Earth in Human Hands by David Grinspoon

Author:David Grinspoon
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Science / General, Science / Global Warming & Climate Change, Science / Philosophy & Social Aspects, Science / Space Science, Science / Environmental Science (See Also Chemistry / Environmental)
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2016-12-05T16:00:00+00:00

Three Futures

It’s often said that we humans learn best through disaster. An endless supply of tragic historical anecdotes supports this claim. Yet that is not the whole story, because we are also uniquely gifted with foresight. This is a great strength because we can do much of what would otherwise be trial-and-error learning by running scenarios inside our heads. As individuals, we’re always considering outcomes and making choices. We picture ourselves skidding off the road, so we step on the brake. We’ve developed mechanisms to do this in larger and larger groups, with mixed results. Our big evolutionary challenge now is to take this to the global level more effectively. If we can learn from disasters foretold, we can steer clear of danger.

In 1979, for CoEvolution Quarterly, the underground comic artist R. Crumb drew “A Short History of America,” a series of twelve sequential panels portraying the path of progress (such as it is) over the twentieth century in a random spot, a typical American town. [See here of the photo insert.]

The first panel shows a bucolic scene of a rolling meadow at the edge of a deep forest, with a large flock of birds flying overhead. The next view is nearly the same, but now with a train running through on newly laid tracks. In the third panel a telegraph line and a dirt road have appeared alongside the tracks, along with a lone, modest farmhouse. The scene can still be described as bucolic. The decades pass, and the pace of development, which started innocuously and gradually, quickens. Paved roads, sidewalks, streetlights, electrical and telephone wires appear. The trees decline in number. Billboards and signs grab at our attention. In the final three panels there is no more grass, and nothing but the sky that is not human-made. In the last scene even the sky is visibly altered, dull and smoggy, the backdrop to a clogged, slightly decrepit urban corner where life goes on. A couple rides past on a motorcycle, going about their business. Although the difference from the first panel to the last is jarring, each step seems minor, and each view looks unexceptional, normal. The final panel contains the only text: the caption “What next?”

In 1988, Crumb answered his own question with a follow-up drawing, entitled “Epilogue.” [See here of the photo insert.] It depicts the same scene again in three more panels, showing three possible futures. The top one, labeled “Worst Case Scenario: Ecological Disaster,” depicts a postapocalyptic wasteland. The shells of buildings and cars are decaying in abandoned, weed-grown streets under a frighteningly bright sun and a diseased-looking sky.

The second panel, “The Fun Future: Techno-Fix on the March,” is a much happier place. A clean sky is traveled by sleek hovercraft and flying cars. A sign reads, “NO GROUND VEHICLES IN THIS SECTOR.” The buildings look prefab, molded, efficient. Some green has returned, in the form of well-manicured grass and carefully planted, well-spaced evergreens.

In the third panel, “The Ecotopian Solution,” the trees have grown back tall and wild.

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