And I have mixed feelings about the whole thing. With oil prices skyrocketing, the Iraq war spiraling downward into an ever more dismal abyss,
the economy falling apart, and to top it all off the specter of global climate crisis ready to finish us off it would seem that the last thing we want to hear is that people are living shorter lives. But that appears to be just what is happening.
A new study shows that there are large parts of our country where the average life span is getting shorter. The main culprits seem to be “side effects” of our lavish life styles. Lung cancer from pollution, diabetes and heart attacks from eating too much food. Depressing, but revealing.
What Did the Researchers Do and Find?
The researchers looked at differences in death rates between all counties in US states plus the District of Columbia over four decades, from 1961 to 1999. They obtained the data on number of deaths from the National Center for Health Statistics, and they obtained data on the number of people living in each county from the US Census. The NCHS did not provide death data after 2001. They broke the death rates down by sex and by disease to assess trends over time for women and men, and for different causes of death.
Over these four decades, the researchers found that the overall US life expectancy increased from 67 to 74 years of age for men and from 74 to 80 years for women. Between 1961 and 1983 the death rate fell in both men and women, largely due to reductions in deaths from cardiovascular disease (heart disease and stroke). During this same period, 1961–1983, the differences in death rates among/across different counties fell. However, beginning in the early 1980s the differences in death rates among/across different counties began to increase. The worst-off counties no longer experienced a fall in death rates, and in a substantial number of counties, mortality actually increased, especially for women, a shift that the researchers call “the reversal of fortunes.†This stagnation in the worst-off counties was primarily caused by a slowdown or halt in the reduction of deaths from cardiovascular disease coupled with a moderate rise in a number of other diseases, such as lung cancer, chronic lung disease, and diabetes, in both men and women, and a rise in HIV/AIDS and homicide in men. The researchers’ key finding, therefore, was that the differences in life expectancy across different counties initially narrowed and then widened.
What Do these Findings Mean?
The findings suggest that beginning in the early 1980s and continuing through 1999 those who were already disadvantaged did not benefit from the gains in life expectancy experienced by the advantaged, and some became even worse off. The study emphasizes how important it is to monitor health inequalities between different groups, in order to ensure that everyone—and not just the well-off—can experience gains in life expectancy. Although the “reversal of fortune†that the researchers found applied to only a minority of the population, the authors argue that their study results are troubling because an oft-stated aim of the US health system is the improvement of the health of “all people, and especially those at greater risk of health disparitiesâ€
So there you go, the rich get rich cause the problems and then don’t let the poor people in on any of the solution. Wee! Sounds like great fun.
Human beings like to pride themselves on all the fun and interesting ideas they have. I am one of them, when I read a great book of hear a great song I am uplifted and find beauty in the human condition. But we have forgotten one important fact, nature couldn’t give a shit. Thats right, natural selection, physics, chemistry, the sun, the moon, gravity (nature), doesn’t give two warm turds about humanity.
If every human on this planet were to vanish suddenly it wouldn’t mean a hill of beans to some bacteria living around a thermal vent on the bottom of some ocean. Some dogs might care for a couple of weeks, but they would soon move on to running in packs returning slowly to wolf like behavior.
The sad honest truth of it all is the only thing on this planet the really truly cares about people, are other people. And they can’t even be bothered to do that very often. When people talk about “saving the earth” and “protecting the environment” they really mean “keep this planet habitable to human beings.”
If a global war, or giant climate crisis killed off all the humans, and most of the rest of the species on this planet, the earth would shrug for a couple of million years, and nature would just keep on trucking. Some sort of squid or bacteria or tiny mouse would survive and keep right on evolving to meet whatever climate shows up. Human beings however are a highly complex, and therefor highly fragile species that could easily be wiped out by any number of things.
We are dependent on so many natural things, food, air, water, predictable climate, that if any one of these systems gets out of whack the rest soon fall apart. The next time you hear some hippy environmentalists squawking on and on about how you have to save this owl, or this river, or stop global warming, remember they aren’t really trying to help an owl, or a river, or the climate, they are trying to help YOU.
Though I agree with some of what you say, I also diverge with some of your points.
1) “But we have forgotten one important fact, nature couldn’t give a shit.”
