In The Hidden Dimension, his dated
(1969) but thoroughly researched breakthrough study of the field of proxemics, Edward Hall provides
lots of food for thought for environmentalists and architects.
Proxemics is the study of space
(here on Earth not out in, er..., space), and how we use and perceive
it.
Hall makes it clear that an understanding of the subject also requires
that we understand how time
is perceived, since it is, after all, one of the dimensions we move
through. This is a social study, not a scientific one. In the belief
that 'perception is reality', Hall introduces us to a whole new and
valuable world of investigation, one that scientists, in their zeal
for 'real', have overlooked.
The first part of the book was of particular interest to me because
I've been writing a lot on these pages lately about overpopulation, and
the book describes extensively how we, as animals, react physically and
socially to overcrowding. Last week I cited Daniel Quinn's Story of B which ascribes human
overpopulation to one simple factor: production of excess food. This is
illustrated in the chart above. To Quinn, it's simply an issue of
imbalance. Readers of my article last week had mixed opinions on
whether food production really is a direct factor, and were frustrated
that having hypothesized the root cause of and solution to the problem
("produce less food"), he offered no suggestions, indeed no hope, on
how to implement the solution. Readers also suggested the equation is
overly simplistic, and misses important variables. Hall proposes some
additional variables and backs his argument up credibly.
To Hall, one key variable is the adrenal system, by which he claims the
balance
of all life on Earth is regulated in a way much more 'humane' than mass
starvation:
When crowding becomes too great
after population buildups, interactions intensify, leading to greater
and greater stress. As psychological and emotional stress builds up and
tempers wear thin, subtle but powerful changes occur in the chemistry
of the body. Births drop while deaths progressively increase until as
state known as 'population collapse' occurs. Such cycles of build-up
and collapse are now generally recognized as normal for the
warm-blooded vertebrates and possibly for all life. Contrary to popular
belief, the food supply is only indirectly involved in these cycles.
The adrenals play an important part in the regulation of growth,
reproduction and the level of the body's defenses. The size and weight
of these important glands is not fixed but responds to stress. When
animals are too frequently stressed, the adrenals, in order to meet the
emergency, become overactive and enlarged...Mortality [in major animal
die-offs that were extensively studied by John Christian] evidently
results from shock following severe metabolic disturbance, probably as
a result of prolonged adrenocortical hyperactivity. There is no
evidence of infection, starvation, or other obvious cause to explain
the mass mortality.
It is now widely held that the processes of selection which control
evolution favor the dominant individuals in any given group. Not only
are they under less stress but they also seem able to stand more
stress. The adrenals work harder and become more enlarged in
subordinate animals...A
blowup of aggressiveness and sexual activity
and accompanying stresses overload the adrenals. The result is a
population collapse due to lowering of the fertility rate, increased
susceptibility to disease, and mass mortality from hypoglycemic shock.
The dominant animals, however, usually survive.
So from a systems perspective, we actually have several more variables
at work than Quinn suggested. Before the invention of agriculture, the
balance of human numbers was
preserved at no more than 300 million people, for three million years.
Food availability caused numbers to rise, natural
predators kept the balance in check. Whenever that failed, as in
medieval Europe, the stress
balance that Hall describes kicked in: 'naturally' lowered birth rates,
and more death from violence and stress-related disease, until the
overcrowding was alleviated and adrenal levels could return to normal.
It's nature's way of sabotaging the system when it gets out of control.
In fact pox viruses, of which there are thousands, affect every species
on Earth (except, and only for the last couple of decades, man) and are
amazingly species-specific: They flare up only in densely concentrated
populations and are nature's (or god's) perfect population control
mechanism.
But since the invention of agriculture, this has now evolved into a
much more complex system, with a host of new human-engineered variables:
Agriculture was a human response to the sudden scarcity of food about
30,000 years ago, which arose from a combination of over-hunting of the
big, easy game that made human life so idyllic until then, and possibly
the ice-age effect of a meteor strike wobbling the Earth's rotation at
that time. Everything else flowed from that: Agricultural technology
increased food availability but also entailed man living a more
regimented, interdependent life in much closer quarters. The resultant
increase in stress and violence required the development of a
completely new culture, with laws to try to keep the lid on violence,
medicines to deal with diseases that spread quickly in concentrated
populations, and religions to teach people how to live 'unnaturally'.
Natural predators that we used to respect were now demonized and
exterminated because they competed with us for food, and soon were
eliminated as a population balancing mechanism. The final chart above
shows the result.
