Tuesday, 8th September 10.00 AM.
A pitched battle of sorts was waged yesterday on the high seas somewhere between Madeira and Tenerife, our first port of call (and my departure point from the project).
It wasn’t anything as dramatic as a physical duel, not a below deck female wrestling match. It was more a battle of minds, a clash of instinct, perspective and personal experience.
The protagonist was Dirk Draulans, a Flemish scientist-cum-TV presenter. He trained as an evolutionary biologist in Belgium before applying for a job as a science correspondent on a weekly news magazine. For the last 22 years, Dirk has written about advances in scientific progress translating academic jibberish into something more palatable for the popular gut. His hope, he told me over breakfast today, is that when people sit drinking at a bar they will some day “talk about science with the same passion that they discuss their favourite football team or the size of the barmaid’s breasts”.
Dirk later segued into becoming a war correspondent, specializing in the Congo – which, I guess, is still a pretty hot topic for the folks of Belgium.
Another unplanned career development followed an invitation to participate in a TV panel. Since then Dirk has taken to becoming a leading TV presenter on scientific issues in the Dutch-speaking world.
That’s why, for the next year, Dirk has been co-opted onto this extraordinary project retracting the voyage of Charles Darwin, 200 years after his birth.
So, it was inevitable that at some point during my 12-day voyage I would find myself face to face in a televised duel with Dirk. These things are always a bit contrived, since Hans the cameraman and Charley the soundman were always only inches away. As was Lex, editor in chief, who hovered close by, keen to ensure that the questions and answers were sufficiently brief to avoid endless editing.
With the equivalent of what must be a week’s worth of video already filmed for episode 2 of On the Future of Species, that’s something about which I can readily sympathise.
Dirk and I have fairly diametrically opposed views on what’s to be done about addressing the ailments of the modern world. There is no denial that we’re in a mess – at least we didn’t spend time disputing that during the 10 minute interview. The two-fold question really was this:
Is science the cause or the solution to the environmental problems of the modern world?
And
What’s to be done about it?
In fact Dirk was surprisingly willing to acknowledge that many of the most pressing issues we face today – both as a species and as constituent parts of the global ecosystem – have been provoked or at least exacerbated by western science. It would be impossible to conceive of a modern world, with its carrying capacity of 7 billion humans, without everything from Norman Borlag’s Norin 10 wheat to the successful eradication of smallpox.
But what’s to be done now?
Dirk’s view is that humanity’s best chance comes from making the benefits and comforts enjoyed by developed countries (as a result of scientific progress) available as widely as possible to the less developed world.
Sounds like sense – lots of delicious new markets for the western world’s myriad products. Governments of less well developed areas equally keen to please their swollen populations by promising the prospect of westernized lifestyles within the span of a single generation. The partnership is bound together by democratic dynamics that consign societies to pursue not what’s sensible or even rational in the longer term, but whatever can be sold through the media and made to sound motivational and popular within a 5 year timeframe.
To my mind this is the modus operandi driving everything from today’s sixth mass extinction, the destruction of habitats, rainforests, to the desertification and acidification of the rising oceans and atmospheric asphyxiation.
The only alternative, I admit, is to change our lifestyles – to make some compromise in which the reduction of our ecological footprints takes priority over the habits of westernized living.
A skeptical, frustrated frown draws across Dirk’s brow.
“But isn’t that just naïve to expect people to change their way the life?”
NAÏVE?
Dirk had, inadvertently, pulled my emergency cord.
By all means tell someone they are just plain wrong, or challenge them to backup their views with robust evidence. Even walk off and terminate an interview in disgust, if you have to….. BUT, PLEASE, NEVER CALL SOMEONE NAÏVE!
I momentarily flipped.
That’s so RUDE! It’s so patronizing, it’s so disrespectful…. I thought.
Even if you fundamentally disagree with someone, to say to them that, despite years of research and consideration about an impossibly difficult, complex issue….. their opinions are naïve is to say simply that they have the thoughts of a child whereas you have the sophisticated mind of an adult. ……. Ugh! Yuk!
I rallied, a little slowly at first, from that below-the-belt moment, and Dirk and I could be seen continuing to debate the potential for humans to change their ways, sitting on deck just in front of the ship’s bridge.
I continued.
Imagine that one day a scientist discovered a six mile wide meteorite careering towards the Earth and that impact was 21 years away. The giant lump of rock and ice was traveling at an estimated speed of 17,000 miles per hour. No-one could predict exactly where it would land, because it may break up into pieces in its final moments as it cuts through the thick Earth atmosphere…..
Would humans rally round to try to find a solution? Would people put aside their parochial differences, at least while the common threat existed, and put their best collective endeavours into finding a solution?
I believe they might.
Is that naïve?
When countries mobilize for war, people sign up to fight for a cause they believe in – for a flag, a feeling, a belief or a song - regardless of the personal risks. They even leave their families behind, the feeling of patriotism overruling the most powerful of instinctive urges to protect one’s genetic progeny.
So potent is the human capacity, through reason and culture, to overrule nature’s genetically driven evolutionary short-termism, that people will even blow themselves to bits as suicide bombers because the cause they believe in, however misguided it appears to the outside world, has such a powerful grip. Is that madness? Or is that just about being human?
How does this apply to striving for global ecological balance? What could individuals do collectively to really make a difference?
I proposed that, for a start, people could give up eating red meat and consuming dairy products to relieve the world of its 1 billion cows, which, with the associated agricultural practices that support them, are the cause of as much as 18% of greenhouse gas emissions? Eat chicken and pork instead – at least these are creatures that feed off waste.
I also suggested that it could become a modern taboo to have more than two children since I cannot see how could any number of headline-grabbing carbon emission reducing initiatives possibly work if the population keeps on growing by 211,000 people a day (as it currently does).
I know….. you can see the objections come flying over – political, economic, cultural, religious, racial, civil liberties… Just think: No more burgers, no more cornflakes with milk... fondue without meat or cheese and loads of contraceptive pills.
To achieve such a change means it must be explained, by politicians, journalists, ecologists and, most importantly, by scientists, too, that this IS an emergency only resolvable by collective action. That the equivalent of a meteorite will strike, sometime within the next 100 – 500 years, in the form of sea levels that will rise as much as 25 metres and countries that were once fertile being reduced to sterile, wasteland scrub.
It is possible, I am sure, for humans to make collective adjustments in their habits and lifestyles (who knows, perhaps it will even increase our “well-being”?). We have it in our natures. It’s this thing called reason whose evolutionary function is to override instinct. We have even proved our potential already by removing genetically selfish action – for example rape and slavery– from some, if not yet all, human societies.
Of course, we didn’t / couldn’t get all that on camera. Lex, Hans and Charley would have long packed up and gone.
As for Dirk, I wasn’t really sure what he felt or thought by the end.
But I have learned one thing for sure. Next time I shall be better prepared to be typecast (aka dismissed!) by the cynically scientific as just another one of life’s naive dreamers…
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