What Would a Rational Species Do? We Need a New Paradigm

We humans stand on the precipice. We now face five existential threats, each unique in our short recorded history.

First, we are running out of planet to plunder. So we are destroying the climate in which we evolved, likely irrevocably.

Second, we are fighting a global pandemic that’s evolving as we watch, beating our best genetic-engineering tools to an uneasy stalemate. Third, our population—already too big for our small planet—continues to explode, as our economists tell us we need yet more babies to support our living geezers.

Fourth, our food sources are starting to fail, principally as a result of climate change and overuse. Last fall, there was a drought-caused partial crop failure in Southern China. The breadbaskets of Australia, Argentina and California have been beset by drought and wildfires. Ukraine’s is under siege, blockaded, and pock-marked by bomb craters. Food prices are rising globally, and famine is growing in the world’s poorer parts.

Last but not least, we humans are gradually extinguishing the other species (both flora and fauna) with which we co-evolved. The consequences are unclear but likely horrendous: a duller, less beautiful, less resourceful and more sterile Earth. We even have fancy scientific names for this catastrophe—the “Sixth Extinction,” or a new “Anthropocene” Age in Earth’s history. Named after us, that new Age portends a sterile near-monoculture of ourselves, our crops and our cattle. So what, pray tell, happens to us when a new plague wipes out a key crop or food species on this near-sterile Earth?

Any one of these problems could maim our global civilization. Together, their threat is nothing short of catastrophic. So how are we addressing them? We are preparing for war among ourselves.

The West and Russia are re-arming conventionally, with nukes ever in the background. The West is arming to fight Russia’s gratuitous atrocity in Ukraine, which already threatens Eurasia’s greatest breadbasket. Germany and Japan have two of the most orderly, rational and productive cultures in human history. Both learned the hard lessons of unprovoked aggression in history’s greatest war. Yet what are both doing today? Turning their rational productivity toward armaments to address the threats of Russia and China, respectively.

Don’t get me wrong. The foes that Russia conquered in our most-horrible war are all lining up against it. The two that we helped beat—Germany and Japan—are aligned and allied firmly with us. They are even (reluctantly) giving up their hard-earned pacifism to face the growing martial threats of Russia and China.

All this testifies to a general human preference for basic rights and democracy, however imperfect they may be. All this proves that our American system is better than complete despotism or plutocracy, or at least more human.

But still. Neither war nor preparing for it is going to solve any of the five existential problems that our species faces now. Instead, it’s going to make all of them worse. At least war or re-arming will draw down resources and distract attention needed elsewhere. As India’s PM Narendra Modi reportedly told Warmonger Putin, “Now is not a time of war.”

So what would a really intelligent species do, all together? I can think of four things off the top.

First and foremost, we would treat the Covid pandemic now raging in China like the global four-alarm fire that it is. It’s shutting down the “world’s factory” in the middle of a lingering economic crisis. Worse yet, it’s turning the world’s most populous nation—with virtually no innate and little acquired immunity—into the biggest-ever petri dish for growing new variants of the plague.

So simple self-interest, let alone common humanity, demands an all-hands-on-deck crash project to flood China with vaccines that work. That means our existing mRNA vaccines, plus new versions for new variants as they evolve. A rational species would use China’s immense manpower and efficient organization, along with the best Western scientific expertise, to build the biggest and best vaccine factories in human history, in China, and to do so quickly. Then it would vaccinate all of China and the world, while keeping new vaccines coming as long as new variants arise.

A rational species would spare no expense or effort in this task. After all, what’s the price of species decimation? And the value of avoiding it? Priceless.

Second, and equally important, China would devote its huge stores of lithium and rare-earth metals, plus its vast solar-panel and windmill factories, to electrifying the worst climate offenders ASAP. That means Brazil and India. I can’t think of any quicker way to reduce global CO₂ emissions than swapping out the massive, dirty coal-fired power plants in these two countries for solar and wind farms. The construction work in Brazil would also slow the present destruction of the Amazon rainforest, the “Earth’s Lungs,” by offering Brazil’s people climate-saving jobs to replace climate-destroying ones. After Brazil and India, the same approach could apply to the rest of South America’s and Africa’s coal plants, as well as China’s own.

Conceptually, these two projects are low-hanging fruit. They are obvious things to do. They would benefit every human being, not to mention the other surviving species that share our planet. They are not even especially hard to organize, at least if we don’t let politics get in the way.

Other projects, while clear in principle, will be harder to plan and organize. A third is “terraforming” our own planet Earth to make it more resilient to ongoing climate change.

The principal focus would be fresh-water management. California is a prime example, and it could be a demonstration project. After years of punishing drought and wildfires, it has faced devastating floods in just the last two weeks, with more apparently to come. To preserve and enhance its immense breadbasket, we must “terraform” its Central Valley to save all that rain (and ameliorate its flood damage) for another dry day.

In the bad, old days, we used to do things like that with lots of cement, damming rivers and changing their courses. Now we have much more sophisticated civil engineering, which takes natural geology and ecology into account. It preserves wetlands to spare species and buffer storms. It takes natural river flows and water-based ecology into account.

