Perhaps humans are coming full-circle on climate change

Go back a few million years and our ape ancestors lived in trees in the lush jungle of East Africa and ate a largely fruit and vegetable diet, using our powerful arms to swing from tree to tree.

Then a huge ice-age came down over Europe leading to a cooler and drier climate in East Africa with the jungle turning to largely savannah. Several things followed: we were forced to walk on our hind legs across the open grassland; this freed our hands to hold and throw rocks, and later more sophisticated weapons, at animals for food as there weren’t enough fruit trees left; and then this higher protein meat diet helped us develop larger brains.

But that’s not all. I’m currently reading one of E. O. Wilson’s most recent books – The Meaning of Human Existence (2014) -  in which he reminds us that we humans are social beings (despite all the evidence to the contrary in the current American primary process), and that this has only occurred twenty times in animal evolution. The classic examples are ants and termites about which Wilson made his name earlier in his long career. These insects are hard-wired and work together like robots in huge colonies with each individual doing his genetically assigned task without question. Wilson reports that the only other mammals that exhibit a degree of sociality are a couple of species of mole rats. And in us humans our social abilities are good but certainly not all inclusive.

We early humans couldn’t just wander around as small groups like our ape cousins still do. In order for some – basically the guys – to go off hunting for perhaps days at a time, there needed to be a base-camp where mothers and babies resided leading to small village life and cooperation there, as well as cooperation amongst the gang of hunters. All this helped develop our brains and lead to mutual cooperation and social mores. The flip side of this was if this developing tribe, always struggling for sufficient food, discovered another tribe in the region, they were seen as competitors for this scarce food and therefore the enemy. We see this tribalism today in the passion of sports fans, and in political, ethnic and national enmities. So deep in human nature we have this duality between a wonderful ability to love one’s neighbor and sacrifice for one’s loved ones and beyond, while at the same time having a strong tendency to distrust the stranger who looks or sounds different. Nevertheless, the good news was the development of these social skills that we humans exhibit at our best, and which saved us from extinction when that earlier climate change nearly wiped us out.

Now we face another climate change situation, this time man-made. The challenge that faces us all now is whether we can rise to the next level of sociality, not of course hard-wired like ants, but consciously reaching both inward and outward and doing the unselfish thing to stem the worst effects of climate change which will hit hardest in parts of the world that had little part in creating these changes and have little resources to cope with the disaster that faces them, such as various Pacific islands that will be inundated by the ocean, and large swaths of Africa that will face terrible drought and starvation, not to mention the increasingly powerful storms that are causing damage in various parts of the world. All this will exacerbate the already serious tensions between nations and factions around the world increasing the likelihood of war.

It would be very ironic if one natural climate change brought about our intelligence and social skills that have produced nation states and democracies and caring institutions; and then a man-made climate change finds us lacking in sufficient caring and intelligence to be able to deal with it. We are strange creatures.