The Element (34 page)

One climate crisis is probably enough for you. But I believe there’s another one, which is just as urgent as and has implications just as far-reaching as the crisis we’re seeing in the natural world. This isn’t a crisis of natural resources. It is a crisis of human resources. I think of this as
the other climate crisis.

The dominant Western worldview is not based on seeing synergies and connections but on making distinctions and seeing differences. This is why we pin butterflies in separate boxes from the beetles—and teach separate subjects in schools.

Much of Western thought assumes that the mind is separate from the body and that human beings are somehow separate from the rest of nature. This may be why so many people don’t seem to understand that what they put into their bodies affects how it works and how they think and feel. It may be why so many people don’t seem to understand that the quality of their lives is affected by the quality of the natural environment and what they put into it and what they take out.

The rate of self-inflicted physical illness from bad nutrition and eating disorders is one example of the crisis in human resources. Let me give you a few others. We’re living in times when hundreds of millions of people can only get through their day by relying on prescription drugs to treat depression and other emotional disorders. The profits of pharmaceutical companies are soaring, while the spirits of their consumers continue to dive. Dependence on nonprescription drugs and alcohol, especially among young people, is also rocketing. So too is the rate of suicides. Deaths each year from suicide around the world are greater than deaths from all armed conflicts. According to the World Health Organization, suicide is now the third highest cause of death among people aged fifteen to thirty.

What is true of individuals is naturally true of our communities. I live in California. In 2006, the state of California spent $3.5 billion on the state university system. It spent $9.9 billion on the state prison system. I find it hard to believe that there are three times more potential criminals in California than potential college graduates, or that the growing masses of people in jails throughout the country were simply born to be there. I don’t believe that there are that many naturally malign people wandering around, in California or anywhere else. In my experience, the great majority of people are well intentioned and want to live lives with purpose and meaning. However, very many people live in bad conditions, and these conditions can drain them of hope and purpose. In some ways, these conditions are becoming more challenging.

At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, there was hardly anybody around. In 1750, there were one billion people living on the planet. It took the whole of human existence for the world population to reach one billion. I know that sounds a lot, and we’ve agreed that the planet is relatively small. But it’s still big enough for a billion people to spread out in reasonable comfort.

In 1930, there were two billion people. It took just one hundred and eighty years for the population to double. But there was still plenty of room for people to lie down. It took only forty more years for us to get to three billion. We crossed that threshold in 1970, just after the Summer of Love, which I’m sure was a coincidence. After that came a spectacular increase. On New Year’s Eve 1999, you were sharing the planet with six billion other people. The human population had doubled in thirty years. Some estimates suggest that we’ll hit nine billion by the middle of the twenty-first century.

Another factor is the growth of cities. Of the one billion people on Earth at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, only 3 percent lived in cities. By 1900, 12 percent of the almost two billion people lived in cities. By 2000, nearly half of the six billion people on Earth lived in cities. It’s estimated that by 2050 more than 60 percent of the nine billion human beings will be city dwellers. By 2020, there may be more than five hundred cities on Earth with populations above one million, and more than twenty mega-cities, with populations in excess of twenty million. Already, Greater Tokyo has a population of thirty-five million. This is greater than the total population of Canada, a territory
four thousand
times larger.

Some of these massive cities will be in the so-called developed countries. They will be well planned, with shopping malls, information booths, and property taxes. But the real growth isn’t happening in those parts of the world. It’s happening in the so-called developing world—parts of Asia, South America, the Middle East, and Africa. Many of these sprawling cities will be mainly shantytowns, self-built with poor sanitation, little infrastructure, and barely any social support services. This massive growth in the size and density of human populations across Earth presents enormous challenges. It demands that we tackle the crisis in natural resources with urgency. But it demands too that we tackle the crisis in human resources and that we think differently about the relationships between these two. All of this points to a powerful need for new ways of thinking—and new metaphors about human communities and how they flourish or decay.

For more than three hundred years Western thought has been dominated by the images of industrialism and the scientific method. It’s time to change metaphors. We have to move beyond linear, mechanistic metaphors to more organic metaphors of human growth and development.

A living organism, like a plant, is complex and dynamic. Each of its internal processes affects and depends on the others in sustaining the vitality of the whole organism. This is also true of the habitats in which we live. Most living things can only flourish in certain types of environment, and the relationships between them are often highly specialized. Healthy, successful plants take the nutrients they need from their environment. At the same time, though, their presence helps to sustain the environment on which they depend. There are exceptions, like the Leyland cypresses that just seem to take over everything in their path, but you get the idea. The same is true of all creatures and animals, including us.

Farmers base their livelihoods on raising crops. But farmers do not make plants grow. They don’t attach the roots, glue on the petals, or color the fruit. The plant grows itself. Farmers and gardeners provide the conditions for growth. Good farmers know what those conditions are, and bad ones don’t. Understanding the dynamic elements of human growth is as essential to sustaining human cultures into the future as the need to understand the ecosystems of the natural world on which we ultimately depend.

A few hundred miles away from my home in Los Angeles is Death Valley, one of the hottest, driest places on earth. Not much grows in Death Valley, hence the name. The reason is that it doesn’t rain very much there—about two inches a year on average. However, in the winter of 2004-5, something remarkable happened. More than seven inches of rain fell on Death Valley, something that had not happened for generations. Then in the spring of 2005, something even more remarkable happened. Spring flowers covered the entire floor of Death Valley. Photographers, botanists, and just plain tourists traveled across America to see this remarkable sight, something they might never see again in their lifetimes. Death Valley was alive with fresh, vibrant growth. At the end of the spring, the flowers died away and slipped again beneath the hot desert sand, waiting for the next rains, whenever they would come.

