Summer World_ A Season of Bounty - Bernd Heinrich [83]
It is at this point tempting to spout personal and political views. But factual scenarios are scarcely either. There is the necessity of maintaining sound natural ecosystems—those that sustain the life of all animals that evolved in them and that live there in a complex unity.
I am an optimist. There is a way. As Thoreau wrote, “Men think it is essential that the Nations have commerce, and export ice, and talk through the telephone, and ride thirty miles an hour.” He meant they are mistaken. I believe Thoreau was a happy man. People have lived happily in a small cabin in the woods where they had none of the amenities such as refrigerators, oil furnaces, electric toasters, cars, telephones, television, running water, etc. Some who have experienced it even think with nostalgia of such a presumably deprived existence.
It is unlikely that we will, or even can, change our lifestyles radically enough to make much difference. It is madness to suppose we would make a significant difference by using more energy-efficient lightbulbs and using agrofuels rather than oil, or that city dwellers can or would take up a rural farming or a hunter-gatherer lifestyle: given our numbers, there is no land. There is only one thing to do that will have an almost immediate effect (say, in a century or two): radical reductions of population. Ironically, if we do take that route then we can have everything—cars, jetliners, televisions, and all the rest, even perpetual summer. With a low population we could subsist and get by, in perpetuity, with the most efficient method yet devised for capturing solar energy—trees.
We can cut down some of the most beautiful creations imaginable, but out of forests. That requires having more forests rather than creating tree plantations. We need two things: clear vision and also a spiritual imperative so that we will focus on the ultimate ecology, not the proximate economy. The increase in human happiness of future generations that this simple solution would create staggers the imagination, and the vast misery that would result if we do not adopt it is almost too horrendous to contemplate. Those are the “knowns.” The solution is obvious. The treating of symptoms is opinion and hype.
I ask here instead how we got to where we are now. To start simply, I think we can learn a lot from—yes—hair. If one accepts the almost universally applied premise that we evolved from furred apelike ancestors, then our present insufficient amount of insulating body hair indicates that we evolved while being subjected to more overheating than was experienced by them while other (furred) lines became present-day apes. (An alternative hypothesis, which needs scarce consideration, is that we became naked to shed lice. If that were true, then any number of other primates would also be naked.) That is, not only did we not need insulation; it was a liability in terms of survival. We were, therefore, spawned by a perpetual summer world.
When Homo sapiens first spread out of Africa about 150,000 years ago (plus or minus a few tens of thousands of years), we were, as now, already defurred or nearly so. However, by then we were also clever enough to co-opt the fur of other animals who had already adapted to a cold environment. We don’t know precisely when that happened, but thanks to lice, DNA technology, and clever sleuthing by the geneticist Mark Stoneking at the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology, it looks as though we became clothed about 115,000 years ago. The remarkable closeness in the two dates—spreading out of Africa and becoming clothed—is probably not coincidental.
Lice are ectoparasites (parasites living on our skin rather than under it), and ectoparasites are remarkably species-specific; each kind of bird or mammal has its very own louse and flea species living on it because each is an island with regard