As I get older, my sense of time is changing. What used to seem like a relatively long time now seems not so. Having lived sixty years, it is rather easy to imagine and understand what happened sixty years before I was born. Even though there has been an amazing amount of events since 1903, I can get my mind around it and understand the constant march forward to the point where I was born. Having made it to sixty and having a grandmother (Ellen) who lived to be ninety-eight years old, a hundred year span is something my mind can accept and comprehend.
Using my grandmother as a measurement, my country, the United States of America, has been around for 2.5 Ellens. That doesn’t seem like a very long time. In terms I can relate to, I feel I can put myself into certain events of our country’s history and understand what people went through. The more I read history the more I realize that, despite an incredible amount of “advancement,” people haven’t changed much. People were reacting to situations in 1776 just as they would react to situations today or situations 100 Ellens ago. As a result of this change in time perspective, I have taken to reading about global human history. As I read, I am learning things about humans that seem as fitting in a contemporary setting as they were hundreds or thousands of years ago.
Humans Move
As I read about the history of human migration I am seeing patterns that make me more able to grasp such a long period of time - 200,000 years (2,000 Ellens). The biggest lesson I am learning from this reading is that people like to move around. In 170,000 B.C.E. estimates are that there were 20,000 - 50,000 homo sapiens on the planet. Population estimates vary widely up until about 10,000 B.C.E., but by 170,000 B.C.E. people started moving out of Africa. Africa, obviously, had more than enough resource to support as many as 50,000 people, yet people were moving out of Africa and into what is today the Middle East.
At the time of the earliest sign of people living in the Americas, somewhere between 30,000 - 25,000 B.C.E., there was an estimated world population of around 3 - 7 million. Again, obviously, the land mass that stretches from Africa to the eastern edge of Asia had enough resource to support 3 - 7 million people. Yet, we decided to hop over the Pacific Ocean and land in the Americas.
It was only a matter of time before we would circumnavigate the globe and explore every inch that is available. This behavior continues today with our exploration of the moon, distant solar systems, and the goal of colonizing Mars. We like to move. We can say that droughts and climate change over the millennia forced us to move, but the reality is that we like to move. Today, you hear people talk about wanting to colonize Mars because of climate change here on Earth. We could focus on protecting Earth, preserving the best of what is here, but there is a strong pull to move. It may be about wanting to escape reality and avoiding being responsible for our actions. It might also be an evolutionary wanderlust that benefits the species by spreading us out over as vast an area as possible.
We Fight Over the Earth
Throughout history, people have been fighting with each other. The earliest sign of group violence, the precursor to war, occurred in Kenya and is dated to around 10,000 B.C.E. Of course, humans have always been prone to anger and violence on an individual scale. But, groups of people fought over resources when either new people moved into an area or when climate changes or over-harvesting caused a scarcity of resource. With the rise of agriculture 12,000 years ago (only 120 Ellens ago!) and the need to stay in one location to tend to fields and flocks, battles increased and began to define our sense of history.
War already existed in cultures around the world before the era of European Colonialism. There were wars between the city-states in Central Mexico before Cortes and the Spanish arrived, war in Peru to establish the Incan Empire, and war amongst Native American tribes in North America. In Africa, Asia, the Sub-continent, the Middle East, and Europe there was war between city-states and empires since ancient times. Although some of these battles evolved out of grudges between families and peoples, most often they were fights over what the earth provided. What you could extract from the earth defined your wealth… and your power.
In our current time, we have created a wealth that is not directly dependent on extracting resources from the earth. Investments and the control of accessing knowledge are creating an ever bigger percent of the planet’s wealth. Yes, these forms of wealth are supported by resource extraction from nature, but their ends are flexible as to their means. This is changing the equation. We are already fighting politically and covertly over these new developments. Will we actually go to physical war over these developments like we have over the wealth extracted from the earth?
We Work the Earth
There is a part of us that likes to think that if all of society and human interference ended, the earth would be an Eden, Shangri-La, Xanadu, or Erewhon. The reality is that nature, left to itself, provides little but hostility for humans. Wherever humans have inhabited the planet, they have altered their environment to better serve themselves. From felling trees, quarrying rock, burning prairies, building dams, inventing agriculture, developing animal husbandry, and creating cities, humans have altered the planet to make it a habitable place in which they can thrive. We have always worked the land to create more carrying capacity, which has sustained our ever increasing numbers.
One of the main catalysts of science, if not the only catalyst, is to better understand how nature works so that we can continue to increase its capacity to sustain our life. We are discovering, through science, that some attempts to make life better are actually making it worse. For the most part, we adjust when we learn this and continue forward.
The question arising today is are we over-working the planet? Are we over-extracting and over-burdening our ecosystems? Have we worked ourselves into a dead end from which we will not recover? Fortunately (or unfortunately) the only way out of our current predicament of climate change crisis, while maintaining current population trends and lifestyles, is to keep working; make better and more efficient transport, make food more local, make buildings that more fully integrate nature’s systems, find sustainable replacements for harmful chemicals and materials, etc.
We Do Amazing Things
Human beings really do amazing things! Our ability to drill-down into problems and situations to come up with new inventions, new ideas, etc. is astoundingly fascile, persitent and productive. Take a situation and let several hundred (or thousand or million) human brains start picking it apart and pretty soon you have something new. Give those brains a little more time and that new thing gets integrated into daily life and becomes part of the norm. Then the brains move onto something else.
From the outside, this process can look slow. Some of the brains are putting eight hours a day, or more, toward the goal. Other brains are spending a little spare time addressing the goal - because it is fun to them. The activity, en mass, is frenetic and constant, but the progress can take quite a while to materialize.
As a painter who has been around for sixty years, I have seen a lot of derivitive art. But then I come across a painting that feels fresh, has a new perspective, or a new version of an old message, and the whole genre moves incrementally forward. We, the human species, are doing this in all media, all industries, all disciplines, all concepts, all everything all the time. It is perhaps this sense of timing that has helped me to grasp the progression of humans across the millenia, I have experienced how long it takes for things to progress.
At sixty years I have spent enough time making my own personal progress at painting, cooking, relationships, etc. to understand at what pace humans learn. I have spent decades being a project manager for governments — I have seen the slow but steady progress of our chief mechanism for communal good. Having lived .6 Ellens, I can imagine what progress might be made in the next .4 Ellens and beyond. Yes, it is a mixed bag, for sure. But I see an upward spiral in our progress. I think that we have some bad habits and notions we are about to kick to the curb and walk forward into our new future. I hope I am around at least .4 Ellens from now to see it.