What the World Needs Now Is Plague, Sweet Plague

The real problem with the world today is that there are too many damn people. The human population is increasing exponentially, and I’m not sure how long the planet can sustain us. A good plague would solve that. Maybe it could kill off a few billion people and get us to a more manageable level.

But I wouldn’t want it to affect anyone I know. Or any countries that I like. Maybe it should happen in Bangladesh. I’ve never been there, I don’t know much about it, and I know it’s crazy overcrowded. I certainly have nothing against Bangladesh, but you gotta start somewhere.

But that won’t work, will it. Wiping out Bangladesh wouldn’t be nearly enough, because the way the human population is expanding, we would replace the Bangladeshianians within a matter of years.

Hm, maybe it would be better just to make a whole bunch of people infertile. That would work better. And no one who’s alive would have to die, so it would be a lot less cruel, too. Sure, it would be very sad for people who always wanted to have kids but can’t, but you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few dreams.

Why am I talking this crazy talk, you ask? Well, it’s all a load of crap, to be sure, but it does get at something I’m seriously concerned about. I am perpetually frightened for our species. Eventually, one way or another, there will just be too damn many of us for this planet to handle. We’re going to outstrip our environment somehow. Any species growing as fast as we are is trouble, and that’s trouble with a capital T and that rhymes with C and that stands for “catastrophe.”

My worries are based in well-accepted science, thank you very much. See, the world is made up hundred zillion little ecosystem cycles in the natural world, all carefully balanced, all interacting with each other. Having one species come out of nowhere and dominate can ruin everything. A wolf that becomes too good at killing deer will eventually eat up all the deer and then have no more food source.

The point is that too much success can ruin a species, and while we may be one hell of a smart species, we’re subject to the same rules. In the history of the natural world, extinction is common, and we’re not immune from it. This is seriously how I look at things. I am lots of fun to be around, let me tell you.

But I honestly don’t think it’s that crazy of a perspective. Like it or not, we do depend on natural cycles for survival. Granted, the wolf example isn’t a great one, because we're probably not going to run out of food for ourselves too soon. We have sorta made our own little ecosystems that are under our control, through agriculture and animal husbandry. So in one sense, we solved the problem. But now the greenhouse gases that we pump into the atmosphere are fucking things up. So we’re back to threatening ourselves with our own success.

Sometimes I look at global warming this way: Think of the world as an organism (this perspective, by the way, is known as the Gaia hypothesis). All large organisms have other little organisms inside them. Humans have tons of little amoebae and paramecia and who the hell knows what else inside us, swimming around and not really affecting us one way or another. Most are harmless, but occasionally you get a nasty one, and then you get a disease.

Humans, and indeed all other species, are microbes within this Earth organism. All other species, so far, have not affected the Earth one way or another. But now the human species is becoming a virulent little mofo. We’re expanding rapidly and taking over the Earth, much the way a virus expands rapidly within a host and takes over. The Earth responds by raising its surface temperature, much the way we get fevers. The point of a fever is to make the place inhospitable for the bug, to essentially kill it off.

That’s what global warming is for, to kill us off. It’s the Earth’s own self-regulating mechanism for doing what I was talking about before, getting our species to a more manageable, sustainable level.

Normally, plagues are good for this sort of thing, as I mentioned above. They’re the Earth’s white blood cells, keeping a population down before it can go past a tipping point into becoming dangerous. But we keep evolving these resistances to these plagues, through modern medicine. So the Earth’s only recourse is to turn up the heat and see what happens.

Of course, we’re talking in terms of geological time here. In geological time, our switch from harmlessness to virulence has been unbelievably fast, within the last 100 years or so. So the killing-off process will be similarly fast by geological time standards, but slow by our standards. Maybe temperatures will get hotter and hotter, and more and more parts of the world will become too hot to live in. Then those people will have to move somewhere, so they’ll crowd to the North.

Frankly, there’s plenty of open space in Canada and Russia, so we maybe actually have room for these folks. But like ecosystems, economies also work best when there’s a measure of stability. Think what crazy flux everything will be in if people have to abandon Texas en masse and move to Canada. Do you think the Canadians want about bunch of Texans around? Canadians are nice, but not that nice.

That’s a facile example, but you get the idea. We don’t know what kind of chaos that global warming is going to cause. It’s such a fundamental change that it will affect every aspect of our lives and our societies.

All this is why the environment is my number-one issue, and always has been. I’m not saying that what we’re doing to the planet will necessarily destroy it, but there’s the threat there of such widespread, cataclysmic change that will have ripple effects everywhere else, and that frightens the shit out of me. And frankly, it trumps everything else.

Take the Iraq War, for example. It’s very serious and very tragic, no doubt. But the human species has weathered serious, tragic wars before. I’m confident we can do it again, albeit with more scars and probably more wars to follow.

Meanwhile, our species has never faced something like global warming before, and I’m not so sure how well we’ll do. I’m sure we’ll survive in some form, but not the way we are now if we don’t make some serious changes fast. That’s scary. That could mean famines, economic collapses – who knows what.

This is why I’m a strident environmentalist – it’s totally self-interest. Or more precisely, interest in humanity. I don’t really give a crap about the planet per se. I give a crap about it because the species I love, human beings, depends on it for survival. It’s sort of like the fact that I care about the chair I’m sitting on. This chair doesn’t do much for me in itself, but if it were suddenly taken away, I’d fall and break my tailbone. I don’t want humanity to fall and break its collective tailbone. (OK, I took that too far.)

I’m not even that big on nature, exactly. It can look quite nice in small doses, but I find it looks best through the window of a comfortable hotel room. I’m not outdoorsy – I’m indoorsy. I can find my way around the indoors amazingly well, surviving only on the food and water I can forage together from refrigerators and food courts.

So yeah, I’ve been made soft by the comforts of modern life. I like them and I sure don’t want to give them up through some kind of man-made catastrophe that returns us to the Stone Age. So if we can make small changes now to stave off the big changes we might suffer down the road, I’m all for it. More solar panels and wind farms? Sure. Fuel-efficient cars? You betcha. Change to fluorescent bulbs? I’m on it. Maybe it’s a pain to make these adjustments, but it’s much better than the alternative. Granted, I don’t know what that alternative will be, but the odds are it won’t be pleasant.