Growth, Pandemics and Our Failed Species
We didn’t get it right on the first try, but we’ll have another chance in 60 million years
Mark Cramer (author of Old Man on a Green Bike and Urban Everesting)
In early January of 2020, just as the pandemic was arriving, I spotted a coyote on a suburban street in Irvine, California, and then another quiet coyote on a similar street in Santa Clarita. Both these places were part of Mexico until Manifest Destiny ushered in the culture of infinite growth.
What is our voracious species doing, encroaching with SUVs and manicured lawns into those wild hills?
I’ve been having recurrent animal dreams, eavesdropping on conversations not of coyotes but of nearer relatives, the bonobos. Only 20,000 of them remain in the wild. Their matriarchal philosophy seems to be “make love, not war.”
Bonobo 1: Our distant ancestors never should have allowed those chimp mutants among us to leave the colony, and eventually evolve into George W. Bush. How did we become John Bolton, Jair Bolsonaro, Jim Jones, Jeffery Dahmer, Jeffrey Epstein, Jeff Bezos, Jared Kushner, Henry Kissinger and Elon Musk?
Bonobo 2: I heard that many ex-Bush supporters, all Iraq war promoters, are rallying around a guy named Biden.
Bonobo 1: Embarrassing for us as a species that our evolutionary offshoots became warmongers and are now intruding in our territory and threatening us with extinction. Every dead bonobo is another point added to their GDP.
Bonobo 2: Even more embarrassing for the reputation of our hippie heritage is Biden’s opponent. But fortunately, Americans not schooled in evolution are under the false impression that Biden’s opponent evolved from the orangutan.
I awaken from time to time like an intermittent windmill slipping off the fossil-fuel grid when the wind kicks up.
The human species is on its way out.
There were great achievements for sure, like minor-league baseball, minimalist art and municipal parks, but our reliance on unlimited global growth brought us into proximity with animals we should’ve kept at a distance, resulting in plagues and pandemics. Even the bubonic and pneumonic plagues of the 1300s were the result of globalization, with Italian spice merchants bringing back those deadly viruses from Central Asia.
Bonobo 1: You mean medieval Europeans weren’t locavores?
Bonobo 2: They were, but the locavores were seduced, convinced that adding a little pepper, ginger and cinnamon would spice up their lives. Can’t blame them. We bonobos never fell for it. We remain locavores, but we’re now threatened with extinction.
Bonobo 1: Don’t worry! When the dinosaurs became extinct, it gave a renewed lease on life for the small mammals. We will survive and then thrive.
Bonobo 2: How do you know?
Bonobo 1: Because the supposed descendant of the orangutans, who is really our evolutionary mistake, will continue to peddle fossil fuels, deny climate change and even deny a pandemic in his own back yard. And his mutant rival will say a few good things but continue encroaching into the hills, even if he does it with aeolian wind mills or electric cars made by Elon Musk.
Bonobo 2: Yes, we got it wrong the first time. But most first-time efforts are failures. Isn’t that what self-help experts say? We should’ve restrained those deviant chimps within our colony and waited for a more advantageous matriarchal mutation. But once the humans have become extinct, sooner than they think, we’ll have a second chance to get it right. It will take millions of years, but we’ll have learned from the mistakes of our escaped mutants, the humans.
The wind picks up. I wake up to reality.
