WE NEED HUMILITY

by Lynn Margulis

Human beings need to be more humble. "Humble" comes from dghem , which is an ancient Indo-European root meaning earth. It's the root of humus and human and humanity. All of those things are, in that sense, of the earth and from the earth.

The world is full of non-human splendor, and I think people are healthy insofar as they can interact with that splendor. The trends toward total human takeover of the environment are awful. We are using 40% of net photosynthetic production for humans, and you have to be out of your mind if you think we can use 80%. We are already at maximum, and yet people think they can go on having children and all those children are going to live.

We think we're exempt from species death, that we're no longer subject to any kind of evolutionary rules, and our species is going to go on forever. That's a cultural myth. The tendency to exponentially grow all populations never lasts very long.

Lynn Margulis is an internationally renowned microbiologist, currently Distinguished University Professor of Biology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She had spent a lifetime complementing the Darwinian idea of natural competition with a vision of how organisms cooperate in changing and sustaining life. She is the co-developer (with James Lovelock, British biologist) of the Gaia hypothesis which states that the Earth is a single purposeful living system. This article reprinted from the Utne Reader, March-April 96 no. 74. From Pop!ulation Press vol 2, # 3, Spring 1996.