At the New York World’s Fair, for instance, you could tour the Westinghouse exhibit and see the wonders of tomorrow. A futurama showed the “typical city of 1960” — brimming with every techno-gadget Depression-era Americans could dream of, from electric dishwashers and superhighways to robot housemaids and personal autogyros. Naturally, poverty wouldn’t exist in that far-off age. The phrase “ecological degradation” hadn’t yet been coined.
We may shake our heads over their naivete, those people of 1939. They got it right predicting freeways and television, but who knew anything back then about atom bombs? Or missile deterrence? Or computers? Or toxic waste? A few science fiction writers perhaps, whose prophetic tales nevertheless seem quaint and simplistic by today’s standards.
Fifty years is a long time, and the pace of change has only accelerated.
Still — and here’s the funny thing — there are a great many people still around at this moment who lived through every single day from August 1939 to the present. To them, the world of the Nineties doesn’t seem bizarre or astonishing. It evolved, bit by bit, step by step, each event arising quite believably out of what had come the day before.
This is what makes half-century projections among the most difficult speculative novels to write. In order to depict a near-term future, say five or ten years ahead, a writer need only take the present world and exaggerate some current trend for dramatic effect. At the other end, portraying societies many centuries from now, the job is relatively easy also. (Anything goes, so long as you make it vaguely plausible.) But five decades is just short enough a span to require a sense of familiarity, and yet far enough away to demand countless surprises, as well. You must make it seem believable that many people who are walking around at this very moment would also exist in that future time, and find conditions — if not commonplace — then at least normal.
Therefore my apologia. This novel isn’t a prediction. Earth depicts just one possible tomorrow — one that will surely strike some as too optimistic and others as far too gloomy. So be it.
What is a world? A myriad of themes and contrary notions, all woven up in a welter of detail. And so Earth had to include everything from the failing ozone layer and thickening greenhouse effect, to geology and evolution. (And while we’re at it, let’s throw in electronic media, the Gaia hypothesis, and the nature of consciousness!)
In the course of researching this book, I would listen to news reports from Armenian earthquakes and Alaskan supertanker disasters, and constantly find myself struck by how foolish our illusions of stability and changelessness seem, perched as we are on the trembling crust of an active planet. History and geology show what an eyeblink it’s been since our current, comfortable culture came about. And yet that culture is using up absolutely everything at a ferocious rate.
Still, there are positive signs — evidence that, at the very last moment, humankind may be waking up. Will we do so quickly enough to save the world? No one can possibly know.
One thing guaranteed over the decades ahead will be copious irony. Suppose, for instance, peace truly does break out among nations. The ingenuity and resources now spent on weaponry may be reallocated, unleashing fantastic creativity on our more pressing needs. But then, what will history say in retrospect about hydrogen bombs if we finally do get around to retiring them all? That the awful things scared twentieth-century man into changing his act? That they helped maintain a balance of power, allowing a smaller fraction of humanity to be soldiers — or be harmed by soldiers — than in any prior generation? (Small solace to those in Cambodia and Afghanistan and Lebanon, where the averages did not hold.) How strange, if the bomb came to be looked back on as the principal vehicle of our salvation.
What if all those engineers really do turn their focus from deterrence to productivity? Some prospects are awesome to contemplate… suspended animation, artificial organs, intelligence enhancement, spaceflight, smart machines… the list is dizzying and a bit daunting. If such godlike powers ever do become ours, we’ll surely face questions much like those so long asked about the bomb. Such as, How do we acquire wisdom along with all these shiny things?
There is a popular myth going around. It maintains that there is something particularly corrupt about Western civilization — as if it invented war, exploitation, oppression, and pollution all by itself. Certainly if this were so, the world’s problems might be solved just by returning to “older, better ways.” Many do cling to the fantasy that this or that non-Western culture had some patent on universal happiness.
Alas, if only it were so easy.
In his book A Forest Journey: From Mesopotamia to North America, John Perlin shows how the vast, fertile plains and mountains of Greece, Turkey, and the Middle East were turned into hardscrabble ravines by ancient civilizations. The record of pillage goes back thousands of years to the earliest known epic, the Tale of Gilgamesh, about a king who cut down primordial cedar forests to take lumber for his city-state of Uruk. Droughts and floods plagued the land soon afterward, but neither Gilgamesh nor any of his contemporaries ever saw the connection.
Sumerian civilization went on to seize oak from Arabia, juniper from Syria, cedar from Anatolia. The rivers of the Near East filled with silt, clogging ports and irrigation canals. Dredging only exposed salty layers below, which eventually ruined whatever soil hadn’t already blown away. The result, over centuries, is a region we now know well as a realm of blowing sands and bitter winds, but which was once called the “fertile crescent,” the land of milk and honey.
We don’t need mystical conjectures about “cycles of history” to explain, for instance, the fall of Rome. Perlin shows how the Roman Empire, the Aegean civilization of ancient Greece, imperial China, and so many other past cultures performed the same feat, ignorantly fouling their own nests, using up the land, poisoning the future for their children. Ecological historians are at last starting to realize that this is simply the natural consequence whenever a people acquires more physical power than insight.
While it is romantic to imagine that tribal peoples — either ancient or in today’s retreating rain forests — were at harmony with nature, living happy, egalitarian lives, current research shows this to be far from uniformly true, and more often just plain false. Despite a fervent desire to believe otherwise, evidence now reveals that members of nearly every “natural” society have committed depredations on their environment and each other. The harm they did was limited mostly by low technology and modest numbers.
The same goes for beating up on the human race as a whole. Oh, we have much to atone for, but the case isn’t strengthened by exaggerations that are just plain wrong. Stephen Jay Gould has condemned “… as romantic twaddle the common litany that ‘man alone kills for sport, but other animals [kill] only for food or in defense.’ ” Anyone who has watched a common housecat with a mouse — or stallions battling over dominance — knows that humans aren’t so destructive because of anything fundamentally wrong about human nature. It’s our power that amplifies the harm we do until it threatens the entire world.
My purpose in saying this isn’t to insult other cultures or species. Rather, I am trying to argue that the problems we face are deep-seated, with a long history. The irony of these myths of the noble tribesman, or noble animal, is that they are most fervently held by pampered Westerners whose well-cushioned culture is the first ever to feel comfortable enough to promote a new tradition of self-criticism. And it is this very habit of criticism — even self-reproach — that makes ours the first human society with a chance to avoid the mistakes of our ancestors.