For California specifically, scientists talk about exploiting “paleo valleys” to store floodwater. These are underground valleys, formed by ancient floods, filled with gravel and silt but permeable to water. We can use or modify them to store modern floods for agriculture and/or to gradually replenish underground water tables after droughts.

We must build many massive infrastructure projects like these to make our geography more resilient, using recently discovered natural features and phenomena. To do so, we can create a modern civil engineering informed by scientific discoveries of how our world really works. We can adapt our planet not by paving it over, but by mimicking and improving how our natural world has adapted to change in past ages. If we are clever enough, we might even find ways to divert floods like the one that inundated Pakistan last year to replace some of the fresh water from the rapidly disappearing glaciers that now keep much of Asia alive.

The fourth and final hurdle may be the hardest. We are going to have to cut our global population, or at least level if off. However good the glib reasons may seem—having more youngsters to support the old, growing the economy, or out-populating our political rivals—we cannot continue to grow our global population indefinitely. Our planet and its resources are finite. Our Earth is not going to get any bigger.

In my view, the greatest political blunder, worldwide, in my adult life has not been our own disastrous War in Vietnam, Bolsonaro’s despoliation of the Amazon, or even Putin’s bloody atrocity in Ukraine. It has been Xi’s abolition of China’s one-child policy. Coming from the world’s most populous and arguably most disciplined nation, that bad example has set the stage for making all our existential problems worse, and sooner.

Even in the medium term, a global race to grow in population is a recipe for species-wide suffering and partial self-extinction. The iron laws of biology are clear. We have studied them intensely in many other species. When a species outgrows its habitat, the Four Horsemen of the biological apocalypse inevitably cut it back: famine, conflict, predation, and disease. Often the decline is precipitous: a population “crash.” In our own case, an even more horrible global war, or a pandemic far more deadly than Covid, could do the trick. A rational species would not court that outcome by pretending it lives on an infinitely expandable planet.

So how do we get from where we are to a rational plan for sustainable living? Ay, there’s the rub! It does no good to preach or plan when most of us, and most of our leaders, act like kids on a playground grabbing toys and territory and screaming, “Mine!” It does no good when Xi reaches for Taiwan, or Putin reaches for Ukraine, not with promises of advancement or better treatment, but with saber-rattling, unnecessary arming, threats, an invasion, atrocities, and devastation. And it does no good when we in the West respond only with threats and force, however necessary they may seem in the moment.

We in the West are only slightly less flawed in our thinking. Individual profit will never cure, or even spark the cure of, all that ails us. Profit may motivate the development of mRNA vaccines, but it won’t bring their massive production and rollout worldwide before the next viral mutation arises. Profit also can help proliferate cell phones around the globe, the better to spread lies, misinformation and propaganda. Indeed, cell phones may be the new “opiate of the masses,” distracting us all relentlessly while our planet burns, our fertile valleys run dry (or are flooded), our crops fail, and new pandemic variants take us.

At the end of the day, the West’s apotheosis of profit as the ultimate good will destroy us. We need a new paradigm.

Unfortunately, it can’t be religion. That simply hasn’t worked. For two millennia, Jesus and his disciples have been telling us “Love they neighbor as thyself” and “Love thy enemy.” Both are superb advice. Both implicate our species’ chief evolutionary advantage: our ability to communicate and cooperate in detail.

But we can’t seem to heed either. Russia, the EU and America are all predominantly Christian nations. Yet, right now, they are engaged (partly by proxy) in the vilest major-power war in 78 years. Somehow, despite the best efforts of innumerable priests and popes, Jesus’ good messages just haven’t gotten through. The noise of people, their supreme leaders, patricians and even popes crying “Mine!” has drowned out the signal.

Not only are today’s religions mostly unhelpful. Some are actively counterproductive. Why? They seem to teach that “God” wants people to have and raise as many children as possible, regardless of whether or not their parents can feed them or our overburdened Earth can support them. The more “orthodox” or “fundamentalist” believers are, the more they seem to subscribe to this philosophy. Like Xi Jinping with his abrogation of China’s one-child policy, they are pushing our species relentlessly toward population crash, while their adherents take more than their fair share of the Earth’s dwindling resources for their own families.

What our species needs, in principle, is really simple. We need to grow up and wise up, or start dying prematurely by the millions. We need to understand that we are all alone on our little blue planet at the end of a small spiral arm of a medium-sized galaxy in an impossibly large and complex Universe. We need to see that no one and nothing are going to save us from our own shortsighted selfishness and stupidity.

If we can’t work together wisely and conserve what’s left of our planet for our own survival and happiness, we are going to start suffering, being displaced, and dying in large numbers, in this very century. And if you think that migration at our southern border is too great now, wait and see what happens when large parts of the tropics become literally uninhabitable!

It really is that simple. If we want to justify our self-awarded title of “Homo sapiens,” we are going to have to change our thinking and our ways, and soon. We are going to have to learn to work together, hard and fast, for the good of all.


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