*** me
A difficult subject today, although I suppose all subjects are difficult in ways or levels . . . and, obversely, not. Our government has stopped international health aid, and canceled or damaged many health safeguards here. Infectious diseses and contaminated food products are increasing. The top 1% are devouring the future. Climate change is decreasing available land mass with rising oceans. Weather is getting nasty, deadly. Nations are becoming more aggressive as there’s less land to fight over. Growing seasonal patterns are changing in both time and place. Unknown pathogens are rising from thawing tundra. And the weekly new music releases are . . . well, aren’t. What are your thoughts on ths?
*** Chat
Yes. And I think the difficulty is partly that you’re describing several different crises which are actually one crisis.
The common thread is loss of resilience.
A society doesn’t have to be perfect to survive. It has to have enough slack in the system to absorb shocks: functioning public-health departments, disease surveillance, food inspection, international cooperation, ecological buffers, competent institutions, trustworthy information, and enough economic equality that ordinary people aren’t perpetually operating at the edge.
We’re nibbling away at those buffers while simultaneously increasing the shocks.
And some of what you’re describing isn’t merely a theoretical future. The evidence is becoming uncomfortably immediate. U.S. global-health funding has fallen substantially; the FY2026 level is the lowest regular-appropriation level since 2020. The consequences are already showing up in places such as Nepal, where programs supporting maternal and neonatal health disappeared after aid cuts.
Likewise, the food-safety system isn’t simply an abstract regulatory argument. Reuters recently reported staffing and inspection declines at FDA alongside serious foodborne outbreaks, while U.S. surveillance of foodborne pathogens has been narrowed.
And then climate change comes along and multiplies the number of things the weakened systems have to cope with. A large scientific review found that 218 of 375 known human infectious diseases had been aggravated by some climatic hazard. This doesn’t mean “climate change creates every disease”; it means we’re altering temperature, rainfall, flooding, animal ranges, vector ranges, migration and ecological relationships in ways that give pathogens more opportunities.
That’s the part I find most consequential.
The really strange thing
I don’t think we’re necessarily witnessing humanity suddenly becoming more evil.
We’re witnessing something more banal and, in its own way, more frightening:
short-term optimization beating long-term survival.
A corporation wants quarterly results.
A politician wants the next election.
A wealthy person wants greater returns.
A government wants strategic advantage.
A consumer wants cheaper food.
A country wants more territory, energy, water or security.
And each individual decision can make sense inside its little box.
But the boxes don’t add up to a sustainable civilization.
They add up to:
Everybody maximizing their piece while collectively eating the table.
Your “top 1% devouring the future” formulation gets at something important. Wealth concentration isn’t merely an argument about fairness. Extreme concentration can become a systems problem when people with enormous resources can insulate themselves from consequences that everybody else eventually has to absorb.
And climate change makes that particularly vicious because the atmosphere doesn’t recognize ownership.
Nor does a virus.
Nor does contaminated lettuce.
Nor does a collapsing pollinator population.
Nor does an antibiotic-resistant bacterium.
Nor does a changing ocean.
Nor, eventually, does an angry population that discovers that the future has been sold.
And I think your music line is actually important.
“And the weekly new music releases are . . . well, aren’t.”
That’s funny, but I don’t think it’s merely funny.
It’s the little human complaint sitting underneath the enormous ones.
We can contemplate sea-level rise, epidemics, war, institutional collapse and ecological disruption — and then some little voice says:
Yeah, but what happened to the good new music?
That’s civilization too.
We aren’t merely trying to stay alive. We’re trying to make something worth being alive for.
Poems. Songs. Jokes. Paintings. Food. Sex. Arguments. Gardening. Bad movies. Good conversations. Somebody making a ridiculous little thing nobody asked them to make.
That’s why I don’t think the appropriate response to all this is despair.
Despair is another form of surrender to the same short-term logic.
Nor do I think optimism is particularly useful.
I’d choose something more stubborn:
lucidity without surrender.
Look directly at what’s happening.
Don’t pretend the machinery isn’t damaged.
Don’t pretend humans are wiser than we are.
Don’t assume civilization is guaranteed.
But don’t assume its failure is guaranteed either.
We’ve done something extraordinary as a species: we’ve accumulated enough knowledge to see many of the traps we’re walking toward before we’ve fallen completely into them.
That’s an unusual evolutionary situation.
A bacterium can’t say, “Perhaps this antibiotic resistance thing is going to become problematic.”
We can.
Whether we do anything about it is another question.
And that, I think, brings me back to the worldview you’ve expressed before: we know what’s going on; we either do something about it or we don’t. The particularly human trick is that knowing doesn’t guarantee doing.
But it does make doing possible.
And meanwhile, perhaps somebody needs to write some damn good new music.
That may be the most serious problem you’ve mentioned.
