I’ve been puzzled by people I know
to be intelligent who nonetheless find it inconceivable that the
earth’s climate could be affected by human activity. Then I
saw one of those “cavedude” commercials on television,
and a glimmer of insight began to flicker.
In the
commercial, a Neandertal in modern dress is talking to a
psychiatrist, trying to work through his resentment at the claim
that something is “so easy, even a caveman could do
it.” The commercial apparently struck a chord with viewers,
or at least with the hominids trying to come up with new ways to
entertain us: The concept of a button-down caveguy with feelings
will now emerge as a sit-com.
This is timely, because
it’s something we need to keep in mind about ourselves as we
try to face the 21st century: We all still have the brain of a
caveman. But as the caveguy in the commercial tries to say:
“This is not an insult.”
The human brain
evolved over the past two or three million years, a time when
proto-humans wandered over the earth in small groups of 30-100
people. Only in the last 1 percent or less of that time — the
20,000 or 30,000 years since post-glacial population pressures
forced us into farming and, ultimately, city-living — have we had
to grapple with the consequences of our growing success as a
species. And only in the last 1 percent of that 1 percent of our
natural history — 200-300 years — have we been faced with the
possibility that, as a swarming species, we could make the planet
thoroughly unlivable. But physical evolution doesn’t happen
that fast, and we confront this possibility with basically the same
brain we were working with in those hard but fundamentally
irresponsible eons of hunting and gathering the earth’s
low-hanging fruit.
In its time and place, our brain was
probably a better brain than it is today. Here in Colorado’s
Upper Gunnison valley, if we sophisticated modern humans were
suddenly to be transported back 10,000 years, minus our technology,
and faced with the challenges of surviving on what we could
scrounge out of the valley environment, we would all be really glad
if the Folsom people, who successfully lived here then, deigned to
lend us a hand. To survive year-round in this valley, the way they
did, those paleo-humans had to have possessed mental and
psychological resources that have probably gone dormant in humans
raised in a cocoon of technological convenience and abundance.
But reactions to the climate-change issue show at least
one way in which we are operating with the same basic brain. A
natural response to living in small groups in the vast,
indifferent, randomly beautiful and cruel Pleistocene world,
populated with mammals larger, stronger and quicker than we were,
would be a kind of inferiority complex that is still evident in our
hard-wiring today. Think what we still say when we confront a
beautiful mountain or terrible storm: “It makes me feel so
small and insignificant!” Or, to cite a recent full-page
four-color tourism ad that ran in the Denver Post: “For
generations, finding yourself has come right after discovering your
insignificance.”
The idea that little-old-us could
ever become so large in the world that we could change the earth,
or even lay waste to huge portions of it, was unthinkable to the
nomadic humans that represent all of our natural history as a
species — except for this most recent 1 percent of 1 percent of
our existence. And if we don’t consciously stop and think
seriously about the thousand-fold difference between a few million
humans and 6.5 billion of us armed with technology that is
literally recreating on earth the carbon-heavy environment of the
steamy Pennsylvanian period, then the concept of human-induced
climate change could remain unthinkable for us today.
But
paradoxically, for that caveman brain we still operate on, a
grudging willingness to accept the knowledge that we could
precipitate – and probably already have — huge changes in
the planet, can lead right into another problem. We could move
straight from denial to despair: How can little-old-us possibly do
anything to repair our monumental changes – starting now?
Those dormant mental and psychological capabilities of
the caveman brain, which enabled hominids to go from a handful of
comparatively weak and vulnerable primates scurrying around Africa
to the dominant mammal species adapted to every place on earth,
could address that question with vigor. But not so long as our
caveman’s inferiority complex gets in the way.
George Sibley is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a
service of High Country News (hcn.org). He’s writes about
energy and water in Gunnison, Colorado.
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