Reposted from ORION MAGAZINE
The problem with environmentalists, Lynn Margulis used to say, is that they think conservation has something to do with biological reality. A researcher who specialized in cells and microorganisms, Margulis was one of the most important biologists in the last half century—she literally helped to reorder the tree of life, convincing her colleagues that it did not consist of two kingdoms (plants and animals), but five or even six (plants, animals, fungi, protists, and two types of bacteria).
Until Margulis’s death last year, she lived in my town, and I would bump into her on the street from time to time. She knew I was interested in ecology, and she liked to needle me. Hey, Charles, she would call out, are you still all worked up about protecting endangered species?
Margulis was no apologist for unthinking destruction. Still, she couldn’t help regarding conservationists’ preoccupation with the fate of birds, mammals, and plants as evidence of their ignorance about the greatest source of evolutionary creativity: the microworld of bacteria, fungi, and protists. More than 90 percent of the living matter on earth consists of microorganisms and viruses, she liked to point out. Heck, the number of bacterial cells in our body is ten times more than the number of human cells!
Bacteria and protists can do things undreamed of by clumsy mammals like us: form giant supercolonies, reproduce either asexually or by swapping genes with others, routinely incorporate DNA from entirely unrelated species, merge into symbiotic beings—the list is as endless as it is amazing. Microorganisms have changed the face of the earth, crumbling stone and even giving rise to the oxygen we breathe. Compared to this power and diversity, Margulis liked to tell me, pandas and polar bears were biological epiphenomena—interesting and fun, perhaps, but not actually significant.
Does that apply to human beings, too? I once asked her, feeling like someone whining to Copernicus about why he couldn’t move the earth a little closer to the center of the universe. Aren’t we special at all?
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Seems to me that we’re well into the second inflection point; we just don’t know it – yet….
Regarding this ” The sheer implausibility of this change is staggering. In 1860, slaves were, collectively, the single most valuable economic asset in the United States “, it was roughly in 1850’s that humans first began their ramping up of the usage of oil, which is in a very real way, lots and lots of slaves in a barrel. The EROEI for oil was vastly better than for using slaves. Going back for many thousands of years before this suggested by the auther ” implausible transition ” human power was what got things done, and if you were tougher, more aggressive and ruthless, you could get other humans to do the work to make your life easier and better. So I would observe that this transition came about because of the great abundance that oil ( and the other hydrocarbon’s created ). For example if you needed a huge Cotton field harvested today you may need only one oil powered machine as opposed to the old days of using lets say a 100 slaves.
The other issue of Women’s rights and decreasing violence were precipitated by this same abundance IMO. Times before that age of Hydrocarbon Man were very much more difficult, so general human nature meant there would be slaves, subjugated women, and a lot more violence between struggling human groups. The veneer of human civility with its various incarnations moral/ethical codes of behavior will begin to fall away once again as the freedom from drudgery that critical energy sources, the beating heart that runs our modern societies, enters ( it has begun ) the times of increasingly steepening depletion curves. The human brain is the same architecture that creates, and has created all that you might deem ill about the human species and its actions. The old demons did not go away and yet still reside in the grey flesh. They just flourish more in difficult times.
So in a nutshell we are back to this question ” is there any reason to imagine that Homo sapiens,unlike mussels, snakes, and moths, can exempt itself from the natural fate of all successful species? ” No, we are not exempt, even though many folks in this world think we are.
And on another point, humans make up boundries, define classifications and over time continueally ” reorder the tree of life “, but I would suggest that our human distinction between something being living, or non-living itself is an erroneous assumption, assigning a boundry where none exist. Its akin to the idea of assuming that there is a boundry between the past, present, and future, even though the more you try to define the demarcation between them, pin it down, the clearer it becomes that there is not one. The infinite layers of the ” illusion ” never cease to amaze, like in this video describing the most tiny components of the material yet described, strings, but even that ” classification ” is just the edge of even deeper realizations, that will go on and on, and on again 🙂
The Quantum Universe
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FWMkOJxqq8&feature=related