The collection of essays contained in the chapters that follow are a small subset .... making, we wouldn't last long unless we were lucky enough to live in Hawaii.
EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY SPEAKS TO ENVIRONMENTALISTS
A collection of essays on what the new science of the mind has to say about environmentalism and its implications for a new approach to activism.
Marc Pratarelli, Ph.D.
Table of Contents Foreward
i
Acknowledgements
ii
Preface
iii
I.
Curing the Environmental Cold: A New Synthesis.
xx
II.
Conservation’s [Hu]man of the 20th Century: Aldo Leopold and the Road to Modern Bio-ethics
xx
III.
Rethinking How We Develop Ideas About Global Bioethics xx
IV.
(maybe the paper about environmentalists)
xx
V.
(an adaptation of one of the religion chapters)
xx
VI.
Social Pressure & Recycling? I Think Not!
xx
VII. Some Closing Thoughts Bibliography Index
xx
PREFACE The collection of essays contained in the chapters that follow are a small subset of work published in contemporary research journals, edited volumes and the occasional presentation at international conferences. They are all pieces generated between 2003 and 2007 produced after my book Niche Bandits (Medici Publishing, 2003). At the suggestion over coffee one afternoon with my friend, colleague, mentor and fellow crusader—Brunetto Chiarelli—I organized this particular collection of work. They are intended primarily for environmentalists, but really anyone with an interest in environmentalism might find them useful. I intentionally selected pieces that were not written with the dry academic tone most scientific work uses, nor are they one’s heavily laden with statistics or scientific jargon. In a few cases, however, I made minor revisions to make them more readable. I recall that Brunetto and I were discussing that day in the coffeehouse the nature of the barriers confronting environmentalists in their attempts to lobby politicians and the corporate world of the dire need to accelerate the pace of developing and implementing new policies toward sustainability. This discussion took place the afternoon following a luncheon where he had been invited to speak on the need to seriously consider a very progressive transportation and vehicle traffic policy limited to the historic center of Florence, Italy. He had been lobbying the city administration for years to get them to consider a revolutionary way of solving the downtown mess, presently a bedlam of narrow one-way streets packed with tourists year-round, methane-powered public bus transportation, horse carriages, police cars, ambulances, bicycles, mopeds, regular cars and what-not. So far, all the city had come up with was to develop an above-ground light rail system. That would make as much sense and cause as much disruption as trying to convert all of downtown Los Angeles to a series of canals fitted with gondolas or punting boats. The architecture of Florence is one of its main draws. Putting in a light rail system would be unconscionable. They had also considered a conventional metropolitan subway system, but there was concern about all the ruins of the ancient city still lying undiscovered under the existing buildings. Some of these may date back prior to the time of Christ when the Etruscans occupied Tuscany. That day at the luncheon was the first and only time I had seen Brunetto get angry and frustrated with the proposal for a light rail system. He’s an anthropologist, and like many citizens of Florence he sees preserving the city’s historic character as paramount. Without going into too much detail, his proposal had been to eliminate all vehicles except electric ones. These would allow two-way traffic almost everywhere because of their compact size. Risk of injury would be much smaller as these vehicles travel a little slower and have much lower mass because of their
construction, which would result in far fewer problems when the occasional accident did happen. The city would thus be transformed in some ways back to a slower cleaner time with pedestrians, bicycles and horses given right of way. More importantly, what the city would save in cleaning bills and road maintenance, it could more than easily cover the costs of providing free battery recharging at stations in virtually all buildings and parking areas. There are many of these already in place and being used. Moreover, if you didn’t own your own electric car yet, you could rent one hourly, daily, weekly, etc. These would be located at any one of the park-n-ride locations situated around the periphery of the city where many commuters already leave their gas-guzzlers and take city buses, their bicycles or motor scooters into the old downtown area. Seems like a much simpler, cleaner, safer, economical and all-around efficacious solution, and what better place in the world to innovate such a green-solution for the 21st century than the home of the birth of the renaissance. But alas, the city fathers couldn’t financially profit personally of this novel solution because the construction and redevelopment companies they own or have investments in wouldn’t be needed. These are the politics involving environmentalism. So they patronize and give on of those patent “yeah, but…” answers. Naturally, nothing has been done yet. I recognized immediately that many of the themes involved in understanding everything from the obstructionist motives of self-serving politicians and corporate managers, to the illusory thinking that we can accept the resistance to changes, stomp our feet and pout that we aren’t being listened to, or just give up in frustration and hide out in our private caves, etc., are all part of psychology. More importantly, I’ve seen that many people have begun, finally, to understand that the competitive uncaring consumer-oriented disposable mega-societies we live in are entirely the product of natural, that is, biological forces. The cultural creations that we love and sometimes love to hate like: industrialization and technology, medicine, government, religion, transportation, social services, commerce, education and child welfare, etc., are all products of biological motives. Even much of our morality is driven by ancient innate motives as one of these chapters will show. I’ve said many times that if we were hypothetically able to go back in time and restart the clock, say, 10000 years ago, human history would pretty much unfold exactly this way. Certainly, different wars would be fought, but always for the same reasons. Different megalomaniacs would be born and people would suffer greatly just the same. All the major scientific innovations from medicine to bombs to space travel, chess and monopoly would all be born again. Not exactly the same way, of
