’s another story, one that we might not be around to tell.
Our hubris takes a humbling blow when we consider the dire consequences of crashing a drone in the midst of a tern nesting ground. But the living often have only short term memories. We don’t remember the demise of the graptolites, those floating animal colonies that thrived between the Cambrian and Mississippian periods. They’re gone. So what? That was hundreds of millions of years ago. But what of those who now walk through Times Square? Do they remember that in 2020 and early 2021, it was an empty set of sidewalks? Do they remember that like the tern nesting ground, it was vacated? During the last three-quarters of 2020, according to a CBS report, some 330,000 people left New York City.**** Human terns? The flock was decimated when something far smaller than a drone hit the city. And having found new nesting places, will they return?
Life adapts when it can, sometimes by abandoning one ecological niche for another and other times by mutating to forms more resistant to extinction threats. Speciation preserves a genus when extinction threatens a member species. As one species says goodbye, another says hello and eventually fills the trophic and ecological niche it left; at least that appears to have been the pattern over the past six or seven hundred million years for multicellular organisms, and maybe, for single-cell organisms, going back maybe 3.5 to 3.8 billion years. Apparently, like tables at a restaurant, when one party leaves, another is ready to sit for its reservation. Turns reserved. But look at where we humans are in that process. When our species first appeared, other human species existed. The first Homo sapiens shared the planet with Homo floresiensis, Homo Neanderthalensis, Homo erectus soloensis, and others. They’re gone, leaving us as, in Jonathan Edwards’s frightening words, like a spider held on a thread over a fire, ***** not the fire of Hell, but rather the fire of extinction.
Think. There are a dozen genera of terns right now; that species on the beach where the drone crashed belonged to Thalasseus elegans. Elegance. It’s a term associated with urbanity, dignity, grace, rich design, and sophistication. Probably many New Yorkers consider themselves to be elegant in one or more of those meanings. But nothing says “inelegant” more than fleeing and abandoning a generation of tern eggs or a city of offices and restaurants because of a tiny drone or an even tinier virus. And now many buildings in New York City lie as empty as the beach at Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve. Terns and humans. Beaches and restaurant tables temporarily empty. Are they reserved for returning birds and people or for a future species? All life forms, billions in the past that have come and gone, have resided and fled, and millions in the present that reside and flee today, all living under a constant threat. And the irony, the paradox, lies in our elegant technology, the drone an invention of high tech and the virus apparently an invention of biotech. Elegant in their design, both crashed and frightened species—elegant humans and elegant terns—away from their habitats.
Notes:
*Wigglesworth, Alex. 8 June 2021. A generation of seabirds was wiped out by a drone at a reserve. Now, scientists fear for their future. Los Angeles Times. Online at https://phys.org/news/2021-06-seabirds-drone-reserve-scientists-future.html Accessed June 9, 2021.
**Klampe, Michelle. 2 June 2021. Phys.org. Online at https://phys.org/news/2021-06-peace-accord-colombia-deforestation-biologically-diverse.html Accessed June 9, 2021.
***Raup, David M. 1991. New York. W. W. Norton & Company. The title of Raup’s first chapter is “Almost All Species Are Extinct.”
****DeAngelis, Jenna. 8 Jan 2021. Over 333,000 New Yorkers Have Left City Since COVID Pandemic Began In March. CBSNewYork. Online at https://newyork.cbslocal.com/2021/01/08/moving-out-of-nyc/ Accessed June 10, 2021.
*****Jonathan Edwards. “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Edwards, if you forget your American history, was a prime mover in the movement called the First Great Awakening that was a religious revival between 1730 and 1755. The Northampton, MA, theologian was more doom and gloom than glorious salvation. His idea was to frighten his charges into moral living. If you’re having a really good day (see a previous blog on that) and want a downturn, you can read this famous sermon online at http://www.jonathan-edwards.org/Sinners.pdf Accessed June 10, 2021.