This World Is Not Real

Like I said in my last post, the paleontologists came to the same conclusion the biologists did: it is essential that we care about biodiversity, and doing so requires a moral discussion on the order of ending slavery, declaring free speech, or striving for gender equality. All things that aren't really in their field! But they are in the field of moral philosophy, which is what I read next.

The moral philosophers I read sounded a lot like the environmentalists, except they hadn't concluded anything yet. They lamented humanity's lost connection to nature, but said the role of philosophy is in getting people to choose how much culture and nature they want, based on what science and economics tell them will happen. The thing is, science tells us environmental degradation, left unchecked, will ruin all of the cultural advancements we've made. Political theory says that in crowded environments where resources must be tightly controlled, democracy is unlikely: submarines, spaceships and the like are all military dictatorships. So we need to take this into account. But it seems like ethicists are more around to help people figure out what they want than to tell them what they should do. Which makes sense, but it's somewhat disappointing; one discomfiting thing about growing from a child to an adult is becoming your own moral authority, then realizing all our rules were just made up by other adults.

Ethical dilemmas in environmentalism are still possible, like when an elk was stuck in a tar pit in a US national park, and calling out for help before it was ripped to pieces by wolves. The consensus seems to be that humans should alleviate as much suffering that they are responsible for as possible, while respecting the wildness of animals. But what if the elk is from a locally threatened population, reduced by hunting, pushed to this dangerous habitat by encroaching settlement? What about the wolf's right to eat? He may be endangered as well. Merely extending human ethics to wild animals belittles or sabotages the harsh Darwinian realities of wild life, but the suffering that humans cause other animals is complicated and requires consensus built through discussion and moral prioritizing.

How do we make these decisions, though? It has to do with how we see ourselves as a species. I read some more philosophy that dealt with humans specifically, asking questions about whether or not we're special and if so, what we should do about it. From a certain perspective, we have escaped the Darwinian trap. Changes in our own behaviour are dictated by cultural, not biological evolution. We have self-reflective capacities we have yet to ascribe to any other species. And we have the power to affect the planet to an extent not shared by any other macro-organism.

Philosophers of human life generally agree that we have the choice not to follow natural selection in the same way that an amoeba does. We can choose to self-impose limits on the effect we have on the planet. If overpopulation would have disastrous socio-political consequences, it's in our best interests to do so. The most optimistic of them said that we are the only species that can prolong the Earth's window for supporting life, beyond what would naturally occur, because our science can help us engineer the climate. So we have the capacity to be the most positive species on the planet!

Offsetting this optimism was a strange and fascinating argument from astrophysicist J. Richard Gott. He attempted to determine whether humans would continue to increase in number and sophistication; whether we were a true exception. Dealing as astrophysicists do in competing theoretical explanations where scientific tests are impossible, all he could conclude was whether or not we should believe that we are exceptions, whether it was likely or not. He found that it was very unlikely, given the current population explosion, that it would continue. He made it clear that he didn't think humans would necessarily go extinct soon, but that they were unlikely to keep increasing.

The way he did this was argue that if the life we are living was picked at random from all of the human lives that have happened and will happen in the future, ours is most likely to be chronologically somewhere in the middle. Assuming we were thrown into one of the lives, it would be unlikely to be one of the first 5% of human lives, or one of the last 5%. And yet humans have existed in relatively modest numbers until the last few hundred years. So Gott argues that we should be sceptical of any potential future that imagines the population will continue to grow or even stay this high for a long period of time, since a significant percentage (10%?) of the human lives ever estimated to have existed are being lived right now.

This is a weird type of argument I was not familiar with, and one that seems likely to be wrong at first glance. After all, you could have made the same argument at any point in human history, and with hindsight you'd always be wrong. But it isn't claiming to predict anything, it's just saying that we shouldn't base our decisions on the theoretically unlikely event that the human population will continue to increase or stay at current levels for a long time. That conclusion actually seems pretty reasonable, despite the fact that humans continue to seem like an exception. We may well be, but we seem to be approaching the carrying capacity of an increasingly fragile Earth. And we are not yet close to colonizing other worlds, so this is a hard limit (technology-dependent) for now.

So far I'd seen environmentalists, biologists, paleontologists, and philosophers weigh on the problem of the loss of biodiversity. One thing they all had in common was they recommend immediate action, and the second thing they had in common was passing the buck of actually enacting the necessary change to the political and economic spheres. So I knew I needed to learn more about that; not only what we need to change, but the ways the current system makes change difficult.

A Summer Reading List

I just turned 26. When I was in high school our environmental education was very good, compared to what has been taught for most of human history. Silent Spring had been out for decades, and most people had seen An Inconvenient Truth. We knew a lot more about the science of the environment, and as students we were painted a bleak future of doom-soon extrapolating graphs. The urgency of the material and environmentalist exhortations of individual action was undercut by our teachers' (sometimes unconcealed) feeling of powerlessness. Scaring people in environmentalism is a double-edged sword; you push some people into action, but for many others it becomes easier to detach emotionally: “we're all screwed, so what do I care?” And the more dire predictions you use, the more like a millenarian cult leader you sound. We're running out of tungsten! No more lightbulbs! Then it turns out LED lights are more energy efficient anyway. People stop listening when you're constantly predicting a rapture that never comes.

