Humanity’s incredible run of luck might be coming to an end
Here’s the long view of human history, as Ruth DeFries sees it: An ingenious species, we keep finding new ways to “hijack nature” and better feed ourselves. Each newfound system for producing food is a game changer, allowing our numbers to grow, only to be halted in our upward trajectory by some new problem that we must innovate our way out of again. Europe adopts the potato, people live longer and have more children, then the Great Irish Famine hits. A million people die, but humanity perseveres, developing new potato varieties and agriculture practices that keep the blight from causing another disaster.
DeFries, a MacArthur fellow and chairwoman of the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology at Columbia University, calls those new innovations “pivots.” They lead to boom periods — “ratchets” — along with inevitable problems — “hatchets” — for which we require new pivots. Potato, growth, famine, new potatoes. Pivot, ratchet, hatchet, pivot. It’s pretty much an endless cycle from there. In each, the stakes grow, and in each, we have new obstacles to contend with. But throughout, DeFries writes, “millennium after millennium, humanity as a whole has muddled through.”
The stakes, as they currently stand, are greater than they’ve ever been before. The title of DeFries’ book, “
The Big Ratchet,” refers to the second half of the 20th century, a time during which “our twists of nature sped up so fast that the trajectory of human civilization changed course.” It’s come with some pretty big hatchets, different in kind from what we’ve had to deal with before: We’re now facing problems on a planetary scale. Will we pivot? Will human ingenuity save the day again? DeFries isn’t telling (because, she insists, we have no way of knowing). “Although history shows that ingenuity has brought humanity back from the brink time and again,” she writes, “this history does not ensure that the same will occur in the future.”
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