For most of the history of our genus over the past two-and-a-half million years, we were a part of nature. We are animals, after all—vertebrates belonging to the class Mammalia. We differ from other mammals in our bipedalism (an evolutionary development which began with the Australopithecines); the steady increase from species to species in the size of our brains relative to body weight; our opposable thumbs; and the faculty of speech.
It is estimated that 200,000 years ago we numbered about 10,000 individuals, confined mostly to the East African savannah. Had there been an intelligent being there to study us, he, she, or it, is unlikely to have extrapolated what we are today from what we were then. As palaeolithic hunter-gatherers, we were part of an ecosystem, a close-to-the-top predator in the food chain, perhaps, but not much more.
The human situation changed after tens of thousands of years when agriculture developed independently in regions as remote from one another as Mesopotamia and China. Settled communities, with a more-or-less stable food supply, led to population increase and the organisation of hierarchical societies dominated by powerful political and religious elites. These in turn led to the waging of war.
Humans are almost unique in our willingness and ability to kill large numbers of our own species. We will probably never know if this propensity is an evolved trait and therefore instinctive, or whether it is a later development, the result of the organisation of humans into states, in constant dispute with one another over territory or resources. What is certain is that as far back as we can go in recorded history war has been a defining feature of the species. Peace, as the medievalist Geoffrey Shepherd once said to me, is an interlude between wars.
War is also an outlet for another human trait, cruelty. In a well organised society this is kept under control through the influence of moral education at home and at school and through the forces of law and order. Attempts have been made to limit cruelty in war, too, through various formulations of the ‘laws of war’. But war is savage and it makes the participants in wars savage. I know of no war in which women have not been raped, prisoners tortured and killed, civilians targeted: ‘At no time in the world’s history have men been at a loss how to inflict mental and bodily anguish upon their fellow-creatures’— so Joseph Conrad in Nostromo.
War also disrupts and destroys the natural world as we invent ever more devastating weapons systems. Look at the battlefields of World Wars I and II; look at the battlefields of today. Destruction of nature may be said to be collateral damage, yet it is often done deliberately in the modern world, as when the Americans sprayed the forests of Vietnam and Cambodia with the defoliant Agent Orange to get at their ultimate target, fellow human beings, and no counting the costs.
War is one extreme of human behaviour. As Earth’s population of Homo sapiens increased exponentially, humans developed from co-existing with nature in proto-agricultural communities to today’s dominion over all habitable land surfaces. Primeval forests are cleared for timber, or to make way for farming; marshes are drained; agribusiness creates monocrop wildernesses; pesticides and habitat destruction lead to the collapse of insect populations, followed by the birds and animals that depend on them; seas are fished out… All of this is well known and needs no elaboration.
Then there are the megacities: Mumbai, Beijing, Mexico City: 22 million people in each; Cairo, 23 million; Dhaka, 24 million; Shanghai, 30 million; Delhi, 34 million; Tokyo, 37 million. Vast, dense human hives—‘planets’ in their way, drawing ever more humans into their gravitational field.
In cities it is possible to believe in the power of our species. You are surrounded by people; you pass hundreds of thousands as you walk the streets every day and you rarely encounter the same people twice. Everything around you has been built by humans, buildings, roads, cars, shopping malls, supermarkets, and the hundreds of thousands of things they sell. The noise, the energy, it is all human. There may be an avenue of trees here and there, pot plants peering from windows of flats, and there are parks, ‘the lungs of the city’ we say, where people stroll, sunbathe, play with frisbees, relax. Parks are green spaces, but they are not nature—they contain specimens selected from nature in the form of trees, grass, flowers, organised into a pleasure ground. There will be a few birds, too—blackbirds, carrion cows, house sparrows, perhaps even a rarity now and then, but they are semi-urbanites themselves or messengers from another world.
Nature, in its true meaning, is unknown to most of us. I live in Ceredigion in West Wales. It is green and beautiful, but it is countryside, not nature. Countryside is nature disrupted, reformulated by our species for our own ends. I was once with the botanist Arthur Chater on the shore beneath the cliffs of Allt-wen, just south of Aberystwyth. He pointed to a slanted section of rock in the cliff-face which was covered with a brown smear of some kind (a species of rust, perhaps). ‘That is probably the only undisturbed example of nature in the county,’ he said. Arthur Chater was joking, of course, but in another sense he meant it. There is hardly anywhere in Ceredigion, or indeed in the whole of these islands, that has not been altered, one way or another, by the intrusion of our species.
I grew up in countryside in Monmouthshire, wandering along the banks of the River Usk and in the valleys and along the ridges of the Black Mountains. I thought of these places as wild, but they were not. I have only glimpsed nature—as opposed to countryside—once, when the plane I was in began its descent to land in Georgetown, Guyana. As the plane banked, I saw through the passenger window dense tropical forest stretching far, far, to the horizon, intersected by sluggish brown meandering rivers. There were no visible signs of human life. I knew, as I looked, that fascinating though it was, I would not survive in that pristine world. No doubt there were small groups of indigenous peoples living there but I could never be one of them. I belong to a tamed world, the product of an engineered human condition.