And yet this was the tone of much of the environmental and biological literature I read for this project. Even when dispelling myths like the 50,000 species some say are going extinct a year (which is based on a completely made up number), one of their primary concerns is inspiring donations and grants for their research. Not that this is a bad thing; research on current extinctions is very important, and the true number that occur per year is undoubtedly still a scary one. But knowing that the articles in a lot of the books were recommending very specific courses of action made me warier of them. If not the numbers themselves, but the picture they were painting with them. I hate being sold, even on a good cause. I'd much rather come to the same conclusion on my own.

Even so, biologists talking about the current human-led biodiversity loss basically agreed that convincing people of the importance of biodiversity loss is the foremost challenge of the 21^st century. If I'd originally been asked to say why biodiversity is important, I wouldn't have had a ready answer but I could have reasoned my way into a few. Now I had several: biologists, eager to convince readers of the importance of biodiversity, have long lists of reasons why it's important. They all made sense and yet, I kept thinking, the species we have lost in recorded history have mostly been localized, fragile ones. Island species, ones with very specific eating habits or habitats, ones without much competition. It's easy to romanticize the loss of the dodo, but hard to see what the extinction of a strange flightless bird on a single island means for the future of our planet. As did more practical concerns like cures for diseases that have yet to be discovered, compounds for industry that have yet to be extracted from endangered Amazonian beetles. And more abstract ones, like the existence of a tipping point which once passed will cause massive chains of extinction. Mourning the loss of things we don't have yet and theoretical problems we may face; I could see why getting people to care about these things would be a challenge!

Ironically, it took me reading less alarmist paleontological sources to start to get worried. Especially when they came to the same conclusions as the biologists had. The history of mass extinctions is interesting; we know of at least five that meet the threshold we created, but large extinction events have been happening almost continuously since there has been life on Earth. Paleontologists are generally divided on their causes, but I read good summaries of their consensus opinions.


Two things that I learned stuck out to me. One was just how variable the Earth's climate has been over both the short term and long term. The gas composition of the atmosphere, the temperature, the sea level and its chemical composition, all of these things fluctuate massively all the time. The current sea level is almost the lowest it's ever been in the Earth's history, as is the level of CO2 in the atmosphere. It surprised me that even though the short term increase in CO2 that we worry so much about may have dire implications for our planet, in terms of hundreds of millions of years, a lack of CO2 is predicted to be a bigger problem, as trees gradually convert virtually all of it into oxygen. It was also fascinating how much life determines its own conditions. Changes in microorganisms can completely shift chemical conditions in the oceans, for example. Runaway reproductive success for one type of organisms was always a key component in theories of mass extinction.

Paleontology is all about time scale, and the long one is often counter-intuitive. Paleontologists generally agree that a large meteorite only had a hand in one of the mass extinctions, the C-T one that killed the dinosaurs. Except the fossil record seems to show that most dinosaurs were already extinct by then, and only two groups were wiped out. Like when I researched the near-extinction of the bison and found evidence that their numbers had already been falling for centuries before the arrival of Europeans, extinction seems to not usually be that dramatic. More often, it's a gradual fading away of an old species in its sleep rather than a young species in its prime.

That said, cascading chains of extinction can and have taken out otherwise successful species. The second thing I found striking was that in mass extinctions, there was always an accompanying drop in biomass, the amount (not diversity) of life on Earth. Maybe this is obvious, but I didn't see why having lots of types of organisms go extinct would necessarily mean there would be less tons of living stuff, worldwide. If some things were out-competed by others, aren't successful species then more numerous to make up for it? Apparently yes, but not in the long term, because of the extreme variability of the Earth's climate. So if Australia gets a couple degrees cooler, the cane toads, a newly introduced species, might all die because they can't take it, whereas the older established species that they wiped out would have survived (because the very fact that they're old species means they've probably survived a similar cooling period in the past).

This fact, that species exist places because they are best suited to live there in the long term, and that allowing them to be extirpated can create lifeless wastelands in the relatively short term, really convinced me. Life is just something that's managed to make solar energy useful to itself, hung on through severe climactic variations, and even had a hand in dictating its own conditions on Earth: creating an atmosphere, making the planet able to better sustain life. It's totally possible for the efficiency at which life converts solar energy into a variety of living things to fall apart until, like Mars, it's just sunlight hitting bare rock. The less biodiversity we have, the more delicate our balance, the more dependent we are on current climactic conditions staying the same. And they're always changing, that has never happened! We need as many players as possible ready to step up when their time comes, and then fade into the background when others are better suited, slowly changing and branching out to be ready for when they're needed again.

Solid New Intro

If my last album MB-LP was an album as a writing project, trying to think myself into the heads of people who saw the world very differently from me, then my next album Extinct! is an album as a research project. An omnivorous, note-taking binge on the way different academic disciplines deal with environmentalism and the way we think about the impact humans are having.