As a consequence, human population has grown virtually unchecked for
30,000 years. We respond to each new disease with new medical
technology, and to the explosion in human violence with increasingly
strict laws that subjugate, restrict human freedom and incarcerate
non-conformists. We've even introduced, recently, medical technology
that artificially reduces stress itself (starting with the lobotomy,
whose first gruesome practitioner won a Nobel prize for it). We are
placed in ever-more stringent and oppressive physical, psychological
and social strait-jackets to keep our 'natural' reaction to the
massive, psychotic stress that unprecedented overcrowding produces, all
in the interests of coping with more and more people. The education
system 'teaches' us relentlessly that a passive, highly-structured,
urban, hierarchical 'consumer' society is the only way to live.
Nevertheless, famine, war, disease, crime, domestic violence, mental
illness, suicide, depression -- all manifestations of stress, are
exploding as quickly as our numbers. It's a pressure cooker waiting to
blow.
Our culture has so indoctrinated us that the very concept of a world
with fewer people is
inconceivable, even horrifying, to most of us. Our laws, our religions
and our culture have reinforced our natural inclination to procreate
and perverted it into a fundamental 'right', even a responsibility.
Despite this, because we
instinctively know something is very wrong (our instincts
reflect our full three million years of evolution, not merely the most
recent 'civilized' 1%), in recent years we have added the two new boxes
in the upper left of the chart above, to once again balance the forces
that determine population size:
- Birth control technologies, which allow women some freedom
from one of the most horrific effects of our stultifying patriarchical
culture -- lack of control over their own bodies, and
- Population education and awareness, which despite
government and religious attempts to undermine it, is flourishing
So now we again have some sort of balance, unstable as it may be, and
it bears tribute to our amazing instincts and ingenuity.
The problem now is momentum. The system has been out of whack for
30,000 years and, like an SUV careening out of control on an icy road,
the recently-applied brakes are not working fast enough to prevent
collision. We need some additional variables to be introduced quickly
into the final chart above, to bring human population growth to a quick
halt, and start reversing it back to levels that are not only
sustainable, and will allow our severely damaged planet to heal, but
which will also allow us to throw off our cultural shackles and learn
to live fully and naturally again, in a world that is healthy, happy
and at peace, and as part of the natural ecosystems of which we are,
contrary to all our 'new' culture's propaganda, inextricably a part.
We cannot depend on governments or business for this -- they're
invested in the status quo, in deep denial, and as the 'dominant'
members of our society they are the elite that Hall says will survive
the eco-tastrophe when we perish anyway. They control the machinery of
production and will not reduce food availability, and will not invest
in radical technology of any kind to reduce human population -- it's
not in their nature, means or interest to be ahead of the mainstream of
public thinking. We cannot depend on education alone -- there is not
enough time. We cannot depend on nature's own mechanisms to
restore the balance in time (though with global warming, Mad Cow,
species extinction, AIDS and other new diseases nature is trying) -- we have too many
countervailing technologies in place. We surely cannot depend on the
gods, or the lawyers.
I am increasingly and reluctantly coming to the conclusion that the
only answer -- if there is an answer at all -- is coercive. Not in the
political sense -- people are already doing all the unnatural things
they can bear, and no political edict to reduce population could ever
succeed. We must sabotage the system. We must run the careening SUV off
the road before it crashes and kills us all.
I know I'm being a bit cryptic -- I'm still thinking this through. I
shudder at this conclusion, and the options I can imagine for doing it
fill me with dread and revulsion. Just as our culture has given us no
choice but to live within its terrible and suffocating walls, we must
give this culture, and its people, no choice but to reduce its numbers
and its impact on our dying world. I think I always knew and feared my
thinking would come to this. My instincts have long told me there is no
solution that is not radical. Question is, how to sabotage the system with a minimum
of suffering.
There is more in Hall's book that I want to talk about. He has some
important ideas that could change the way we think about architecture,
about other cultures, and about how we communicate and relate to each
other. It's all about perception, and it's fascinating. Look for
another article on The Hidden
Dimension, much less grim than this, next week
Thanks to the two kind readers
who helped me find this book.
|
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
An
article by Richard Manning entitled 'The Oil We Eat' in the February
Harper's Magazine (not available online) bolsters the case I made in my
post earlier today about the connection between
overpopulation, biodegradation, pollution, war, violence, mental
illness, loss of biodiversity, and the politics and economics of food.
The most remarkable argument Manning makes is that it actually costs
more energy to produce a lot of our agricultural products than these
products contain. This is made possible, of course, by the billions of
dollars of agricultural subsidies paid mostly to low-employment
agribusiness corporations, at taxpayers' expense, so they can export
these extravagant products to other countries, undercutting and
dislocating those countries' own farmers and ruining their domestic
economies.