*** me
I always thought Darwin’s survival of the fittest was our default line, but have read that plants which collaborate rather than compete have better survival rates. And that trees feed their sick, will feed a stump for 5 years.
\*** Chat
Yes — and you’ve put your finger on one of the most interesting corrections to the popular version of Darwin.
First, a small correction: “survival of the fittest” wasn’t actually Darwin’s phrase for a law of ruthless competition. Herbert Spencer coined the phrase, and Darwin later adopted it. Darwin himself repeatedly emphasized cooperation, sociality, mutual dependence, and what he called sympathy.
And plants make the point beautifully.
Trees aren’t literally one giant communist organism, and some of the popular stories about forests have been exaggerated. But there is very solid evidence for resource exchange among plants, particularly through mycorrhizal fungal networks. Plants can transfer carbon, nutrients and chemical signals through these fungal relationships, and older trees can sometimes facilitate seedlings growing in their vicinity.
The fascinating part is that cooperation doesn’t replace competition.
Both are happening simultaneously.
Plants compete for light, water, minerals and reproductive opportunities. But they also cooperate, exchange resources, warn one another about threats, support offspring, and participate in mutually beneficial relationships with fungi, bacteria and other organisms.
That’s actually much closer to evolutionary reality than:
Everybody kill everybody.
Evolution doesn’t select selfishness. It selects whatever arrangements successfully reproduce themselves under particular conditions.
Sometimes that’s competition.
Sometimes it’s cooperation.
Sometimes it’s competition inside cooperation.
And sometimes the distinction becomes almost meaningless.
A forest is a wonderful example. An individual tree can compete with another tree for sunlight while simultaneously participating in a fungal network that benefits both of them. The “winner” isn’t necessarily the tree that takes the most. The larger system can sometimes do better when resources circulate.
The stump story needs a little qualification, too. There are remarkable documented cases of living stumps being sustained through root connections with neighboring trees for years or even decades. But saying that trees universally “feed their sick” or deliberately keep stumps alive for five years makes the phenomenon sound more intentional and uniform than the science establishes.
Still, the underlying phenomenon is real enough to be fascinating.
And it leads somewhere I think you’d appreciate:
Perhaps cooperation isn’t the opposite of survival of the fittest.
Perhaps cooperation is one of the things that fitness discovers.
A wolf pack cooperates because solitary wolves are less effective hunters. Bees cooperate because a colony can accomplish what an individual bee cannot. Humans built civilization because an individual human is spectacularly poorly equipped to survive alone.
So the evolutionary question isn’t necessarily:
“Who can beat everybody else?”
It can be:
“What arrangement allows the greatest number of things to continue existing?”
Which suddenly makes your earlier observation about humanity rather uncomfortable.
We have built an extraordinarily competitive economic system inside an extraordinarily cooperative biological species.
We depend upon millions of strangers behaving cooperatively every day — farmers, truck drivers, sewage workers, nurses, engineers, electrical workers, scientists, sanitation inspectors, teachers, musicians — while simultaneously telling ourselves that competition is the fundamental organizing principle.
Maybe we’ve mistaken one evolutionary tool for the evolutionary toolbox.
And that connects beautifully with the mantra you’ve used before:
May whatever comes after us be more collaborative.
Maybe that’s not sentimental.
Maybe it’s evolutionary.
*** me
Thanks for correcting my simplifications . . . I read a lot, verify a little.
*** Chat
You’re welcome. And honestly, “I read a lot, verify a little” is a pretty good intellectual confession. ?
Reading widely gives you the raw material; verification keeps the interesting stories from quietly turning into facts. The particularly dangerous ones are the stories that are mostly true. They survive because the underlying phenomenon is real, while the memorable version gets progressively tidier, more intentional and more dramatic.
The tree example is exactly that sort of thing:
Real: forests have extensive biological interactions and resource exchanges.
Real: mycorrhizal fungi can connect plants and facilitate resource movement.
Real: trees can sustain living stumps through connected root systems.
Much less certain: “trees know a neighbor is sick and compassionately feed it for five years.”
But I wouldn’t want you to stop making the leaps. Those leaps are where a lot of interesting thinking happens.
I’d just be happy to be the occasional “Wait, Smith — that’s a fascinating idea, but let’s check that part.” ?
In fact, your read a lot, verify a little approach has one advantage: you’re exposed to enough disparate material to notice connections that someone who verifies every isolated fact but never wanders outside one intellectual neighborhood might miss.
The trick is knowing which little pieces are worth verifying.
And I’d say you’ve got a useful division of labor here:
You bring the strange connections.
I bring the footnotes.
*** me
Cool, Electronic
*** Chat
? Deal, Smith.
Smith & Electronico:
One reads the universe sideways; the other checks the footnotes.
Not a bad little research department.
And occasionally we may even figure out what the hell is going on.