When is enough enough?

Originally published 4 February 2007

Eigh­teen years ago, Bill McK­ibben jolt­ed our envi­ron­men­tal aware­ness with a splen­did lit­tle book, The End of Nature, that cat­a­loged the ways human eco­nom­ic activ­i­ties are rend­ing the fab­ric of nature. In par­tic­u­lar, he drew atten­tion to changes in the atmos­phere and glob­al warm­ing. The book was trans­lat­ed into 20 lan­guages and may have been the most effec­tive call to envi­ron­men­tal action since Rachel Car­son­’s Silent Spring in 1962.

McK­ibben has remained a pro­lif­ic and artic­u­late cham­pi­on of the envi­ron­ment. In his 2003 book Enough: Stay­ing Human in an Engi­neered Age he laments the poten­tial end of human nature. He fore­sees a future, per­haps not so far away, when human chil­dren become con­sumer prod­ucts, like genet­i­cal­ly mod­i­fied toma­toes or ears of corn.

Human germline genet­ic engi­neer­ing — tin­ker­ing with genes that can be trans­mit­ted to suc­ces­sive gen­er­a­tions — is ille­gal in this coun­try and else­where. But such bans are frag­ile and eas­i­ly nib­bled away by eager genet­ic engi­neers. Stop now, says McK­ibben, before we lose the essence of our humanity.

He writes: “The first child whose genes come in part from some cor­po­rate lab, the first child who has been “enhanced” from what came before — that’s the first child who will glance back over his shoul­der and see a gap between him­self and human history.”

Is it real­is­tic to sup­pose that chil­dren can be engi­neered with the same mar­ketabil­i­ty as, say, dish­wash­ing deter­gent? Absolute­ly. Is McK­ibben’s pas­sion­ate call for cau­tion nec­es­sary? You bet­ter believe it.

The chal­lenge we face, how­ev­er, is not to stop in our tracks, but to nego­ti­ate a felic­i­tous future. McK­ibben’s “enough” flies in the face of cos­mic evo­lu­tion, which is based on inevitable, unstop­pable change. There is no such thing as “the end of nature.” What­ev­er the future holds, whether good or bad from a human or plan­e­tary point of view, is nat­ur­al.

Evo­lu­tion on Earth has led inex­orably, by nat­ur­al selec­tion, to ever more com­plex crea­tures with ever-big­ger brains. It need not have been us who emerged as the plan­et’s dom­i­nant species, but soon­er of lat­er some­thing like human con­scious­ness and cun­ning were prob­a­bly inevitable. With con­scious­ness and cun­ning came sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy, which — in the cos­mic scheme of things — are as nat­ur­al as res­pi­ra­tion, sex, mul­ti­cel­lu­lar­i­ty, or backbones.

McK­ibben does not reject the pos­si­bil­i­ty that biotech­nol­o­gy can bring changes for the bet­ter, only the omi­nous specter of germline genet­ic tin­ker­ing. But one gets the impres­sion he might have been equal­ly hap­py to have said “Enough!” on the eve of the Agri­cul­tur­al Rev­o­lu­tion, the Sci­en­tif­ic Rev­o­lu­tion, or the Indus­tri­al Revolution.

All of these steps in human evo­lu­tion have been fraught with omi­nous con­se­quences. But I sus­pect very few peo­ple today would vote to turn back the clock, and I sus­pect that a hun­dred years from now you could say the same. “The good old days” were nev­er as good as we like to imagine.

Our agen­da is not to stop the clock or turn it back but to ensure that an ever-larg­er pro­por­tion of the human pop­u­la­tion enjoys the fruits of sci­en­tif­ic and tech­no­log­i­cal progress: good health, edu­ca­tion, free­dom from tyran­ny and super­sti­tion, and a healthy and diverse nat­ur­al envi­ron­ment. Achiev­ing this will not be easy, and we will need the McK­ibbens of the world to guide us.

God knows there’s enough going on in the world today to be pes­simistic about. Read the the news too often and you are like­ly to throw up your hands in despair. Which is exact­ly the worst thing that can hap­pen. Pes­simism is the surest road to the grim future the McK­ibbens warn us against.

