Homo sapiens — the rightless animal? PART II

 [see Homo sapiens — the rightless animal? PART I here]

The original article in Viktor Gorshkov and Anastassia Makarieva's Web Site: Biotic Regulation

4. The right for significance and the right for human virtue

E. Munk. "The Scream"

The right for territory is tightly connected with other natural human rights, the information about which can similarly be gained from a study of the biological design of human beings.
We notice that per capita individual territory of humans is about four square kilometers. At the same time our voice is so powerful, that we can vocally mark a much larger territory. If one screams at full voice, he can be heard over a territory of a few hundred square kilometers.
Since normally no alien intruders are tolerated on individual territories, this means that the normal social group of humans consisted of about 100 individuals, who were closely correlated with each other.

In such a natural population every human being had an average 1/100th impact on the life of the society. Individual significance on average equaled 1/100. In modern overpopulated societies individual significance has shrunk by millions of times, producing unsatisfaction, humiliation, and anxiety.
Most people feel they do not produce any impact on the society, do not decide anything — and suffer. Those people who are on the top of the society, naturally, desperately defend their natural right for social significance against any possible rivals (their co-citizens). As we know, in each country the number of actual decision-makers can be counted in no more than a few hundreds, with all of them knowing each other very well. This exactly corresponds to the size of the natural social group of human beings. Note that such people cannot be straightforwardly blamed, as cannot straightforwardly be blamed people defending their rights for food and water amidst a terrible famine or drought.
That the right for significance penetrates all aspects of human existence can easily be seen from many aspects of modern life. People try to invent ways of re-gaining significance:

• Professional societies organize at sizes close to the size of natural human groups ~ 100-1000 individuals (sportsmen, scientists, musicians etc.)
• Most religions try to compensate the lack of significance in their believers by sending the message of each person being individually valuable and important for God.
• Internet communication competes with religion for this function; people are able to create web societies close in size to natural human groups and get a feeling of influencing life of the society.

Ultimately, people have even lost the right for human virtues. Biological design prescribes every normal human being to possess a certain set of behavioral standards (virtues), which ensure stable existence of the natural population. People have to be clever, kind, honest, capable etc. and competitive, i.e. socially active. In the normally-sized population all these qualities in each individual are monitored by the other individuals with high precision. Those who possess all these qualities, the most harmonic human beings, get to the top of the society.

In a small natural social group all individuals are approximately equal in performance and possess the complete set of behavioral properties essential for a stable existence of the group. The best among the equal rule the society.

The unnaturally high intensity of competitive interaction in huge populations makes human beings choose among human virtues; nobody can afford retaining all of them. The individual has to choose to be either clever or competitive, either kind or competitive, etc. This choice among virtues can be compared to a forced choice between eating and drinking, breathing and sleeping etc. In the result, only those get to the top who spend all their time on competition. But these are no longer are the most harmonic individuals in the human society.

To get to the top of an unnaturally large social group one has to sacrifice the majority of human virtues spending most time on social competition.

Although for different reasons, this situation produces unsatisfaction, moral sufferings and diseases both in those decent people who cannot get to the top and in those who ultimately get there. Needless to say that this critically destabilizes the civilization, because the best human virtues remain undervalued and gradually lost from the society.

