Summer 1995

    By the time you read this, the 25th Earth Day will have come and gone. A quarter century ago, many of us did not even exist, and 1970 seems distant and remote. Twenty five years ago, as the Vietnam War raged on, before the full 7 million tons of bombs and defoilants had been dropped in the name of anti-Communism, and as the Civil Rights movement began to desintegrate between in-fighting and government infiltration, a level of consciousness was reached sufficient to enshrine a global holiday. Many people began to question the convenient myths of the industrial societies: perhaps the Earth was not an infinite resource, or an infinite garbage can. Perhaps it was time to seriously think about new ways of organizing societies; perhaps GNP and per capita income are not such reliable indicators of the health of civilization.

    Certainly at the individual level, material wealth remains an empty indicator. In the March 24 issue of Science, psychologists reported that since the 1950s, growing living standards and per capita income in the US had no effect on people's subjective well-being, happiness, or self-satisfaction. Such a phenomena is no cultural accident either; similar results were found in Japan, where per capita income since the 50's has risen from 1/8 that of the US to the present levels of 7/8, without changes in levels of happiness. It seems the old adage that money can't buy happiness can be extended further: even a little more money won't make you a little happier.

    Marvin Minsky, an outspoken believer in the eventual development of machine intelligence, remarked that humans don't learn very well; witness the fact that ancient wisdom, such as the idea above, is still considered wisdom. Yet, however poorly used, this human ability to learn and accumulate knowledge, i.e. cultural evolution, is unique to this planet's history. But a mere few thousand years after its appearance, cultural evolution (at least, Western culture) finds itself in direct conflict with biological evolution. The driving priorities of our society, economic growth (where $100 of guns or tobacco is worth as much as a $100 of vaccines or books) and individual material gain, are exacting their toll in the form of wrecked ecologies, broken communities and empty, meaningless lives. It seems Nature's brief experiment in cultural evolution may be in its terminal phases.

    A great deal of this clash arises from the fact that cultural evolution has largely failed to recognize its biological roots; the upstart of a few thousand years only recently recognized the ancestor of a few billion years seniority. The twenty five years since we started proclaiming, one day per year, the obvious axiom that our survival depends on the health of the planet, is a stark reminder of how inadequate our appreciation of evolutionary time really is. We have difficulty thinking in terms of decades past, or years ahead, when what is desperately needed is the ability to think in millenia and ages, on the cosmic scale. To begin thinking on the scale of aeons is the only way to understand our place in the universe, and thence how we ought to live in it.

Kai Wu '96
Editor