Though I understand the idea you’re expressing, I disagree with anthropomorphizing “nature”. To me “nature” does not not care (intentional repetition of “not”) or care; it does neither. To me, it doesn’t have the capacity to feel, form opinions, make judgments; it is neutral to the point of being beyond even being definable as neutral. Otherwise we are ascribing human traits to what is most definitely not a human being. It grants it a consciousness and that starts down a slippery path. I’m well aware of Gaia theories that ascribe such consciousness to complex, global, living systems, but, even if true, applying human traits to such a system is reductionist in the extreme. The other risk in anthropomorphizing nature is that it sets up another “us†versus “them†dichotomy that humans just so love to cling to. If “nature†is cast in a cold, indifferent, callous light that cares nothing for the fate of humanity, then it is something to be turned into an enemy to be defeated, an obstacle to be beaten down, or an unbridled system that must be brought under control. I’m not suggesting that that is your personal opinion but it certainly is the opinion of many.
To me, the best (and still far from grasping the true essence of it all) description is that “nature” simply IS; it is that indivisible point of IS-ness, that ever-unfolding moment in the present of all that is in the act of existing, of being. It is free of all human appellations; positive or negative. We are a part of “it†but we do not define “it”. “It” is a system who’s complexity I believe we’ve only just barely begun to grasp. Or, perhaps, we did grasp it at one time and were much more aligned with the natural world. But then we got so excited by the fact we could speak, make tools, and effect the environment around us that we lost site of that connection and how it effects us still.
But in the sense of what you’re trying to express, I agree with you; the Earth and it’s living organisms will continue on with or without homo sapiens. That some get taken down with us should we become extinct will not matter in the long run to the continuation of life on this planet; it just won’t be OUR form of life.
2) “If a global war, or giant climate crisis killed off all the humans, and most of the rest of the species on this planet, the earth would shrug for a couple of million years, and nature would just keep on trucking. ”
Again, I agree in principle but diverge on specifics. It is, in my opinion, the height of arrogance and a disservice to the movement they support for environmentalists to resort to the propaganda that human beings are anywhere near capable of the global-scale extermination of the life and biosphere of this planet. Earth’s life forms have been subjected to no less than 5 Extinction Level Events (ELEs) over the course of it’s history. Whether near instantaneous in their devastation or occurring over a period of a few months, years, or centuries the results have been the same; the mass extinction of practically everything larger than an algae colony or a small mammal depending on which ELE we’re talking about. Guess what; life bounced back more numerous and robust every time!
It could be conjectured that, short of the planet being baked by the Sun swelling to a red giant or going nova or an asteroid sufficiently large and energetic enough colliding with and breaking the planet into pieces, life here will continue for several millions or even billions of years. Radiation from a global thermonuclear war wouldn’t even end all life as there have been bacteria found living in the pores of rocks 10,000 feet below the surface in addition to the bacteria living around the deep sea thermal vents that you mention. Life evolved to survive in conditions far harsher than anything humans can possibly come up with at present and will endure.
The most recent ELE that took out the dinosaurs is theorized to have caused the extinction of 90% of the species alive at the time in probably less than a decade (when factoring in the aftermath of the immediate destructive force of the impact in the form of a “nuclear†winter, eliminating most plant life at the bottom of the food chain). That’s 90%! Stop and think for a moment what the mass extinction of 90% of the species alive today would look like and the amount of energy it would take to accomplish that ………………………. makes the current levels of extinction (anthropogenic or otherwise) pale by comparison. Yet, a few million years after that ELE we have, lo and behold, an even richer and denser biosphere than existed at the time of the dinosaurs (if measured by the number of species extant)! And lest we forget, this planet started with a Carbon Dioxide atmosphere. It took a few million years for photosynthesizing life forms to convert it to the CO2 / O2 mix we have today (which, ironically enough, was itself a hypothesized cause of a mass extinction of many photosynthesizing life forms at the time; look up “The Great Oxygen Crisis”).
Claiming that humans are going to cause the mass extinction of life on this planet due to climate change is a ridiculous scare tactic which discredits the environmental movement. Yes, global warming is real, yes, specialized species unable to adapt will become extinct, and, yes, I agree that those are undesirable consequences and, where we are able to make a change in our current practices, we should. But I’d prefer some honesty from the environmental movement on this point. Stop claiming that we’re destroying the planet. We aren’t destroying the planet; Earth is a lot, lot, lot hardier than you give it credit. What they’re really saying is, “We are changing the environment in such a way that it poses a risk to the health and continued existence of homo sapiens and several other species.” And, as I suspect, it goes even deeper than that. What some are really, REALLY saying is, “Stop changing the environment in such a way that it poses a risk to the health and continued existence of ME PERSONALLY and to the wild places of this planet that I want to treat as my personal playground!”