5. Conclusions

Thus, having lost the natural human rights, the overwhelming majority of people on Earth will never in their life have an opportunity to feel what it actually means to be a human being. What can this global humanitarian catastrophe be compared with? For example, if all human beings lost the ability to hear and, without knowing what happened, continued to believe that they have everything a human being must have. Or if all people of Earth became of one and the same sex and never knew the beauty of sexual relationships between men and women. Or if people lived under ground and never saw the sunlight, without even knowing that it exists. In the same manner modern humans have lost their right for individual territory, for social significance and human virtues.
Is our planet inhabited by human beings? Or, rather, by pathetic fragments of what once could have been conceived as a majestic design? As we have argued, all problems of modern civilization are the consequence of global overpopulation. Not only is this problem unresolved, but it has not even been set up properly. Usually human population growth is considered as an inevitable law of nature that cannot be modified. It is assumed that all civilization processes must be adapted to this law. Free market economy strongly relies on population growth. Mass-media not only ignore the overpopulation problem, but advertise the need to mitigate the demographic crisis in some developed countries.
In natural species, overpopulation is strongly suppressed and is practically never observed. It destroys the ecological community. But under some rare conditions overpopulation does exist in nature. What are these conditions? It is the abundance of some environmental characteristics used by life. Such abundance arises for species introduced on new territories, like rats and rabbits in Australia, or after volcanic eruptions. In all such cases we observe exponential growth and population expansion.
The reasons for this expansion are not obvious and must get a scientific explanation. Life cannot be stable without competitive interaction of individuals inside each population. Without competition and selection of defective individuals, the number of the latter increases. The species loses its organization and goes extinct.
Under conditions of abundance, defective individuals can occupy free territory and claim free resources, and thus avoid competition with normal individuals. In order to switch on competition, it is necessary to expand the population to occupy all available territory and resources, in other words, to do away with abundance. Life in continuous abundance is impossible. Therefore, expansion is a genetically programmed characteristic of life.
Human brain and thinking put the humanity under the illusion of a continuous resource abundance, which arises during the unstoppable intellectual development of the civilization. This very dangerous situation must be realized and seriously analyzed by modern humanity, in order that at least the future generations of people on Earth would live up to the proud name of the human being.

Homo sapiens — the rightless animal? PART I

(on humanitarian disaster of a global scale)

The original article in Viktor Gorshkov and Anastassia Makarieva's Web Site: Biotic Regulation 

Disclaimer: Dear readers, here we have attempted to tell you a picturesque story of how it happened that modern Homo sapiens lost all their major natural rights. We wrote this text in hope that it might be of interest even to those of you whose hearts are followed by minds (not vice versa, compared to our target reader). A.M. Makarieva, V.G. Gorshkov, 14 February 2009.

1. Introduction: What determines natural human rights

Something wrong is in the air with the Humanity. What is this and how this should be fought with before it is too late is the issue that bothers millions of people around the globe. Here we will argue that the essence of the catastrophe is that Humans have lost some major rights implied by their biological and ecological design.
Apparently, all living beings, with humans being no exception, are designed to eat and to drink. Accordingly, the rights for food and water are the primary rights reflected in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. If we look at the Humanity on a global scale, we will see that some biological rights are largely preserved, although increasingly threatened:

• the right to breathe,
• the right for comfortable ambient temperature,
• the right for food,
• the right for water.

But here we will give scientific evidence that several more natural human rights, as inherent as the above, have been globally lost. We termed them ecological human rights; these are

• the right for individual territory,
• the right for social significance,
• the right for human virtues.

Uniquely, these human rights have been lost without being explicitly recognized. Generally, rights of living creatures follow directly from, and are dictated by, their design and natural needs. A bird is designed to fly, a fish is designed to swim. Accordingly, they have the right for the sky and for the river, respectively.

What is the biological design of humans? Answer to this question will determine natural human rights.

2. Humans are designed to move and have the right
for an individual territory of four square kilometers

The power of human body is equal to approximately 100 Watts. This is the power of two reading bulbs. This power, which is called metabolic power, is used to support all biochemical processes within the human body. The energy comes with food. Food is provided by the biosphere.

The biosphere receives all energy from the Sun. Green plants convert some part of solar energy into organic matter, which is used as food by humans and other animals. Mean global productivity of the biosphere is about half a Watt per square meter. This is a very low power. It cannot satisfy a human body, which demands thousands times more per the same area.
From these two fundamental parameters, the metabolic power of human body and the productivity of the biosphere, we conclude unambiguously that human beings must move and collect organic matter that is produced on a very large territory. Obviously, this territory must be protected against competitors. In other words, humans are designed to move and possess a large individually controlled territory.
Humans are not unique in this design. The right for individual territory is invariably respected in all natural species of animals. There is a fundamental dependence between the body size and the size of individual territory in animals. Home range area grows approximately proportionally to body mass, Fig. 1. Small animals like mice and shrews are granted with small territories of several hundred square meters. The largest animals like elephants or rhinoceros or some large predators defend individiual territories that can exceed several hundred square kilometers.

