Chapter 2: The History of Planetary Biology
If you live in the jungle, and your family has lived there for 2,000 years, you probably know everything you need to know to live well in the jungle. But if you moved to the desert, you wouldn’t know how to live well there. There would be different plants and animals there, so you wouldn’t know how to farm as well in the desert as you could in the jungle.
However, if you picked up a rock in the desert and let go of it, it would still fall to the ground just like it did in the jungle. If you rubbed your hands together in the desert it would make them warm, just like it did in the jungle. The plants that lived in the desert would still need water and the right kind of soil. And so on. Some things would be different in the desert than they were in the jungle, but some things would be the same.
Scientists have been studying things like this, to try to figure what other things work the same way in the desert as they do in the jungle, or in any other part of the world. That way, just like you’ve figured out how to live well in the jungle, people could figure out how to live well in every part of the world.
In 1968, a great scientist named Dr. Aurelio Pecci brought together a group of scientists from all over the world to a meeting in Rome, in Italy, to study humanity’s impact on the world on a global scale. He realized that the whole world was like a farm. He also realized that a lot of people didn’t know that. He also realized that nobody knew how the world-farm worked.
Dr. Pecci saw a problem no one else could see at the time. The population of the world was growing, people were building more and more factories, they were growing more and more food, they were using up more and more resources, and they were generating more and more pollution. But the Earth is only so big. People need food to live, and growing food requires farmland. There had to be a limit to how many people the Earth could support, because there was a limit to the amount of farmland on the Earth, and a limit to how much food the soil of the farmland could produce.
Dr. Pecci tried to answer some important questions: How many people could the Earth support? When were we going to reach that number? And, what was going to happen when we did? So he founded the Club of Rome to find answers to those questions.
The information the Club of Rome had to work with wasn’t nearly what it is today. But it was enough for them to get a good idea of the answers. The population of the world would reach the limitations of the world sometime in the 21st century. When it did, we were going to run out of resources quickly. The main reason our population size was growing so quickly was because of machines and factories. When our resources were gone, there would be no more resources to take to the factories to build more machines. When our machines started breaking down, a lot of things were going to go wrong, like, anyone who didn’t work on a farm wouldn’t be able to get the food they needed, because there wouldn’t be any more trucks to haul it from the farms to the cities or wherever the people lived. With the food distribution network gone, a lot of people would starve. That would cause a lot more problems. If that happened all over the world, billions of people would die in the 21st century.
Solving that problem would require us to live differently. If you’re a subsistence farmer, you don’t need to live differently (or not much, anyway), but most people in America and many people in the rest of the world would need to.
Some of the scientists published their discoveries in a book called The Limits to Growth. A lot of people listened to them. But a lot more people didn’t. The problems the scientists predicted kept getting worse.
In 1987, another great scientist, named Dr. Ervin Laszlo, brought together another group of scientists from all over the world, to a meeting in Budapest, in Hungary (which is another country in Europe), to try to figure out as much as they could about how people think. Since people are a part of the world, they’re a part of the world-farm. It had been 19 years since the Club of Rome met, and the problems they had predicted kept getting worse, not better. Dr. Laszlo realized that the world-farm was never going to work unless someone could figure out why making our problems worse instead of better seemed like such a good idea to so many people. In order to help change people’s minds, he started studying how people’s minds work.
The field of science that has built up around those two groups is what I call planetary biology.
In my family we’ve been working on a similar project for longer than these scientists have. My grandmother was a philosopher and an artist, and my grandfather built airplanes. They had completely opposite points of view on a lot of things, but they were happily married for 67 years. My grandfather was always interested in how things work, and my grandmother was always interested in thinking about everything in the world. So between them, they had to figure out how everything in the world worked, just so they’d be able to talk to each other.
That’s been a tradition in my family ever since. Science is the study of how things work, and my grandfather, my father, and me, are exceptionally good at it. My grandfather was an engineer and an architect, and my father was a mathematician, an architect, a teacher, and a sociologist. I was raised on science from the time I first learned to talk.
Now these great scientists started trying to figure out how everything in the world works, and my family had a head start over them.
1968 was an important year here in America for another reason. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was the greatest American activist of the 20th century, and he was assassinated in 1968. The scientists of the Club of Rome were saying that great social change would be necessary to keep from destroying the environment, and meanwhile Dr. King had made a lot of great social changes happen. My dad realized then what these official scientists are realizing now: Great social changes happen because someone figures out how to explain to everyone why the old way of doing things doesn’t work, what they need to do differently, and why doing things differently is going to benefit everyone.
My dad could’ve become an official scientist and joined the Club of Rome. But instead, he set out to lead a life of adventure, and he kept up on new discoveries scientists made. He and my mother raised my brother and me the same way.
I have 8 years of university education, which should make me a Doctor of what I do, but my 8 years of education is in 4 different fields. I’ve traveled and lived all over the United States. I’ve met a lot of different people and seen how they live. I’ve been a carpenter, a mechanic, I’ve been a maintenance worker at a hotel (where a lot of Mexicans worked), and I’ve also been a teacher, an artist, and a helicopter pilot.
The year after I graduated high school, I went to live in Ecuador for a year. I learned some Spanish and I saw how much differently the peasants and the materially wealthy people lived. And when I went out in the streets with my long hair and my black beret, people always said I looked like Ché Guevara. So I guess now is the time to see if I can live up to the name.
By now, a lot of scientists who are working on planetary biology are getting worried about what’s going to happen. The problems they’ve been talking about still aren’t getting solved. The people taking your farms is just one example, and all the illegal immigrants coming to America is another. The people who are taking your farms, and people like them, have always been able to produce a lot of things by extracting resources from the world. But these are the people who don’t understand what science is or what it means. These people assume that just because the world has produced a lot for them proves it will always produce as much as they want. But the world doesn’t work that way. You can’t produce as much as you want on your farm, you can only produce a certain amount, and that’s all. The whole world works the same way.
This is one way that my not being an official scientist benefits me. The official scientists depend on the people who are taking your farms, or people like them, to pay for a lot of their work. So there’s only so much they can do to get people to pay attention to their science, before the people who are taking your farms stop paying them for their work. But I don’t have that problem. So I can tell anyone I want about planetary biology. I’ll start by telling third world guerillas who are fighting to defend their farms.