OK, so I’m an opti­mist. On what basis? How is it pos­si­ble to be an opti­mist in a world racked by envi­ron­men­tal degra­da­tion, reli­gious strife, pover­ty, hunger and disease?

Well, for one thing, a lit­tle his­to­ry helps. I know, for exam­ple, that pre-Columbian Amer­i­cans, so often evoked by envi­ron­men­tal­ists as a peo­ple liv­ing in bliss­ful har­mo­ny with nature, in fact lived in a state of con­stant war­fare. They were as capa­ble as we are of acts of unspeak­able cruelty.

Many envi­ron­men­tal­ist writ­ers rue the 17th-cen­tu­ry’s Sci­en­tif­ic Rev­o­lu­tion and its “dis­en­chant­ment” of nature. Would they rather have lived in 14th- or 15th-cen­tu­ry Europe? What was so enchant­i­ng about the Black Death, or the reli­gious wars between Protes­tants and Catholics?

The Enlight­en­ment, too, is often regret­ted as a binge of human hubris. What’s the alter­na­tive to enlight­ened rea­son? Burn­ing women as witch­es? An Index of For­bid­den Books?

Here are some things to be opti­mistic about.

Walk down the trendi­est street in many of the great cities of the world and see peo­ple of all races, eth­nic­i­ties, and sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion enjoy­ing life together.

Try to remem­ber, if you can, the phrase “bare­foot, preg­nant and in the kitchen.”

Vis­it Europe, and mar­vel that the bel­li­cose nation­al­ism that gave us two World Wars seems a thing of the past.

Read about the physi­cians from the Cen­ters for Dis­ease Con­trol and Doc­tors With­out Bor­ders brave­ly bring­ing mod­ern med­i­cine to the world’s poor­est people.

Note that small­pox, plague, polio, and many oth­er dis­eases are most­ly history.

Observe the ever-grow­ing num­ber of ordi­nary folks involved in envi­ron­ment activ­i­ties — pre­serv­ing wet­lands and green spaces, clean­ing up rivers, cre­at­ing pock­et parks.

Take cheer in the pre­dic­tion that human pop­u­la­tion will appar­ent­ly top out some­time in the mid­dle of this century.

Applaud the many altru­is­tic and envi­ron­men­tal­ly con­scious NGOs — non-gov­ern­men­tal orga­ni­za­tions — that pro­vide an anti­dote to gov­ern­ment indif­fer­ence and cor­po­rate greed. Take cheer in the phil­an­thropy of the likes of Bill and Melin­da Gates.

Applaud, too, the thou­sands of ide­al­is­tic young peo­ple from all over the world who ral­ly to protest the some­times egre­gious excess­es of multi­na­tion­al cor­po­ra­tions and finan­cial institutions.

Applaud the bright hope of cul­tur­al glob­al­iza­tion — the ever-widen­ing cir­cle of those we do not kill.

Hybrid cars. Solar ener­gy. Recy­cling. The inter­net. Peo­ple walk­ing on week­ends for AIDS, the Food Bank, MS, heart dis­ease. Be grate­ful, too, as I am, for the Bill McK­ibbens of the world, who speak for the pos­i­tive val­ues of the world we are leav­ing behind and the need to car­ry them into the future.

Let’s not sit around wring­ing our hands in nos­tal­gia for a primeval Eden that nev­er exist­ed. Let’s admit that we live in an “engi­neered age” and get on with engi­neer­ing a world that lifts the human spir­it, while car­ing for oth­er species and habitats.

Let’s rec­og­nize that human con­scious­ness and cul­ture are not things to be ashamed of, but to cel­e­brate. The ene­mies of a bright future are not sci­ence and engi­neer­ing. The ene­mies are igno­rance, intol­er­ance, greed, vio­lence, pover­ty, and disease.

I don’t mean to sound Pollyan­na-ish. Utopia is a myth, an unob­tain­able ide­al. But the dream of return­ing to a prelap­sar­i­an gar­den is also a myth — a myth that evis­cer­ates any hope of a promis­ing future.