I started with a question my brother made fun of me for even asking: “why is extinction a bad thing? Why is biodiversity good?” Intuitively, it seems obvious, but I didn't feel like I could explain it to people with evidence, off the top of my head. I felt some urgency to be able to do that, especially because I'd taken a few classes in Environmental History while studying at McGill University, and that wasn't that long ago.

Fun fact: I'm writing this while on tour, on a bus rolling through Penetanguishene, ON. That's where, in 1904, someone saw the very last passenger pigeon in the wild. Passenger pigeons, along with the bison, are a classic example of how the mighty can fall. They were, for a time, the most common bird in the world—ten billion, maybe, in their North American Habitat—and now there are none. A little longer and sleeker than the rock doves that are our common pigeons today, they got together in flocks of staggering numbers. A continuous sky-river of birds a mile wide could take three days and nights to pass over. To exist in such close quarters and large numbers, they basically acted as automatons: throw a rock at the birds flying over, and they would swerve to avoid it, but for the next three days the birds following would mindlessly deviate in the same way.

So is it a bad thing there are no Passenger Pigeons anymore? If you're a passenger pigeon, then unquestionably. If you're a human, it gets more complicated. The birds had been around in modest numbers since the Pleistocene, that is, thousands of years, before exploding into the most numerous birds on earth. Their biggest competition for food and habitat was humans. They fed on the same tree products, seeds, and nuts as the indigenous people of North America did, and flocked together to communicate where this irregularly occurring food could be found. Finding this food required large, unbroken areas of forest which were surprisingly hard to come by in pre-Colombian North America, since native people were constantly burning the forests to create lots of boundaries between ecosystems where a variety of types of food can be found.

The arrival of Europeans changed the balance between humans and pigeons drastically. The diseases that spread across North American trade routes travelled faster than the newcomers themselves, killing a huge number of natives and removing the passenger pigeon's largest competitor for food and habitat. The forests, left unchecked, grew into huge expanses across which larger flocks of passenger pigeons could range. Their numbers exploded, and European settlers regarded them as both a nuisance (the Jesuits in New France got the pope to excommunicate the birds from the Catholic Church because of the damage they caused to crops) and a boon (pigeon meat was a major source of food and the original ingredient in Quebec's national dish, tourtière), but the birds were always recognized as a force to be reckoned with.

The rise of the passenger pigeon is a classic example of what ecologists call a “weed species”, an organism that takes a niche and runs with it in a short period of time. That should sound familiar. Humans are the ultimate weed species, and the speed at which European settlement in North America began to put pressure on the newly abundant passenger pigeon again, after the demographic collapse of the natives gave them a niche, is what doomed the bird to extinction. The passenger pigeon's extreme social/behavioral adaptation was necessary, since they lived in such dense flocks that absolute conformity was the only way to function. But their rigid patterns of behaviour also meant they weren't able to adjust to smaller flock sizes and sections of forest fast enough to save their species from going utterly extinct. Captive flocks kept in pens would quickly stop reproducing, and the re-settlement of North America necessitated the breakup of the massive forests and the control of species that would threaten the settlers' food supplies.

This year, in a museum in Glasgow, Scotland, I saw my first passenger pigeon. It was stuffed. Should I be sad that that's the only way I'll get to see them? There are still other types of pigeon around, and some people even hate those. Was passenger pigeon vs. human a fair fight, weed specie against weed specie, that we happened to win? Humanity's biggest competition for food these days is the carrying capacity of the planet. We're exhausting not just short-term, opportunistic species like the passenger pigeon, but long-established ones too. In isolation, losing the passenger pigeon might be a small thing, but is it symptomatic of a problem we have as a species? Are wee too good of a weed species? Are we just as mindless in throwing the rocks as the birds are in swerving to avoid them?

These are the sorts of questions I had when I started researching this album, as well as more ethical questions. How bad is it to make something extinct? At what point is it an acceptable trade-off? It seems natural to be rooting for humans, but how do you balance long-range concerns about the quality of life of future generations and the health of the planet with the needs of people living right now? Harder still, how do you convince other people to think about these things when they act?

I got a bunch of books out of various libraries and started making notes. I wasn't concerned with song ideas, just gathering information, collecting theses, and remembering the most interesting examples. I knew the project would be multi-disciplinary because I was asking all kinds of questions, coming at extinction and environmentalism with many different sets of concerns. So I decided to focus on specific aspects of extinction in turn. I would first read current biology and environmentalism to see what scientists studying biodiversity right now were saying about its importance. Then I would study paleontology and the history of earth's mass extinctions, to see what had already happened and what longer-term processes were at work. Then I would read philosophy and anthropology. Why do humans drive things to extinction, how bad is it ethically, and do we have the capacity to act differently? I then wanted to incorporate economics, as a way of looking at how we choose to act and value our environment. And throughout, I would be paying attention to the educational aspect; how the different disciplines were presenting their material, whether they were trying to inspire change or action, and how. I figured this would be important if I wanted to present some of what I learned in my songs.