Now, there’s nothing wrong with a healthy sense of self-preservation, but at least have the courage to say what you mean. Better yet, educate people with a carrot instead of a stick. Help people to understand how they are a part of the world around them and their health is impacted by its health. Use positive reinforcement rather than doomsday predictions and victimization portrayals because all that does is lead to apathy when the horrible consequences predicted will take a couple generations to manifest (if it doesn’t affect someone immediately most people tend to forget about it or don’t care). Funny thing about humans; scare them enough and they adapt to the point where it either doesn’t scare them anymore, they learn to live with it, or they get tired of hearing it and simply ignore you. For an attitude defined as indifferent, apathy accomplishes quite a lot.
Certainly there are truly committed, sincere, real environmentalists out there who in their heart of hearts care about the planet’s life forms on a global scale. But I don’t count among them the college-age crowd arriving at a protest rally in a pollution-spewing VW bus with Starbucks in hand, wearing their petroleum-laden Northface windbreakers, and sporting “Save the Planet” buttons. They are either very naïve or they don’t care about the planet and I don’t believe they even really care about anyone outside their personal circle; all they care about is themselves, it shows, and that hypocrisy reflects poorly on the environmental movement. At least inject some honesty into the movement and set it apart from the methods of the scare tacticians. Simply say, “We’re saving the planet for ourselvesâ€. It may be a selfish point of view, but at least it may lead to the general population eventually realizing the interconnectedness of all things on this planet when the light bulb finally goes on that “Humanity’s Survival = Environment’s Survivalâ€.
3) “When people talk about ‘saving the earth’ and ‘protecting the environment’ they really mean ‘keep this planet habitable to human beings.’ ”
Though I echoed your statement above in my point #2 diatribe, I believe there is a key difference. I don’t think it really is “keep this planet habitable to human beings”; I think it’s “keep this planet COMFORTABLE for human beings.” Should we?
If it were about habitability, human beings have already demonstrated they are capable of surviving through a broad range of environmental conditions. I’m not talking about the present with all of our technology and knowledge of science and engineering to help us out either. Ancestors tens of thousands of years ago came through a global Ice Age intact using nothing more advanced than a camp fire, crude dwellings, and animal skins. Add to this all of the other harsh climatic conditions humans have managed to adapt to, and it really isn’t about habitability. It’s about keeping things like temperature, weather, and other climatic conditions within tolerable limits and predictable patterns so we don’t have to work too hard to adapt anymore like our ancestors did. We’ve finally gotten the “furniture” in the “house” arranged just the way we like it and we don’t want anyone or anything fiddling with it anymore. But is this workable?
My answer is, long term, no. Due to the enormous number and degree of external forces acting on this planet (external to human beings), climate change is inevitable; it’s probably even essential to life on this planet. Trying to anthropogenically change the climate or freeze it at a particular state we find comfortable is futile. I’m not advocating that we should go out of our way to pollute the planet and accelerate natural changes just because it’s going to change anyway. But, if you reduce the environmental argument down to the heart of it’s message, what is it really saying? Don’t change the environment, don’t change the climate (from states that existed prior to roughly the beginning of the Industrial Revolution). Granted, they mean don’t bring about rapid, catastrophic changes through human intervention and don’t make it unlivable for complex organic carbon based life forms. But what happens when, even after reigning in all of our carbon emissions and becoming the perfect environmentalist’s utopia, the planet’s climate continues to change (and it will) such that, short term or long term, it threatens the survival of several species? Will the new hue and cry become “Save the planet from itself”?
It’s time to gain a deeper understanding and a deeper appreciation for how life on this planet works. It adapted to a harsh environment using simple, readily available building blocks (primarily made of Carbon, Hydrogen, and Oxygen) which, by their chemical nature, degrade very rapidly when exposed to the myriad energies and toxic matter (toxic generally; not just toxins made by humans) surrounding them. Given these obstacles, how does a short-lived fragile organism survive? It doesn’t; it is dying the moment it is born, constantly bombarded by these external energies and toxins slowly whittling it away. But in the process it gives birth to the next generation to continue the cycle. The goal is NOT survival of a single representative of a species or even the survival of an entire species at all costs. The goal is the continual passing of that spark of life, that Olympic torch if you will, from species to species based on whichever ones happen to have the best chance of survival under the current environmental conditions.
Life’s endurance comes from the fact that it is much easier to use fragile but widely abundant stuff to make a few billion simple things that continue to adapt and procreate, making more of themselves (shotgun approach) than it is to make a few complex near-invulnerable things out of much tougher but rarer stuff. It’s also a lot easier to adapt to changing conditions when there’s more of you around; greater numbers leads to greater diversity which leads to greater odds of adventitious adaptations occurring through natural selection. All will eventually become extinct but all will also be replaced by some successor to carry on what it’s really all about; life. Not life as some idealized, frozen-in-time form that singularly endures for eternity but life as constantly changing, constantly adapting, constantly enduring from one form to the next in defiance of everything that threatens to destroy it.