course, but so similar that even a child could recognize the similarities. Like all animals, our species has many unique features that differentiates it from others. But the important thing to remember is that our species has one major evolutionary adaptation that sets us apart from all other species on this planet. That trait is called innovation and it’s the product of having a powerful supercomputer sitting atop our cervical column. It’s the biggest one on the planet so far. We needed it because, physically, we’re really not that well adapted to anything but the mildest climates. As a naked beast knowing nothing about clothing or collaborative hunting and toolmaking, we wouldn’t last long unless we were lucky enough to live in Hawaii. The proof of that is the fact that none of the 22 or more hominin species discovered thus far by paleoanthropologists has survived. That is, except the youngest one that itself evolved from its upright walking ancestors. We call ourselves Homo sapiens sapiens. It literally means the smartest of the smart upright walking apes. There were others like Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, but their brain volume and intellectual capacity was only a fraction of ours. In the absence of all the really clever physical adaptations other animals have, like running, flying, swimming, strength, lots of hair, phenomenal eyesight or hearing, etc., we got brains so we could do all of that once we learned how. We also have the most complex social structures and language capacity to help communicate our innovations to each other, and hopefully to make peace, govern and support ourselves, although we haven’t done that good a job using them yet. Despite all this innovativeness, we still haven’t conquered our warring ways, our tendency to exploit each other and the environment, our greed, our envy, and our tendency to self-deceive. As I detailed in Niche Bandits, the problem is that the part of our brain that does all this higher level thinking and innovation, itself sits atop an ancient reptilian brain. That old brain is much simpler in design, but its efficiency has remained functionally unchanged because of its primary purposes. It concerns itself with three basic phenomena, or behavioral domains. It forces an organism to seek out food and feed in order to survive. It forces the organism to aggress when needed in its search for food and any other resources it demands, and it also allows it to defend itself, protect offspring and its home. And lastly, it likes to have sex because that’s ultimately the evolutionary meaning of life. If your species isn’t designed to reproduce itself, it simply ceases to exist. Everything all species do is designed around the reproductive motive. All of these insights have been learned through the sciences, especially biology, anthropology, the neurosciences, psychology and the social sciences; even geology, chemistry and physics have contributed. But a recent revolution in the behavioral
sciences that began some 15 years ago, or, more like evolved out of other sciences 15 years ago, namely evolutionary biology and psychology, has finally started to bridge the divide that has long existed between science and religion. What we’re beginning to learn from this new approach to understanding the origins of the human mind, is what I like to call “answering the why questions.” For centuries and maybe even millennia, there was an uneasy truce between religion and philosophy. The latter would go on to become what we know today to be the sciences. Science and philosophy sought to discover the facts of the natural world and our universe, while religion gave us the meaning of life. But all that began to change in the 20th century, and took off like a rocket about 15 years ago when human evolutionary psychology began to link theory and practice to the discovery and explanation of human motives and the origins of culture. We’re beginning to understand why we are the way we are, why we do what we do to each other and the environment, and we don’t need a supernatural explanation for any of these things, save one—and a few rambunctious scientists even claim they can do that too. But my purpose in this collection of essays isn’t to debate the merits of the first-cause argument. I am more convinced with each passing day that our new understanding of what motivates us—those illusive “root causes” everybody gives lip service to but can’t explain—and why we’ve been so destructive, can inform everybody, from the politician to the corporate movers-and-shakers, from the Pope to the beggar at the bus stop, from teachers to parents and their children. But especially, I believe this new science of the mind has a primary obligation to inform environmentalists. Because as Aldo Leopold told us many years ago, the “conservationist” is the footsoldier who will push the rest of humanity in the direction it needs to go in order to survive through harmony with the rest of nature. As I’ve written elsewhere, too much of a good thing can be dangerous, and a big brain is no exception. Sadly, a solution to our human-caused problems is only possible one of two ways. The first has been tried and we know it’s wholly unnatural. People simply don’t like to be coerced into anything. The second way requires that once each person recognizes it’s in their personal best-interest to live in sustainable ways, they will change to save themselves and their loved ones. As Bertrand Russell would have said were he with us today, “the logical and rational thing to do” would be to discover the way to convince people of that need to change. Crying wolf won’t do anymore, and it was pointless trying in the first place. Continuing to live in denial won’t do either. But we do know, like it or not, that we’re all more or less self-serving. The solution for modern environmentalists of the 21st century is not yet another movie to waste our money on. And we don’t need
another symbolic violent and destructive show of force that only pisses-off the people we’re trying to convince of the desperate need for change, today. The solution lies in communicating the evidence you and I know and understand, to people who don’t want to understand anything but the score in last Sunday’s football game and how their mutual funds are doing. People value things, and there have been many of us racing to study and understand the nature of value structures so that we can derive the appropriate tools and messages that will resonate with voters and their children. People simply need convincing. There’s no need to “tear down civilization” as some recent environmental writers have called for. That won’t happen anytime soon anyway. It’s also entirely nihilistic to wait it out until nature tears down human civilization on its own geologic clock. Many of us prefer doing something now rather than wait to find out in 50 more years that the second halfcentury of the environmental movement moved us no further than the first halfcentury did. I believe I have to start by helping to convince my environmentalist comrades-in-arm that there is a better way of thinking. It doesn’t require reinventing the wheel, just changing our frame of mind about who we are. That is, we need to realistically ask without any religious or wishy-washy postmodernist bias, what is the nature of the beast. We humans are the cause of environmental damage—no one disputes that anymore and Julian Simon passed away some time ago. We are our own worst enemy. So we need to understand this enemy before we can go into battle. As Aldo Leopold said, conservationists can’t afford to have their collective head floating around in the clouds, listening to cute poems and hugging trees. We don’t need to stop writing poems or hugging trees, we just have to get real about our activism and put it first before poetry and group hugs. Leopold made no buts about the fact that it will take hard work and intelligence to make the needed changes. We’ve already wasted three quarters of a century since he told that to us in 1933. My hope is that one or more of these essays serves to convince you that despite our best intentions, we took the wrong path years ago and it couldn’t be helped…then. The next thing you need to do is read ahead keeping an open mind and your ego in your back pocket. MEP Florence, Italy 2007