Fig. 1. The dependence of individual territory on body mass in mammals. Green and black squares denote herbivores and carnivores, respectively. After Kelt and Van Vuren (2001). Red squares denote the natural territory allocated to Homo sapiens (the upper one) and mean individual territory of modern humans (the lower one).

And only in humans this right has been dramatically violated. The unprecedented explosive growth of human population during the last two centuries has resulted in the situation when an average human being can control a territory of no more than a hundred square meters. Of such a small individual territory even some rodents would be ashamed.

3. Major right lost: Consequences

Deprived of air, human beings perish in a few minutes. Deprived of water, human beings perish in a few days. Deprived of food, human beings perish in a few weeks. Deprived of individual territory, human beings are not human beings.
The fundamental nature of the right for individual territory can be traced in all aspects of human existence. What is the main punishment applied to Homo sapiens? Territory deprivation. Vice versa, the highest peaks of human spirit can be reached in solitude when the individual commands a very large territory. Not incidentally, many saints and sacred figures in world religions are known to have reached their perfection in solitude, like, for example, the famous Russian Saint Sergius Radonezhskii.

Vincent van Gogh "Prisoners exercising" and N.K. Rerikh "St. Sergius the Builder"

Another sign of the vital importance of territory for the human beings is manifested in the love of humans for traveling. Whenever free from their obligatory work, the majority of people choose to travel. They try to compensate lack of individual territory by the illusion of vast, although shared, space available to them when they travel.
Given the vitality of territory for the human design, it can be expected that the global loss of this inherent right will profoundly affect human performance and well-being. To realize how many terrible features in the modern civilization stem from the loss of this right, one can monitor the consequences of natural animals being deprived of their territory.
The fact that one does not have a sufficient individual territory signals to the individual about his low social status, results in humiliation and reduced biological performance. A comprehensive study of captive black rhinoceros that are notorious for their poor reproduction in captivity revealed the following. Those rhinoceros who were kept in closed cells with non-transparent walls reproduced worst of all. Both male potency and female reproductive capacity were the lowest. In contrast, those animals that could at least see a large free territory from their enclosures with transparent walls — all reproduced better. These findings, confirmed in many other species, including, for example, the tiny jerboas, indicate that the command of individual territory has a profound physiological significance which can be communicated by visual signals. Looking at the modern humanity, do not we notice a very similar pandemic of sexual disorders? People world over are losing the happiness of sexual life and the ability to leave health progeny. The parallel with territory-deprived animals is straightforward.

Deprived of individual territory, rhinos become infertile.

Another manifestation of the global loss of the right for territory, and this manifestation cries out, is the unnatural aggressiveness of our species. Massive killing of conspecifics is absent in any other species except Homo sapiens. Homo sapiens is an unbeaten and unrivaled champion of atrocities in the animal world. Terrorism, extremism all drink from this source.

V.V. Vereshagin. "Apotheosis of War"

To summarize, humans are not mice and cannot normally exist and implement their design on tiny spots. We are not bad, we are deeply unhappy.
The natural territory that is prescribed by the human design is of the order of 4 square kilometers. Four square kilometers of quieteness and relaxation, of solitude, of communication with nature, four square kilometers of home. Are there many people among those reading these lines who have experienced this at least once in their lives? (=Are there many birds among birds who could fly at least once?)

 [see Homo sapiens — the rightless animal? PART II here]

Hundred dollar hamburger?

Hear interview

BBC BUSINESS NEWS


14 June 2011 

A noted environmentalist and author has claimed that the value of most global resources is 'totally under priced' and if the true economic and environmental costs of producing meat were factored into the price of food, a hamburger would be worth 'about one hundred dollars'.

Speaking to the BBC's Business Daily, Chandran Nair told Lesley Curwen that the current Asian model for economic growth is broken and unsustainable.If economic development in Asia is to continue its rapid pace, 'draconian measures are absolutely needed' in order to combat the deterioration of the environment.
 
Transcript is below.

