Here is an article by Russell Frank. Russell is a writer for many newspapers
I am in a place so nearly perfect it’s obnoxious to even talk about it. Picture any cliché screen saver or calendar photo of a tropical beach: the near-white sand, the leaning palms, the seawater shading from swimming-pool blue close to shore to navy blue beyond the reef. Imagine the magic-fingers feel of the breeze on such a beach. Cue “The Girl from Ipanema.” Ask yourself why in the world do humans live anywhere else?
I am sitting on this Mexican beach watching kitesurfers tack and, heaven help me, I am thinking: We’re doomed.
Maybe it’s my visit to the Mayan ruins at Tulum.
Or maybe it’s the flimsy end-of-the-decade issue of Time magazine I paged through when I got up this morning with its reminders of the 2000 election and 9/11 and Katrina and tsunami and earthquake and Iraq and Afghanistan and the global economy and global warming.
Or maybe it’s just the yummy but undercooked tamales I bought from a street vendor on the way to the beach.
As apocalyptic visions go, this one’s as benign as the breeze. I don’t see a whirlwind destroying the planet. I don’t even see the human race dying off. Rather I see us dying back — a kind of cosmic pruning whereby an exhausted earth sustains a smaller and less resource-devouring human population while it repairs and replenishes itself.
Arguments about the human prospect tend to revolve around human intelligence. The optimists have faith in our capacity for technological innovation: We don’t need to change the way we live to reduce our consumption of natural resources. We just need to develop new extraction and processing techniques that enable us to both tap new resources and tap existing ones more efficiently and more sustainably.
According to this line of thinking, the answer to American dependence on other people’s oilfields isn’t to turn down the thermostat; it’s to develop our own oilfields while allowing the power companies to continue to burn coal and spin turbines and split atoms so they can generate the profits they need to invest in the search for new energy sources.
The pessimists worry that we’re not smart or nimble enough to solve our problems before they overwhelm us. Maybe the human tendency to think about short-term needs and gratifications was a viable survival strategy when there were fewer of us. Now, as the human population burgeons and more and more of us participate in the global economy, consumption threatens to outpace regeneration and innovation.
According to this line of thinking, the most powerful stakeholders in the global economy, from the business tycoons to the politicians whose campaigns are bankrolled by the tycoons, are the least likely challengers of the status quo, which means that the public will never get called upon to make the sacrifices that will need to be made to head off ecological disaster. Change can bubble up from below, but we’re probably too enthralled with our games and toys to get off our duffs.
The vision of the kitesurfers skimming down the sea lanes of the ancient Mayans marries the two views. The kite, harness and board of the kitesurfer – simple, elegant, eminently suited to the purpose—are a testament to human ingenuity and the spirit of adventure. At the same time, the gear is the perfect embodiment of human ingenuity in the service of amusement.
Far be it from me, a vacationer on the Mayan Riviera, to condemn amusement. But as we devote more and more of our time and attention and brainpower to the pursuit of pleasure, it feels more and more like we are dancing on the edge of a cliff. The Mayan calendar is coming to the end of a cycle at the end of 2012. I don’t see civilization collapsing in the next two years, but I can see where eventually – in a few decades? a few centuries? a few millennia? – environmental pressures will kill most of us off. Our cities will be as silent as the ruins of Tulum and Chichen Itza. That’s the bad news.
The good news: The lovely, resilient Earth will heal and we, bold and ingenious kitesurfers that we are, will develop from the simple to the complex all over again.
Which means that some lucky-so-and-so may once again be able to come down from the frozen north at the end of one year and the beginning of the next and drink too many cervezas and dip too many chips into too many bowls of guacamole and spend too much time in the sun gazing out at the ancient Mayan sea lanes considering the future in light of the present and the past.
Russell Frank
Russell Frank worked as a reporter, editor and columnist at newspapers in California and Pennsylvania for 13 years before joining the journalism faculty at Penn State in 1998. He roots for the Yankees, plays blues guitar and harmonica (badly), bikes and hikes for physical exercise and does The New York Times crossword puzzle for mental exercise. He is, by academic training, a folklorist (Ph.D., UPenn), which means, when you strip away all the academic jargon, that he loves a good story. His views and opinions do not necessarily reflect those of Penn State University.
More articles by Russell Frank
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