1.  OLORGESAILIE An hour’s drive and a 600-metre drop in altitude from Nairobi is Olorgesailie, a Lower Palaeolithic archaeological site on the floor of the Rift Valley in Kenya. It is blisteringly hot. Nothing moves in the heat of the day except dust, gathering into twisters. There are puff adders in the grass, scorpions under the rocks. The lions are thin, the giraffes few, the elephants killed. It might be the closest we have to the Garden of Eden. From the campsite it is possible to make out the outline of the prehistoric lake which once flooded the plain in soapy water. According to potassium-argon dating, hominids lived here for 900,000 years. They made handaxes which they used to butcher the hippos, zebras and baboons they hunted and scavenged. Olorgesailie stands for the gaping history of our species, a blurry, half-formed and dreamlike time from which archaeology can pull out only pieces. The Kenyan anthropologist Louis Leakey uncovered a Homo erectus skull here in the 1940s; the brain cavity was disappointingly small. There must have been grunts, gestures with stones, blood, the sky blotted with vultures, ape children kept back in the darkness. The sense of space here is immense. So too is the sense of known time, hominid time, known at first in the way a beast knows time, in light and darkness, but conscious all the same. The night sky is black lacquered. Satellites pass across it like trams. There are shooting stars. Sometimes there is the sound of hyenas. “To the extent we are hardwired, it is probably as small bands of hunter-gatherers,” says Spencer Wells, the American geneticist who heads the Genographic Project. Its aim is to take 100,000 DNA samples from indigenous peoples around the world and write the songline of mankind’s journey out of Africa from a place like Olorgesailie, obliterating any literal interpretation of the Garden of Eden and replacing it with a new evidence-based creed.

2.  THE  GENOGRAPHIC CREED The creed holds that every single non-African on the planet is descended from one or possibly two small bands of humans who made it on rafts and skins across the Red Sea at the narrows of the Bab el-Mandeb, or Gate of Tears, about 50,000 years ago. We are a more maritime species than we ever supposed, even if we keep close to the shore. These early humans, this Mayflower on foot, scavenged shellfish along the tideline and in the rock pools, increasing their range by a few kilometres a year. Within 5,000-10,000 years, without much need for adaptation, they had worked their way around India and across the land bridges that then linked Asia with a short sea crossing to Australia. Some 99% of the human genome is shuffled from one birth to the next. The Genographic Project traces the 1% of the genome which is not shuffled—mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) through the maternal line and the Y-chromosome through the paternal. These jokers in the pack allow geneticists to work back to our common ancestors. Our mtDNA appears to coalesce in a single woman, who lived on the African savannah 150,000 years ago. Our Y-chromosome survives from a single man, who lived in the Rift Valley of Kenya or Tanzania 59,000 years ago. So Adam and Eve did exist—90,000 years apart. The discrepancy is because, unlike the biblical Adam and Eve, this couple only represent the last common Ancestors we can trace genetically. About 60,000 years ago, our species had crashed to 2,000 individuals, then recovered with the help of language and conceptual thinking. The speed of our spreading is alarming set against evolutionary time, as if we’re bacteria. The journey of each individual is arranged by haplogroup, a branch of migration marked by a genetic mutation. Since the 1848 revolutions, the spread of mechanised transport and the rise of “isms” culminating in globalism, couples have been shuffling their distinct genetic families, or haplogroups, some representing tiny indigenous peoples, others much of western Europe. In many respects the Genographic Project is a race against time. Indigenous peoples amount to just 350m of the 6.8 billion people on the planet. The number of languages has gone from 15,000 in 1492 to 5,900 today. The ancient bloodlines are almost gone. Soon only the vampires will be left. The Genographic Project, which is underwritten by National Geographic, IBM and the Waitt Foundation, revolves around the dazzling countenance of Spencer Wells (pictured below). With his blond hair, blue eyes and Nebraska roots, he is the ideal high priest to explain to white Americans that they are blacks gone curdy. His biography carefully notes that he was a “child prodigy with a love for both history and science” who entered the University of Texas at 16. He took his PhD at Harvard under the noted evolutionary geneticist Richard Lewontin, then worked for the founding father of population genetics, Luca Cavalli-Sforza, at Stanford. After a stint running a lab in Oxford and a couple of television shows, he became an explorer-in-residence at National Geographic, which he regards as “the world’s coolest job”. For publicity’s sake, the project will help solve popular history questions. Did the Vikings leave a genetic imprint on America? How far did the Incas spread? But at its core is the hard science of population genetics. Cavalli-Sforza’s “The History and Geography of Human Genes”, written with Paolo Menozzi and Alberto Piazza (Princeton University Press, 1994), is still considered the best overview of genetic diversity in humans. Cavalli-Sforza demolished the idea of there being different species of human being. No more Homo afer, asiaticus, europaeus, americanus and monstrous. Race, says Cavalli-Sforza, has hardly any useful biological meaning at all. It is about adaptation. Grain-eaters between the Baltic and Black Sea got pale skin, pale eyes and pale hair because they were under selective pressure to process more Vitamin D from limited sunlight. Lewontin, Wells’s other mentor, posited that if a nuclear war struck and only the Kenyan Kikuyu survived, they would still have 85% of the genetic variation of mankind; with a similar history and conditions, they too would turn blond and blue-eyed under the northern sun. Cavalli-Sforza was the first to propose a global sample of genetic diversity, but hisHuman Genome Diversity Project foundered on insensitivity to indigenous peoples and a murky position on whether the DNA samples could be sold. The Genographic Project has learned from those mistakes. Instead of covering its costs with industrial sponsorship, it sells kits to interested members of the public, which in turn support a small legacy fund for indigenous peoples that sweetens their participation. The project has so far gathered 50,000 DNA samples from indigenous peoples. It has sold 300,000 kits at $100 a pop to the public in 130 countries. The major findings will be made public in 2011. “The biggest challenges have been bureaucratic and financial,” says Wells. The few remaining ethnolinguistic hotspots are in remote bits of rainforest, marsh, desert and steppe: National Geographic country.