Chandran Nair: There is so much discussion about the shift of economic power from the west to the east and much of the narrative is a western narrative. And I argue that a sort of intellectual subservience in

the part of many Asian policy makers and economists has resulted in a denial of the scientific based evidence that 5 billion Asians in 2050 cannot live like the average American.

Lesley Curwen: Why not?

Chandran Nair: Simply because there isn't enough to go around. Let me give you an example for instance. Today China is already the world's largest car market and car ownership levels in China today are about 150 per thousand people. In the OECD countries, the levels are about 800-750, depending on which source you go to, per thousand people. India's car ownership levels today are at about 50; Indians even haven't started driving. And the estimates are that between China and India alone, there will be about 1.5 billion cars, which will be three times the current world population of cars. 

Lesley Curwen: In what year would that be?

Chandran Nair: In the next 30 years. So this is simply not possible for a variety of reasons including just the nature of the ability of cities to accommodate these amount of cars, but more importantly is that there are some estimates that it will take the entire oil shipment of Saudi Arabia just to drive cars in China and India if they reach these levels of ownership. And I can go on to talk about meat and everything else.  

Lesley Curwen: What about meat?

Chandran Nair: Well, meat consumption is a particularly interesting one given the concerns about how inefficient meat production is in terms of converting grain to meat et cetera and the water intensity. But, again, here is an interesting stat. Americans today consume something like 9 billion birds per year. Asia with a population of about over 10 times that today consumes about 16 billion birds. If Asian meat consumption increases as it is projected to, Asians in 2050 will consume something like 200 billion birds. This again is not going to be possible because on that journey to these levels of consumption, we will see a huge amount of collapse in terms of the ecological systems that we are very much dependent on here.

Lesley Curwen: You are talking here aren't you about the aspirations of people to do better for their children than they have themselves. It is such a basic human urge. Isn't it unstoppable?

Chandran Nair: You could argue it's unstoppable and then we can all stop the conversation about climate change making the world a better place. If we don't care, because we say human nature is all selfish and it's unstoppable, then let's just hope for the best. But hope is not a plan.

Lesley Curwen: If policies are going to constrain economic growth in Asia, in particular, then how do you get governments to adopt that, because surely in democracies people aren't going to vote for it and is it likely that a country like China would willingly adopt that when so far what we have seen is 'let's have more growth' from the Chinese government?

Chandran Nair: I think we need to move beyond this very simplistic notion about what economic growth is. I think what we are all interested in is development. I argue in the book that it's actually in the interest of governments in Asia to start addressing this problem immediately. A shift, a change in direction will provide them with a better opportunity to uplift the majority.

Lesley Curwen: Are you actually saying there should be limits imposed on the number of people who can own cars in Asian economies, the number of people who can eat meat, is that enforceable? 

Chandran Nair: Draconian measures are absolutely needed. We have draconian measures in many aspects of our lives today. I mean we have draconian measures, that don't allow you and I -I don't smoke - to smoke indoors. Some governments might decide that there would be restrictions on car ownerships, which some governments already do. These interventions can be very direct, but they can also be through fiscal means and taxation, et cetera.
The current economic model is based on one very important thing and that is the under pricing of resources. Most global resources have been totally under priced and extreme capitalism has thrived on this. If you start pricing things properly, then clearly meat will be eaten, but people will pay a proper price for this.
I would argue as some economists who have started to look at this issue have suggested that the price of a burger which I think, I don't eat burgers but, range from US$3 to US$4. The actual price if you have factored in the true economic cost of the externalities would be something like US$100. So the first step in all of this is clearly pricing externalities properly.

Lesley Curwen: If you constrain growth in the fastest growing bit of the global economy, what does that mean for all of us in the end? 

Chandran Nair: This is actually the critical question, the fabricated narrative around issues of resource limits, climate change, et cetera, would suggest that somehow free markets, technology and finance will solve these problems.

One of the things that provoked me to write the book was, and I think this goes to the heart of the question. When the financial crisis hit, you will remember that the urgings of most western economies and governments was to ask Asians to consume. At the same time, we were being told that climate change is probably the biggest challenge facing humanity. Any intelligent person knows that you cannot reconcile asking billions of Asians to consume more like Americans and at the same time deal with climate change.