Why We Need to Become Like Trees
People of place are viable members of a biotic community — modern humans are not
Trees are people of place, living within the matter and energy flow limits of their place. They can persist, and when decimated (e.g. a forest fire, Mount St. Helens explosion), they come back (unless humans turn their place into tree farms occupied by tree domesitants whether GMOed or not).
As their place (environment) changes, they may adapt by dispersion or by evolving their form if there is time enough (if modern humans don’t terraform their place into techno-industrial humanscape — industrial-agro-urbanscape — for a time).
“Are there imaginable constraints on our limbic behavior that follow from conscious analysis that make our system operate like trees?” — Jack Alpert
The needed-to-persist constraints were the hominin cultural norm (as evidenced by their persistence) and remain so for <10k San and <400 Hadza, remnant populations of normal humans rapidly being driven to extinction by the surrounding/encroaching expansionist humans despite their condition of being adapted long term to their environment. Our expansionistic form of culture appears to preclude/disallow discussion of transitioning to a different form of culture/civilization. All evidence I have is supportive, but one exception could prove me wrong.
Limbic references our evolved biological tendencies, i.e. genetic. Dogs are not people of place, but like our crop domesticants/cultivars they exist where we plant or feed them. They, like us, have no place in any biome. In their domesticant form, they depend on us (we depend on technology and ideology). Corn (maize) depends on us to plant it. When humans stop planting corn, it will go extinct.
Dogs may go feral, e.g. the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, where after the initial die-off and 15 generations, the dogs look wolf-like and live 3–4 years instead of 10–12 years. Unlike the K-strategist wolves in the zone, the dogs continue to overbreed, but in a few millennia they could evolve back into being K-strategists if mortality rates remain high and humans were excluded from the zone.
Wolves communicate, collaborate and share knowledge across generations. The older wolves teach hunting strategies and techniques to younger wolves by showing them how it’s done, passing down information (memes) from one generation to the next, maintaining a culture unique to each family (pack). Young males and females leave the family to join an established family if one of the alpha breeders dies or becomes non-reproductive, or to start a new pack by pairing up with another lone wolf.
Feral dogs may renormalize eventually, both genetically and memetically, or be replaced by wolves who were never denormalized (domesticated). But not at Chernobyl. Some humans never left and more are coming back, about 2400 work at Chernobyl now (security, maintenance, those still fighting to contain the radiation from Reactor №4… down from 6000 in 1986) short term and without families.
Dogs number about a 1000 (wolves 120) and dogs are being feed by people, and so remain dependent and will not renormalize. Only about 20% of the global dog population are owned pets and restrained. Village dogs, street dogs, dump dogs, neighborhood dogs, stray dogs, and to a lesser extent most feral dogs remain dependent on humans. The dingo in Australia is a feral dog likely to persist without humans. Other future canine species may trace their ancestry back to human domesticants.
Modern human domesticants may also renormalize, but they will take longer (about 6–12 times longer) and doing so may need to happen within the context of a need-to-renormalize narrative (culture), without which renormalizing may be impossible for modern humans whose verbal (cognitive) behavior and culture is far more complex than wolves.
Can modern humans, by some conscious analysis, make our system operate like trees, like a forest (plural for trees)? If we used what we already know, doing so would be easy peasy compared to finding enough modern humans who would consider transitioning to a viable form of civilization, such as Jack Alpert envisions.
The modern form of human cannot seek out a cultural physician because that would require entertaining the idea of needing one, i.e. of being non-viable as is. This may be hardwired into our form of culture (r-culture) if not our genetics.
Changing behavior may require a change in culture. In social species with culture (crows and human have, orangutangs and mayflies have not). Cultural information (memes) is within the genetic information system, and behavior evolves over the lifetime of an organism, then is not passed on as the genes of a species upon extinction are not (unless a paleogeneticist recovers them).
Changing behavior, beyond changing consumer preferences or driving screentimers to click on your clickbait, will involve changing culture, and not in marginal ways. If a core change is required, adding another app isn’t going to do it. Uninstalling Windows 25 (best before the blue-screen of death) and installing Civ 4.0 is needed to make systemic change, e.g. from an expansionist OS to a K-culture live-within-limits OS.
When an anthropologist asked the San hunters in one region why they didn’t hunt giraffe, she was told to consult their giraffe expert, an observational ecologist. She did and was told the giraffe is the midwife of the acacia trees, the keystone tree people whose absence significantly reduces environmental productivity. When water is not limiting in the Kalahari, nitrogen is, and the acacia is a nitrogen fixer whose good work benefits all other plants and animals, including San who know themselves to be animals of place (unlike all domesticants).
Giraffe eat the acacia’s fruit whose seeds pass through and out to maybe take root, enough to maintain the acacia population density. Hunting giraffe would have a short-term gain, but long-term harm, so the San don’t do it. The Bantu expansionists hunt them with dogs, guns, and pickups with spotlights at night to maximize short-term self interests, just like us. If the San elders knew what we know, they would tell us MEP, MPP, and MEPP be damned — don’t kill the midwives of the acacia, stupid. But no modern human can listen to Nature who has all the answers.
A metastatic cancer cell cannot seek out medical intervention for its condition, one it views as completely normal. If one in a million cancer cells did, they would merely self-select out of the hegemon, changing nothing.
The condition of modern humans does differ, however, in that modern humans can cause their own extinction without destroying the biosphere or even degrading it to a point no human in any form could persist, unlike a metastatic cancer that always destroys the soma it is a subsystem of.
This allows for a possibility of some humans (at one in a million, 8k could be a founding population) seeking to renormalize AND passing through the coming bottleneck (the Great Selection) event.
Or not.
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For involuntary change, join the Or-not MHEM. The belief that you are a free agent, with free will to choose your future (or get modern humans to choose their future), is error floating on a sea of ignorance in a thick fog of illusion.
[Note: MHEM membership excludes politicians and the recently (<1 year) politically active, including environmentalists. Otherwise, with the exception of the San, Hadza, and Pygmy, all other humans are Modern humans, and acknowledging that such is who and what you are is the requirement for being MHEM. MHEM includes members who celebrate Modern human life and favor the extinction of all life that humans do not value (aka “Hypers”). Hyper MHEM supporters may prefer to join Hyper MHEM. A minority faction views the condition of being a Modern human the way AA members view the condition of being an alcoholic — i.e. non-viable. The author is obviously one of the “Or-nots” after breakfast (but a Hyper before) who seek to “just say no” to the Anthropocene.]