Ecological Optimism

A vision of the world past overpopulation and biological pollution — a world in which satellite photography will not pick out human activity — humanity as nature in the state of nature, through nature — a post-Anthropocene

A seething mass of ants covers your stomach, chest, arms, legs, face, forehead, pushing into the hollows of your ears.

In the desert, the rain does not come. The Amazon is burned flat and covered with cows for two generations, and then the land is no longer good for grazing cows. Herbicides fester in the soil, allowing only the life of highly-selected mushrooms, which begin to parasitize the bodies of human infants. Parents discover brown traces of burrowing fungus inside the palms of infants’ hands. Deer, overpopulating, spread diseases which make easy leaps to other mammals, other pack mammals, as humanity has become a herd.

First, the worst news. This is the only information that matters:

A seething mass of life, a torrent of meaningless life, life living in cheap housing turning the rotisserie spit at a 7–11, life without purpose, germ life, life unable to feed itself, life without self-criticism, idiot life, life not recognizing itself in a mirror, life incapable of reason or thought: life less than human life.

This is the only map that matters:

In the flat and hollow places on this map, a child can be raised expecting a welcome. In the fat and bulging places, the child will not receive an education, meaningful work, the prospect of a home and the life of a family. Where there are few of us, we are worth more; in Bangladesh, we are worthless.

This is disgusting and unsolveable through democratic process. This is pollution, climate change, the clear-cutting of forests, the human stain everywhere. This is a bad smell in the nostrils of a newborn child which lingers until death: the smell of too many people, people stacked on people, the society of a shipping container.

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However —

We can imagine something different.

Tear down the houses or leave them to rot. The newbuilts won’t last long without inhabitants. The mouthparts of insects, the cycles of freeze and thaw, and the increasingly savage storms we have brought through atmospheric pollution will scrub our handprint from the earth in a handful of generations.

1. In the post-Anthropocene, each child is welcomed into a society that wants her as much as her parents wanted her. This is because the decision to create a child should be a social decision, not just a decision between a mother and father. Not every person should be able to have a child. Not every couple should be eligible to have a child. The raising of children should be communal.
2. This planet is the end. We cannot travel to other Earth-like planets or remake Mars in our own image. As life on this planet becomes increasingly intolerable and disgusting, people will yearn for the mass death of strangers across the planet. This is the first step — ending international aid entirely, and perhaps even covert actions by democratic governments to increase war, famine, and death in other places to lower the numbers of the herd. An overpopulation of deer causes the deer to hate one another: there are no good places to eat or sleep, the water is filthy, the grass chewed down to the soil. The second step is the ecological extremist, the person who creates or spreads pathogens to thin the herd, or employs bombings, nuclear weapons, and the other methods of terrorism to force governments to restrict population growth or simply cause the mass and indiscriminate death of millions. This is a political and social phenomenon, but also a biological phenomenon — animals cannot thrive under the conditions of overpopulation.
3. Things fall apart. Famine even in the West, mass nihilism in a world of polluted air and water in which life is the travel in a sealed vehicle from the small box of home to the small box of work, or simply life from bed to desk to desk to bed, again and again, over an increasingly shrinking number of years. Life expectancy down. Family creation down — but still, some idiots will spawn and spawn and spawn in their desert, dungheap, or mobile home, and their children will crawl across the world to find work and a home, and even the continental shelves will crack from the weight of our bodies and our concrete.
4. We will not rebuild because we will be surrounded by ruins and biologically changed by the sicknesses which spread across our herd. We will cling to strong rules and strong rulers. Democracy will be devalued and disliked, and the herd will not want the herd to rule: we will distrust our own selves. I believe this will usher in a new time, the rule of scientists and doctors. I believe people trained in medicine will be the first to take government seriously on animal principles, to thin the herd and control the herd and find a better life for the herd. I believe doctors and scientists will help us control our growth. Possibly, they will do this by ensuring each child is born infertile and can only become fertile through expensive, government-controlled genetic therapies, or perhaps that only one in a hundred children is born fertile in the manner of some social insects; regardless, there will be fewer of us, and each one of us will be worth more in those thinning days.
5. Now we live in a time of explosions and disgust, but before the real nastiness begins: before the tent cities are erected in each parking lot, before the newly-arrived herds begin to burn down national forests to erect plywood houses, before nausea spreads through America, pure nausea, the disgust at seeing ourselves.
6. Someday, there will be new animals evolving in hidden niches unseen by human persons, and scientists will travel the world in primitive rafts, writing by hand or transmitting information to the hidden cities through the last few satellites, and each new human life will be welcomed with religious adoration. The project of science will have overtaken all other human projects, but particularly the project of growth.
7. A humanity will exist which knows itself — in particular, its potential for ecological harm. A humanity will exist like the polities of the gorillas, beluga whales, or maple trees.