We have seen that we can creep up the CO2 content of the atmosphere and with it a corresponding rise in temperature as well as all of the other environmental ills that we cause. But the long term impact is poorly understood despite it’s current short term consequences. It’s even hypothesized that an increase in global temperatures will melt polar ice caps which in turn will put more water vapor into the atmosphere. This water vapor increase, though considered a greenhouse gas, can also serve to block out sunlight enough that it might actually LOWER the planet’s temperature, acting as either a global homeostatic balancing mechanism or plunging us into another Ice Age if it goes too far. So we can’t even predict with accuracy the consequences of our climatic meddling. What we can predict though is, regardless of our current impact on the climate, long term, it will change; with or without our interference.
We live in a changing world and just happen to be in the middle of a relative lull between extremes. Even though the Earth’s climate will change on its own, should we be concerned about human impacts that accelerate or attempt to subvert those changes? Though polluting and degrading the environment is deleterious to some life on this planet, it doesn’t spell extinction for humanity or life in general, no matter how ardently certain alarmist environmentalists try to convince us otherwise. It may just not be very “comfy” for our type of life anymore (mid to large sized mammals). We, as a species, will survive as will the majority of Earth’s other life forms; even if we have to resort to subsisting as small subterranean enclaves using nuclear reactors or renewable energy sources for power and hydroponics farming for food until the climate on the surface returns to a state we find tolerable (and I don’t think it will ever get that bad). Humans in crisis, like the planet that bore them, are far more adaptable, hardier, resourceful, and tolerant of brutal conditions than the current generation would have you believe; you need look no further than a history book to learn that lesson. And sometimes, rarely, we even do the right thing when push comes to shove. So the argument that we should change our evil ways based on the premise that “we’re destroying the planet†is specious at best; there are other valid arguments for changing, but this isn’t one of them.
However, neither should we, in attempting to curb our pollution, be trying to freeze the Earth’s climate in some artificial, human-idealized state because it won’t last. It’s time to embrace the fact we are living organisms that are part of this planet’s ecosystem rather than trying to remove ourselves to some state of being outside that system as justification for attempting to control it or even benignly manage it; both lead to disaster. It’s also time to embrace the natural climatic changes that are a part of that system and do what, up until recently, our ancestors were so very good at doing; adapt to it and work with it rather than against it.
One’s stance on human impacts on the environment and climate largely depends on which view you take and what you value. If you take the long view and value all life on this planet (not just current expressions of life, but life as a continuum stretching into the future), then you have nothing to worry about. The glaciers of the next global Ice Age will slowly grind nearly all human artifices to dust within their icy grip or the impact and conflagration of an ELE asteroid and it’s resultant super-sonic shockwave will scour the surface clean or humans will actually manage to pollute themselves into extinction. In any case, the balance will be restored and life will recover; both from the cataclysms themselves and from humanity’s interference in the natural cycles of this planet.
If, instead, you take the short view and value human life as much or more than the other life forms of this planet or you selectively value the life forms who’s inevitable extinctions we are artificially accelerating, then there’s some cause for concern as we continue to erode those aspects of the environment and climate that we or they depend upon for survival. I still firmly believe humans are not at risk of extinction in the near term, but I do concede there is the potential for things to get pretty nasty if the most extreme predictions of climate change and environmental degradation come to be realized in an amount of time shorter than we can reasonably adapt (one to three human generations). In that sense and using those values as the starting point, then, yes, we do need to take action and reverse our erosion of the natural world.
So perhaps you’re wondering where I stand. I’d say somewhere in between while believing that more should be done to understand and work within the natural cycles of the planet rather than treating the Earth in a patronizing fashion as something to gain control over or something to become the steward of. I am concerned and for those who know me I’m considered the most staunchly environmentalist-minded amongst them all. But I am not about to view myself as a victim and jump on the bandwagon simply because someone naïve and misguided or selfish and manipulative tells me I should. Nor will I become disheartened at the extent of damage that has already been done for I did not single-handedly create it and I am not now nor will I ever be capable of single-handedly reversing it. I simply continue doing what I am capable of doing to make my life and the lives of those I’m concerned about as healthy and environmentally sound as possible. But I do so with the knowledge that, someday, all of it – ALL of it – will turn to dust and the Earth will return to the balance it once knew (or at least a new balance). And, to me anyway, that is a heartening thought.