That condition has divorced the greater part of humanity from nature. City dwellers, if they think beyond their constructed environment, think of the utility of the countryside, producing food in vast acreages of fields; or as a leisure facility where you can hike, rough-ride on mountain- or motorbikes, paraglide, travel in cars to admire the view, before returning once more to the thrum of the city.
In recent decades, of course, there has been a movement away from crowded city life by those who can no longer stand the pressure and who have the economic means to do so, buying up houses in picturesque villages or farmhouses where the farms have failed. Yet though they have a longer tether than the hundreds of millions who stay behind in cities, they remain part of urban humanity. Their new homes will have been gutted, kitchens fitted, the latest appliances installed, new heating systems, computers, iPhones, one or two cars shining in the driveway. The occupants will have escaped the worst aspects of city life, as they see it, but they will not have escaped the mentality of the city. They are outriders of the entirely artificial environment humanity has created for itself, dependent to the last degree on the vast complexity of our manufactured existence.
Nonetheless, for many more, the city is the place, the only place. I once did some part-time tutoring in the English Department at Aberystwyth University. A first-year student, a young woman from London, was deeply depressed and I talked with her about it. She could not stand that wherever you were in Aberystwyth you could see hills and woods or the sea; wherever you were you were reminded of the boundaries of human activity. It was, I suppose, a kind of agoraphobia. My teaching contract ended shortly after and I never discovered what became of her, but she was so unhappy I think she most likely gave up and went home.
This century, computer science has taken humanity further along the path of alienation from the planet. Millions of people now spend their working lives in front of computer screens, with iPhones to hand. Walk the streets anywhere in these islands and almost everyone under thirty will have little white earphones or headphones, often with an iPhone in hand, texting as they walk. On buses and trains they scroll idly from one message, one image, to another, pausing sometimes, then scrolling on, the digital simulacrum of life becoming more real than the world around them. Silicon Valley is experimenting with micro-implants which will carry these images, this information, directly to the brain. Humans love invention. If such implants are perfected and marketed, many will embrace them.
Peter Thiel dreams that when humans have made Earth uninhabitable, the species will survive in colonies on Mars. As of now such a project seems unfeasible. According to an article in Nature not so long ago, it would take 50,000 years to terraform the planet with current technology. But what about something more modest, domed self-contained units like the Eden Project, called Thielstadt or Muskville, where small elites would survive, protected from the harsh realities of the Martian climate. There might be plants, birds, animals transported from Earth—a modern realisation of Noah’s Ark. Meanwhile, billions would die on a depleted Earth, but all too far away for the New Men and Women to hear or see.
From the viewpoint of now, this seems like the delusive vision of the super-rich, a dream of selfish hope as the Earth is degraded, but hope for what? What kind of world would the Martians be living in; what kind of people would they be? Humans are endlessly adaptable, but I believe that in the domed dwellings of this New World there would be an undertow of unrelievable grief.
Meanwhile, the near-future is already here and we live with it every day whether we want to or not. Chatbots replicate human responses and will very soon reach a high stage of imitation so we cannot tell whether we are dealing with a human or not. AI programmes can write poems and novels. On the internet, all knowledge, all information, is available—you need never leave your computer or iPhone. You can have hundreds, even hundreds of thousands, of ‘friends’ in a world where you are never alone, yet profoundly lonely.
In these times of rapid, intrusive, all-encompassing change it is quite impossible to pause, to ask ourselves if this is what we really want. Humans, so far as I am aware, have never done that. Once an invention has been made, for good or ill, it is let out of the box and is never replaced. The prime example of this is the H-bomb. Only the Americans have used its less devastating predecessor, the atom bomb, annihilating Nagasaki and Hiroshima, so we know on our skin what devastation these weapons can inflict. Yet the Cold War was predicated on the strategy of Mutual Assured Destruction, with the USSR and the USA stockpiling enough nuclear weapons to destroy each other—and the rest of us—many times over. Despite arms reduction treaties, the H-bomb broods over the world. Other nations have developed bombs, too. One day, somewhere, they will be used deliberately or accidentally in war. We know what the results will be, yet the bombs remain.
Homo sapiens is a rational species and an irrational one at the same time. It is why we tear ourselves apart in devastating wars; but also why love and pity cause us to save what we can afterwards from the ruins.
For the moment, we can only see through a dark glass what we are heaping up against the future as AI leaps and bounds over itself. Proponents of AI will point to its perceived benefits—its application in surgery, for example; but humans are dark-side light-side, and as we dream ourselves into a rapidly approaching New World, we can be sure that some of its outcomes will be devastating.
We are so dependent on advanced technology in almost every aspect of our lives that perhaps we should identify ourselves as a new subspecies. Looking back in time’s rearview mirror to 200,000 years ago, it is hard to relate what we were then to what we are in the twenty-first century. What should be the epitaph for Homo sapiens when the end of our species finally comes: That we were rational but all too often in the wrong way? That we failed to subordinate reason to love? It might stand in a desert like the statue of Ozymandias in a sibilance of shifting sands, or overgrown with vines in a tropical forest, silence pierced by a cacophony of birdcalls and the rustle of animals. Either way, there would be no one to read it.