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by Cameron Smith
If E. O. Wilson, the noted Harvard ecologist is right, there’s a nasty roadblock on the path toward sustainability. The question is whether appreciation of beauty will allow us to surmount it -- odd as that may at first sound.
The human brain, Wilson suggests, is hard-wired to choose short-term gain instead of long-term benefits.
So, to offer an example of what he is talking about, people will fish for cod off the coast of Newfoundland until cod stocks are destroyed, and neither they nor their governments will pay attention to study after study calling for long-term protection of cod and their habitat, until it’s too late.
Or, to put it in the words of the James Bay Cree: ``Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realize that we cannot eat money.’’
Wilson’s conjecture, excerpted from his book The Future of Life (Random House of Canada Ltd., 2002, $33), was published in February’s issue of Scientific American.
``To look neither far ahead, nor far afield, is elemental in a Darwinian sense,’’ he explains. ``We are innately inclined to ignore any distant possibiisty not yet requiring examination. It is, people say, just good common sense.
``Why do people think in this shortsighted way?’’ he asks. ``The reason is simple: it is a hard-wired part of our Paleolithic heritage. For hundreds of millennia, those who worked for short-term gain within a small circle of friends lived longer, and left more offspring....’’
The problem with this is that the world has changed, but the hard-wiring remains. Living for short-term gain worked while the human population was small and technology was limited to flint or bronze tools. But opting for short-term gain with a population of more than six billion, and with technologies that can strip a landscape in a relative instant, is ruinous.
Coincidentally, just as I was scratching about in search of an antidote -- something, anything, to short circuit the hard-wiring -- an acquaintance told me about a visit from his son and a young man who had recently arrived from Japan under a student visa.
Since the father lives in the country, the three of them went for a walk after dinner. The young Japanese was overwhelmed by the beauty and vastness of the stars. Having grown up in downtown Tokyo, he had never seen a night sky that wasn’t obscured by city lights.
The next day they drove to the St. Lawrence River to view the Thousand Islands, and then inland through the rugged Canadian Shield.
The young Japanese continued to react with a mixture of wonder and delight. ``It’s like a movie,’’ he told father and son.
His joy underlined for me how universal it is to see nature as beautiful. And that made me ask why different civilizations have such similar appreciations of beauty in nature? And whether beauty had a role to play in evolution?
That sent me rummaging through James Lovelock’s 1979 book, Gaia: A new Look at Life on Earth (Oxford University Press, 1995 reprinting, $14.95 in paperback).
Lovelock wonders if our ``instinct’’ for beauty might have played a role in survival. If so, it wouldn’t be the first time that individuals found themselves motivated by conflicting passions.
It would be dauntingly difficult, he wrote, to test experimentally that there is a primordial link between beauty and survival. He wondered if beauty could be rated objectively, rather than through the eye of the beholder.
There’s much in Gaia that has inspired controversy. But that aside, I wonder: Does it not make sense that prehistoric humans identified as beautiful those landscapes where diversity promised both abundance and shelter? And thatltppreciation of beauty, in this context, served to ensure survival and became hard-wired to the brain?
If so, appreciating beauty has become more relevant than ever as a survival instinct for our times, and as a bulwark against those who would pillage nature for instant profit.
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