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COPYRIGHT 2002 Journal of Business Administration
A framing premise of this paper is that the sustainability dilemma is not merely an ecological or technical or economic crisis as is usually assumed, but rather it is a crisis rooted in fundamental human nature. More specifically, it is a crisis of human evolutionary success--indeed, we have reached the point where our success is killing us!
This interpretation is not part of the conventional sustainability debate for a very simple reason. We human beings--for all that we suppose ourselves to be evidence of intelligent life on earth--really fail to understand who we are. We have a very limited understanding of what motivates us, why it is we do certain things that we do. Little wonder that human nature is hardly on the sustainability radar.
At the heart of this problem is the fact that people today rarely think of themselves as biological beings. It comes to mind from time to time if one has heart palpitations or some other illness but, on the whole, we modems don't like to think of ourselves as biological entities. But indeed we are--we are products of evolution, and our behaviour both as individuals and as society represents a delicate dialectic between self-conscious reasoning and deeper and sometimes darker unconscious urges and predispositions.
The fact is that we humans have a long evolutionary history and many of the traits that we've acquired along the way, traits that were adaptive 50,000 years ago, are with us still. But now some of these once-desirable qualities may threaten humanity's future prospects. That is, some characteristic human qualities and behaviours may well now be maladaptive. I will try to make the case that these ancient traits are such that techno-industrial society in particular is inherently unsustainable. The world is ecologically full--but evolution has not provided us with inhibitions against extinguishing other species, against eliminating competing human groups or, indeed, against destroying our earthly habitat(s).
In these circumstances, prospects for building civil society, and maintaining the conditions necessary for civilized existence on Earth depend mainly on our capacity to devise mutually beneficial cultural constraints on social behaviour that has become maladaptive on a crowded planet. Of course, if we're going to "fix" ourselves in this way, we need to know more about ourselves.
The notion that we are not sufficiently conscious of our own nature has been a persistent theme in the literature of many countries. Listen to Anton Chekhov: "Man will become better only when you make him see what he is like." Or perhaps you prefer W.H. Auden: "We are lived by forces we can scarcely understand." I believe that coming to understand these forces will give us a chance to take a great evolutionary step forward to the point where sound intelligence incorporated into our cultural "programming" holds sway over more well-tested, biologically-determined, but increasingly dangerous behavioural patterns.
My second major premise should already be obvious, namely that if humans are the product of evolution, we are also the product of Darwinian natural selection. Uniquely, however, human evolution is as much determined by socio-cultural as by biological factors. This means, of course, that both cultural and biological "mutations" are subject to natural selection. Everyone recognizes that maladaptive physical mutations will be "selected out" in an environment for which they are unsuitable. It is less well appreciated that, like biological mutations, ill-suited socio-cultural patterns can also be selected out. To reiterate this central idea, culture now as much determines the human future as biology but, like disadvantageous physical characteristics, unfit cultural traits will be eliminated by evolutionary forces.
We can find support for this assertion in both ancient and more recent history. One of the most interesting cases--one that even makes the popular press from time to time--is the story of Easter Island, a small button of land of about 165 square kilometres (65 square miles) in the South Pacific 2,250 kilometres (1400 miles) from the nearest land mass, another smallish Island, Pitcairn. Easter was a verdant subtropical island, heavily forested with at least two very important tree species and many plant and animal species useful to humans. It was first inhabited only around the year 450 or 500 A.D when probably no more than two or three canoe-loads of Polynesian explorer-sailors landed on its shores. The new colony took hold and grew over the next 10 centuries into a kind of microcosmic culture. Over that period, the Easter Islanders developed class structure, division of labour, a priesthood and religion, agriculture, science and art, including some of the finest stonework--both fitted stones for buildings and platforms, and carvings--known to preindustrial times. In short, Easter Island society had most of the basic manifestations and characteristics of the much grander and earlier human cultures of Europe, Africa, Asia and even the Americas (Incas and Aztecs), with which most people are more familiar.
The population flourished, growing to around 10,000 (perhaps as few or as 7000 or many as 20,000) people by A.D. 1400-1500. But then something rather mystifying happened. Easter Islanders cut down the last palm tree growing on their isolated rock. Easter Island was a culture entirely dependent on the forest for their buildings, for log rollers to move their massive carvings, and, most important, for the dugout canoes by which they obtained most of their animal protein. Easter Islanders ate porpoises and fish that could be obtained only by active pursuit in boats.
How could this have happened? Whatever were they thinking? Easter Island's population was small enough that everyone must have at least recognized just about everyone else. One could walk around the island in about two days, so presumably everyone was aware that the forest was disappearing and that a crisis was upon them. There was probably much discussion of what might happen if the forest disappeared and maybe even heated political debates about what to do. And yet, for whatever reason, any effort to change the established pattern of resource exploitation, any move toward a conservation plan, clearly failed--in the end the last tree was felled.
When Europeans (the Dutch explorer Roggeveen) discovered Easter Island in A.D 1722, the population had fallen to something like 2,000 sorry souls. These people were living in rude reed huts and caves--houses had been destroyed, and art and science abandoned. The human dregs of the Easter Island culture that had been thriving just 200 years earlier now survived, in part, on cannibalistic raids on each others' encampments.
The secret of Easter Island's implosion has slowly been revealed by mud core samples taken from the swamps in the interior of the island. Paleobotanists have examined the pollen profile laid down through the island's entire 1500-year post-discovery history. What they learned is that, one by one, the important species of resource plants disappeared. The pollen record suggests that the last specimens of the critical palm tree came down around 1400. Meanwhile, Easter Island's midden heaps tell a similar story. Here we can trace the dietary history of Easter Island society, including the disappearance, one after another, of valuable food species. Most critically, around 1500, fish bones and porpoise bones disappear from the record to be replaced a few years or decades later by human bones.
What could possibly be going on if virtually every member of a society is aware of their society's dependence on limited local resources, of their utter isolation from any other sources of supply, and yet the people do nothing to prevent the destruction of their own prospects. Many articles have been written about Easter Island. British public servant and historian Clive Ponting (1990) was mystified that the Easter Islanders seemed "... unable to devise a system that would allow them to find the right balance with their environment." Most relevant to the present discussion, Jared Diamond's (1995) asks "Are we about to follow their lead?" Think about it. Virtually everyone on Earth is aware that we have an ecological crisis and a population problem, and now there is fear of increasing geopolitical strife. We are utterly dependent on the resources of a tiny planet isolated in space with no hope of finding alternative supplies, and, yet, we too seem unable to devise a system that will allow us to find the right balance with our environment.
Ominously, Easter Island is no exception. Joseph Tainter (author of "The Collapse of Complex Societies," 1988) has observed that "what is perhaps most intriguing in the evolution of human societies is the regularity with which the pattern of increasing complexity is interrupted by collapse ..." (Tainter 1995). Perhaps, then, ignominious collapse is the norm for complex societies.
But, surely, you protest, modern society is different. We know better. Our technological prowess and mastery over nature distinguish us from more primitive cultures. We can avoid crises by reading the warnings, by responding positively to data and analysis. Well, this sounds good--certainly one of our most cherished contemporary beliefs is that is that we are a science-based culture. But what's the de facto modern record? In a controversial paper reviewing the recent record of human exploitation of natural resources, some of my UBC colleagues (Ludwig et al. 1993) concluded that: "Although there is a considerable variation in detail, there is remarkable consistency in the history of resource exploitation. Resources are invariably or inevitably overexploited, often to the point of collapse or extinction."
Another UBC colleague,...
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