Peek a Boo

We hold our hands in front of our faces and tell an infant, “Peek a boo!”
Then we put our hands back in front of our face and ask, “Where’s the baby?” From the earliest days of life we are thus trained that some how out of sight equals out of mind. But just like in the childish game we are startled when it comes back and says again, peek a boo.

Perhaps it is just an evolutionary flaw, a hole in our intelligence that only rears it’s head from time to time. Slowing, but not eliminating human progress. Time after time individual human civilizations have withered and died off because their leadership refused to address problems and have put their hands in front of their faces and said, “There that solves that problem.”

On Easter Island a peaceful civilization once thrived, living in a lush forested Island in a virtual paradise. The huge stone idols they created tell us of the availability of labor and the strength of their economy. The population eventually rose to over fifteen thousand but as it did the need for wood and fresh water increased as well. As the land was deforested the amount of annual rainfall declined causing crop yields to fall as well.

In less than a generation the islanders that had lived in peaceful coexistence for eons devolved from carving monuments to carving spearpoints. Raids on villages for the resources of food and water became common, war became the norm and peace was the exception. The Islanders learned a bitter lesson that civilization is a voluntary organization that it will evaporate in an instant when resources grow short.

They rejected all of their past ideology as they toppled over and broke many of the stone idols. With their remaining strength they smashed the faces of the idols destroying their power because the gods had let them down. This was the Gods doing visiting these punishments upon them. When the surviving population was down to around a thousand the wars stopped, their numbers sufficiently reduced the degraded island could again support their smaller numbers.

The Mayan Empire stretched all across modern day Mexico with beautiful cities and temples complete with highways. The Myan’s lived in a lush jungle rain forest paradise, they farmed using crop irrigation they traded and prospered for hundreds of years. But living in a rainforest means your fresh water resources are in the skies. The population had grown and farming in the jungle quickly exhausts the soil requiring more land and more deforestation.

Then one day the rain stopped or greatly diminished and as crops failed once again humans ceased being part of an empire and became part of a war party. The next village over was no longer seen as their brothers but as their enemies and the sooner they were eliminated the sooner they could eat. The sacrifices at the temples failed to bring rain and the belief and the faith of the masses evaporated like a forest mist. The population fell and the highways cities and temples were reclaimed by the jungle rain forest. The population sufficiently culled they began again to farm and trade as the pressure for the resources had declined.

The British Navy had ruled the waves for centuries but in England the timber to build sailing ships was running out. Wood for the cooking and heating fires was growing scarce and more expensive, their answer was coal. They used technology to solve their problems and with coal you could make iron and with iron you could make iron ships. Little concern was given to the spoiled land or the lives of the miners. The soot was written off as the cost of progress.

The cost of progress has brought us to the problems we face today, population, environment, capitalism and technology. Much like the riddle, of farmer who went to market and purchased a fox a goose, and a bag of beans. On his way home, the farmer came to the bank of a river and hired a boat. But in crossing the river by boat, the farmer could carry only himself and a single one of his purchases. If left alone, the fox would eat the goose, and the goose would eat the beans. The farmer’s challenge was to carry himself and his purchases to the far bank of the river, leaving each purchase intact.

Our task is much more daunting; our technology allows the worlds population to rise but also allows capitalism to move the most polluting industries to the least regulated regions of the world exacerbating pollution. As world population rises technology replaces human power with machine power making human labor unnecessary causing an ever-increasing cycle of poverty. The demands of rising population cause an over consumption of resources and increased environmental degradation.

World War Two was the worlds first environmental World War, of course ideology was a factor but the ultimate goal that the Nazi Germans sought was Lebensraum- living space. To the Japanese it wasn’t so much space as raw materials, the embargo of US oil to Japan made the capture of the Dutch East Indies a strategic imperative for them. The German mechanized war machine as well was critically short of oil. Hitler maintained, “if I do not get the oil of Maikop and Grozny (Caucasus’s) then I must end this war.”

After the war the belief that atomic technology would end the need for energy resource wars. However just to be on the safe side and in the meantime the United States shielded friendly despots and disposed of unfriendly elected governments to secure stable oil supplies. So the invasion of Iraq should be viewed as only the continuation and expansion of fifty years of US foreign policy. It is no different today than that of the Islander or the Mayan or the German or the Japanese seeking resources at the point of a spear. Much has been made about the possibility that the world is reaching peek oil production when in actuality the question is have we reached peek humanity?

Has our inability to realistically address world problems begun to turn the clock back and tied the hands of human progress? The recent G8 summit gave lip service to environmental concerns, the United States and China have agreed to talk about cutting green house gas emissions by 50% within 50 years. Politicians playing peek a boo while hiding their faces behind their hands, pretending that if they ignore it, maybe it might go away.

But it won’t go away and it can’t be handled by a piecemeal approach the Europeans have taken the lead as well as the Japanese in green technology but they can’t just bail out their half of the boat. The planet has a problem or rather we have a problem the planet’s problem is human habitation. The communist Chinese addressed their own population problem head on. They explained to their people with a chart illustrating as China’s population rose the ability to care and feed for all those millions declined until it reach a point where it couldn’t be maintained at all.

A sobering thought for us all that even if we cut green house emissions by 50% in 25 years the population growth will negate any savings. The Christian faiths condemned China’s policy loudly while it remained silent and even supportive of resource wars affecting their own flocks. The Arab and Israeli conflict as well is rooted as much in population as it is in theology or politics. The area in question is small and fresh water resources are scarce and the Palestinians have a higher birth rate than the Israelis do. So the Israeli’s in turn welcome any an all non-Palestinians wishing to immigrate.

A Jewish homeland cannot be made up of a majority Palestinian population and of course the Israelis can’t make the Palestinians leave but they can make it to their advantage to leave. The Israeli’s continue carve out settlements as if it were some virgin territory as if someone else wasn’t living on that same ground a year before. We can couch it in theology or make the issue about race but it obscures the fact of too many people on too little land. The region is a microcosm for the coming world crisis.

The footprints of human history shows clearly where this path leads us to, with an ever growing population and dwindling resources made worse by the twin headed Gorgon of predatory Capitalism and rampant consumerism will make a garbage dump out of the planet and ashes of the human civilization. We as a species began living in caves and the survivors will in all eventualities end up returning to them, Peek a boo!