From: Alan McGowen <alanm@igc.apc.org>
Newsgroups: sci.environment
Date: 06 Sep 92 05:14 PDT
Subject: The Human Niche
Nf-ID: #N:cdp:1466601757:000:7742
Nf-From: cdp.UUCP!alanm    Sep  6 05:14:00 1992


I haven't been active in sci.environment for a while because it 
is far more important to work for Bill Clinton. But I have done a 
few things on the net. The following piece was dropped into 
alt.native, a fun place to talk. The piece isn't very good, 
scientifically. But it will work in the right environment -- 
which is all that elections are about, so to speak.  

I hope you enjoy the bits about "replacing nature".

Just keeping you informed of my whereabouts. I may be writing for 
one of the APC.IGC magazines (paper!) in the near future. That 
should be fun. But I'll find some way to keep sci.environment 
afflicted with my thought. You can count on that.


------------
Alan McGowen

                  The Human Niche

In a previous post I suggested that the human niche is made by 
religion in those societies which are at ecological equilibrium 
with their environments. Hunter-gatherer societies and many 
swidden horticulturalists are at ecological equilibrium, as 
evidenced by the fact that they have persisted for many centuries 
or even millenia in their ecosystems. The Haida may have existed 
for much more than 7,000 years in equilibrium with their island 
ecosystem, providing a strong proof that humans are capable of 
this.

Indigenous people have generally achieved ecological equilibria 
of the sort a biologist would recognize as a niche in other 
species. Their environment is not gradually degraded with time 
once they are well established in an area. 

Although fossil evidence suggests that the first modern humans in 
every area of the Earth may have been implicated in the 
extinction of many large mammals such as mastodons and giant 
sloths, subsequent cultural development seems to have inculcated 
a more conservation-oriented viewpoint, which would have had a 
significant long-range survival value -- what biologists call an 
improvement in *fitness* -- for their descendants. Perhaps 
indigenous people learned conservation values the hard way, 
through harsh and painful mistakes during their first occupation 
of this American (and every other) continent. 

We might learn from these early mistakes, as if a huge experiment 
in human relations with nature had been conducted for our 
edification -- *if* we have the intelligence to learn from the 
people who conducted that experiment. Many biologists who have 
had contact with the native people of north America have been 
surprised at their practical grasp of the concept of natural 
selection. 

The Canadian writer Farley Mowat writes about this especially 
well in Never Cry Wolf, when he balks (artistically) at the Inuit 
suggestion that the wolf was made by the Inuit Goddess to cut 
disease out of the Carribou. That of course is exactly what the 
wolves do -- they take the weakest members, and therefore the 
diseased members -- out of the herd. In doing this they leave the 
more disease-resistant members to reproduce. The wolves are the 
knife that cuts sickness out of the Carribou, the  knife the 
Inuit say their Goddess made. That knife is natural selection, 
the source of all adaptation. 

The Inuit symbology, though alien to western people, has locked 
onto a real, important, phenomenon. It has grasped the core of 
natural selection, at least as it affects themselves. The 
potential continuity of all human experience with science is 
perhaps glimpsed here. The knife of natural selection, the Inuit 
think, is wielded by a Goddess who was once pushed out of a boat 
and had her fingers chopped off by stupid people. She does things 
which we do not comprehend, and which are not always in our 
interests. She is the force of nature, a force we can live in, 
but only with effort, and only with recognition of our place.

It is that "place", the human niche, which we western people have 
forgotten.  A niche is an ecological role -- a relationship with 
all of life. It limits ones take of the whole life power which 
sustains the ecosystem, leaving enough for other species to 
continue their life's imperitives. It is a kind of natural common 
law, or natural justice, which reasonable organisms observe in 
order that the whole commonwealth of life may go on. [That is a very 
controversial statement which most biologists would reject, but I 
think that it is true in its essentials, and is a consequence of 
natural selection.]

Humans must relearn this basic truth, which so many indigenous 
people have already learned, as proven by their long endurance in 
undestroyed ecosystems. There is only so much which we can have 
without taking what is essential for others. That is true whether 
the others are humans or another species, or a whole community 
of other species. Each time we build some telescope or golf-  
course in the home of other species we kill them, individually 
and mathematically. Something sacred dies, whether there is an 
Apache council present to stand for its loss, or not. Perhaps the 
greater tragedies occur where there is no human voice to speak 
against the destruction. That Inuit Goddess, whose hand wields 
the knife of natural selection, has no voice but ours. We alone 
can speak to give her the space she needs to make new species, 
new life: her fertility is the diversity of Earth's life, the 
room for that diversity to become new species. And her room to 
create is our forbearance from taking nature to make more of 
ourselves -- our suburbs, shopping malls, and sometimes even 
telescopes.  

The human niche. A place in nature which is sanctified and which 
allows evolution to continue. What is the alternative? Shall we 
replace all of nature with artifacts? Some think we should: 
intelligent machines are the next stage of evolution, they say, 
intelligent machines spreading through space. The death of 
Earth's life to achieve this goal strikes them as a kind of 
sacred duty. The attempt to limit humans to some biological 
"niche" strikes them as horrible, Nazi-like. "Freedom" for 
humans, in their view, is whatever leads towards death for other 
species -- and for less technological cultures -- provided that 
it increases their technocratic power. The increase of human 
power, of the human take from the allotment all species depend 
upon for life, is what they call "progress". "Progress" is death 
-- for other species, and for all cultures which do not assist 
their war against nature. "Progress" is what they worship.

The human niche is a call for peace. It requires a choice. Shall 
we continue the war to dominate nature and replace her with 
artifacts, with machines? Or shall we accept the fact that -- no 
matter what *else* we are -- we are first and foremost an animal 
life, a citizen of the land community, one of the carvings of the 
Inuit Goddess' knife of natural selection? This is a clear 
choice: do we dedicate our energies to replacing nature or to 
assisting her, in the sense that other species and human cultures 
which augment biodiversity do? To reach the human niche, each of 
us must confont this question personally and answer it. And the 
answer will *not* be easy: how much of your own life has occurred 
at the expense of the Earth's ability to continue its fundamental 
work of evolution? Are you in the way of the knife of natural 
selection?

The answer to that question, and your understanding of it, 
determines where you stand in the war against nature. To side 
with nature, you must choose to give her the room to work. That 
inevitably means a restriction on human expansion. And many 
humans will oppose any such restriction. They will call you a 
Nazi, a Pagan, a Materialist Marxist -- whatever newspaper term 
is damaging at the moment. Count on it.

Are you ready to choose?

------------
Alan McGowen