The frog in the saucepan 

What this page does  This page brings together a number of different perspectives on the one big problem: why Homo sapiens is allowing itself to cook like the frog in the saucepan in Gregory Bateson’s parable about a frog in hot water: a frog dropped into a pot of cold water will remain there calmly while the water is gradually heated to a boil, but a frog dropped into hot water will leap out instantaneously.

The big question of our time   The question for us is "why, as our planet's biosphere is deteriorating more and more, we do not all rise up and say 'enough is enough!' More than that, why don't we act?  Why do we sacrifice our irreplaceable biosphere for just another few days or weeks of personal comfort?" [1]   We so often hope that just one more ecological catastrophe will be the one that serves as a sufficient wake-up call, the next health disaster or next extinction. But it never happens. [2]

Relating the big question to the vision of this website    When we look back to Homo sapiens in the late Pleistocene, we see them as just one of many mammalian species, not taking out of their environment any more than they return to it - a balance that would be sustainable in perpetuity.  But from around 40,000 years ago (say some), 10,000 years ago (say others) or more recently, our ecological footprint began expanding.  Tony McMichael and Crispin Tickell tell us that since the 1970s, we have been operating in an ecological deficit. The air, water and soil that sustain humans in the biosphere has been deteriorating.  Our ability to live the sort of life for which our inherited bodies and minds were designed has slipped further and further from our grasp.

Are we doomed to repeat on planet Earth the fate of Easter Island?  In October 2002 Jared Diamond, speaking at Princeton University on the collapse of societies, wondered "… what the Easter Islander who chopped down the last palm tree said as he or she did it. Was he saying, ‘What about our jobs? Do we care more for trees than for our jobs, of us loggers?’ Or maybe he was saying, ‘What about my private property rights? Get the big government of the chiefs off my back.’ Or maybe he was saying, ‘You’re predicting environmental disaster, but your environmental models are untested, we need more research before we can take action."

I made a similar point in my review of Tony McMichael’s superb book Human Frontiers.  I also made the point in that review about Homo sapiens’ ‘fight-or-flight’ evolutionarily determined instinct.

The destruction of the cod fisheries, previously a major human food source  The New York Times gave further illustrations on 7 November 2002 in an article about the depletion of cod fisheries.  The report says:

•     the United Nations warns that the world's 17 main cod fisheries are fished at or above sustainable levels.

•     anything less than a total, indefinite ban may leave the cod population vulnerable to nature's periodic environmental shocks

•     Franz Fischler, the European commissioner responsible for fisheries, has blasted the European Union's fishery ministers for letting the situation go so far.  "It is galling after repeatedly warning of the dire consequences of inaction, to see our worst fears realized."

•     Part of the problem is that harsher measures would devastate the economies of towns like Gilleleje, where cod fishing is the biggest industry.

•     marine biologists worry that politicians lack the will to sacrifice jobs for cod.

Alex Kirby, the BBC's environment correspondent, asks 'the frog question': On 10 January 2004, he wrote under the banner 'For the doom merchants amongst us, 2004 showed its fearsome teeth in a cracking start before it was even 10 days old.'  His article opened with: 'On 7 January a report in the journal Nature said climate change could speed a million land-based species towards extinction within the next 50 years. The next day the Worldwatch Institute declared modern lifestyles were bad for us and unsustainable for the planet. The UK Government's chief scientist now says climate change is a far worse danger than international terrorism. A triple onslaught like that defies anyone to head into the new year feeling even slightly positive about the human condition. Yet life goes on, and most of us worry more about paying the Christmas bills than about a world bereft of a quarter of its animals and plants. We believe the scientists: we simply do not connect their findings to our lives, our families, ourselves even. Some of us just refuse to react, blaming the messengers for their message and accusing the scientists of scaremongering. Most of us are convinced by the message – yet still we go on as if we had not a care in the world ... the evidence that human activities are intensifying natural climate change is impressive, and hardening. The world really is changing, almost imperceptibly, but in line with what science says will happen ... The trouble with imperceptible change is that for a long time it has virtually no impact, certainly not on the political timescale of four or five years. And politicians respond (often) to what they think matters to voters ... Yet the record preserved in cores drilled out of the Greenland icecap shows climate change can be very rapid indeed, flipping from one stable state to another in a few decades ... Perhaps it will take some sudden, savage reversal of Nature to make us sit up and take notice.'

Alex Kirby, a few days earlier (7 January 2004), had reported a scientist at a climate change conference (Professor John Schellnhuber) saying 'Kyoto is in a very difficult position and it may be necessary to find other exit strategies ... We may have missed the best time to intervene to protect the climate'.

The US government of George W Bush is determined to do something  George W Bush is playing into the hands of those who would prefer to do nothing to preserve our planet.  Instead, in January 2004 he announced his plans for a multi-trillion dollar expenditure (think of the opportunity cost!), to put humans back on the moon and even onto Mars as a precursor to evacuating a despoiled Earth when the time comes.  The environmental consequences and ethics of a space program are discussed in chapter 7 of Clive Hamilton's Growth Fetish (2003) where, as well as explaining why '[space] is seen by some as providing a refuge for humans should Earth become uninhabitable as a result of ecological catastrophe', he writes that 'Space is seen as an infinite waste dump'.

Notes

1. See also the quotations from Dmitry Orlov and Pentti Linkola (note 4 at the foot of this page).

2. See also our page on evolutionary psychology, our page on human hardwiring and our collection of essays that provide examples of the mismatch between Homo sapiens' mind and the constraints of our finite planet. Also relevant to our finite planet is our discussion of the ecolological footprint

Page up-dated on 20 July 2009