What this proved, of course, was that Death Valley wasn’t dead at all. It was asleep. It was simply waiting for the conditions of growth. When the conditions came, life returned to the heart of Death Valley.

Human beings and human communities are the same. We need the right conditions for growth, in our schools, businesses, and communities, and in our individual lives. If the conditions are right, people grow in synergy with the people around them and the environments they create. If the conditions are poor, people protect themselves and their anxieties from neighbors and the world. Some of the elements of our own growth are inside us. They include the need to develop our unique natural aptitudes and personal passions. Finding and nurturing them is the surest way to ensure our growth and fulfillment as individuals.

If we discover the Element in ourselves and encourage others to find theirs, the opportunities for growth are infinite. If we fail to do that, we may get by, but our lives will be duller as a result. This is not just a West Coast, California argument, even though I do live there now. I believed this in the damp, cold days of December in England, when these thoughts can be harder to come by. This is not a new view. It’s an ancient view of the need for balance and fulfillment in our lives and for synergies with the lives and aspirations other people. It’s an idea that is easily lost in our current forms of existence.

The crises in the worlds of nature and of human resources are connected. Jonas Salk was the pioneering scientist who developed the Salk polio vaccine. As somebody who contracted polio in the 1950s, I feel some affinity with his life’s passion. Later in his life, Salk made a provocative observation, one that addresses the two forms of climate crisis. “It’s interesting to reflect,” he said, “that if all the insects were to disappear from the earth, within fifty years all other forms of life would end.” He understood, as Rachel Carson did, that the insects we spend so much effort trying to eradicate are essential threads in the intricate web of life on Earth. “But,” Salk went on, “if all human beings were to disappear from the earth, within fifty years all other forms of life would flourish.”

What he meant is that we have now become the problem. Our extraordinary capacity for imagination has given rise to the most far-reaching examples of human achievement and has taken us from caves to cities and from marshes to the moon. But there is a danger now that our imaginations may be failing us. We have seen far, but not far enough. We still think too narrowly and too closely about ourselves as individuals and as a species and too little about the consequences of our actions. To make the best of our time together on this small and crowded planet, we have to develop—consciously and rigorously—our powers of imagination and creativity within a different framework of human purpose. Michelangelo once said, “The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.” For all our futures, we need to aim high and be determined to succeed.

To do that each of us individually and all of us together need to discover the Element.

GILLIAN LYNNE: All material in this segment came from an original interview for this book.

MATT GROENING: All material in this segment came from an original interview for this book.

PAUL SAMUELSON: Paul Samuelson, “How I Became an Economist,”
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes
/economics /articles /samuelson-2 /index .html.

 

MICK FLEETWOOD: All material in this segment came from an original interview for this book.

SENSES: Kathryn Linn Geurts,
Culture and the Senses: Bodily Ways of Knowing in an African Community
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003).

Andrew Cook, “Exploding the Five Senses,”
http://www.hummingbird-one.co.uk/humanbeing/five.html
.

BART CONNER: All material in this segment came from an original interview for this book.

IQ, SAT, AND EUGENICS: Jan Strydom and Susan du Plessis, “IQ Test: Where Does It Come From and What Does It Measure?”
http://www.audiblox2000.com/dyslexia_dyslexic/dyslexia014.htm
.

“Timing of IQ Test Can Be a Life or Death Matter,”
Science Daily Magazine
, December 6, 2003.

“The Future of the SAT,”
http://chronicle.com/colloquylive/2001/10/SAT/
.

Alan Stoskepf, “The Forgotten History of Eugenics,”
http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/13_03/eugenic.shtml
.

ALEXIS LEMAIRE:
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,22768356-13762,00.html
.

GORDON PARKS: Andy Grundberg, “Gordon Parks, a Master of the Camera, Dies at 93,”
New York Times
, March 8, 2006.

Corey Kilgannon, “By Gordon Parks, A View of Himself and, Yes, Pictures,”
New York Times
, July 7, 2002.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/jan-june98/gordon_1-6.html
.

http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/oralhistories/transcripts/parks64.htm
.

R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER:
http://www.designmuseum.org/design/r-buckminster-fuller
.

ALBERT EINSTEIN: Walter Isaacson,
Einstein: His Life and Universe
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007).

 

FAITH RINGGOLD: The majority of the material in this segment came from an interview conducted by the author. Additional details came from
http://www.faithringgold.com/ringgold/bio.htm
.

BERTRAND RUSSELL:
Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, and Its Connection with Political and Social Circumstances from the Earliest Times to the Present Day
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1945).

PLANETARY PHOTOS: Graphics by Pompei AD, New York.

THE TRAVELING WILBURYS: Original interview with John Beug, senior executive, Warner Music Group.
http://www.travelingwilburys.com/theband.html
.
http://www.headbutler.com/music/traveling_wilburys.asp
.

RICHARD FEYNMAN: Richard Phillips Feynman and Christopher Sykes,
No Ordinary Genius: The Illustrated Richard Feynman
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1994).

RIDLEY SCOTT: All material in this segment came from an original interview for this book.

PAUL MCCARTNEY: All material in this segment came from an original interview for this book.