3.  IBM The sequencing of nucleotides—the Lego bricks which build our DNA and RNA—within each gene segment is only possible with the power of computing, particularly the algorithms that allow for swifter and more detailed analysis of the data. The work on the Genographic Project is being done by the computational biology team at IBM’s vast research division in the Watson labs outside New York. The genome has a digital structure played out over long strands. It may be significant that we live in an age where the digital is more understandable to us. The head of the IBM team is an Indian, Ajay Royyuru. IBM has used the Genographic Projectas a way of sharpening its understanding of genetics. The goal was to build a statistical model for human variation and migration, he says, but the first lessons were ethical. IBM extended its non-discrimination policy to include genetic markers and helped make it law in the United States; it is now illegal to get rid of an employee because their genes indicate, say, a likelihood of multiple sclerosis. The biggest advance Royyuru’s team has made is on new algorithms that could allow population geneticists to work with the 99% of the genome that is shuffled. Since the number of our ancestors grows by “two to the power for each generation removed”, the Genographic Project is only looking at a small part of any given person’s genetic inheritance, a few branches on a tree. So far, says Royyuru, the problem remains “NP-hard” (nondeterministic polynomial-time hard), meaning that it cannot be proven with the present computing power. But by applying parsimony, the logic of the simplest evident solution, the IBM algorithm could allow geneticists to say something about complex traits within given populations. Royyuru expects it could be applied to the growing field of personalised testing for genetic markers within the next decade, constituting a significant medical advance.

4.  MY MIGRATION If you are not an indigenous person, you can buy a DNA kit. You “vigorously” scrape off cells from the inside of your cheek, insert the sample in a clear plastic vial and send it off to Washington, DC. For Europeans, the results are generally bland. About 80% of Europeans are descended from paleolithic hunter-gatherers, with the rest coming up the Danube with the first farming culture, or in smaller groups, such as Ottomans and attendant gypsies. Genetically speaking, my genes are the unsalted of the bland. I was born in the Shetland Islands, of Yorkshire Norman stock. Predictably, comfortingly, my Y-chromosome haplogroup is identified as I1a. “Because of its high frequency in western Scandinavia,” my results read, “it is likely many Vikings descended from this line. The Viking raids on the British Isles might explain the dispersal of this lineage as well.” The I1a Northmen migrated from Africa, through the Middle East to the Balkans and on to western Europe. About 28,000-23,000 years ago they helped found the sensual “Gravettian” culture, weaving cloth from natural fibres and carving voluptuous figurines, fertile in their swollen breasts, belly and hips. They then took refuge from the last glacial maximum in Iberia. When the ice retreated, they made their way up the French coast to populate parts of Britain and Norway. At least I am not a Neanderthal. One of the Holy Grail questions of anthropology, which persisted until recently, was whether Europeans had some Neanderthal blood. The groundbreaking research by Svante Paabo at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, examining DNA extracted from Neanderthal bones, shows that is not the case. The lead researcher for the European part of the Genographic Project is Lluis Quintana-Murci of the Pasteur Institute in Paris. He spends some of his time in the Central African Republic studying the links between Bantu and pygmies. In Europe, he hopes to help solve the mystery of the Basques. Are they relic hunter-gatherers, as some Basque nationalists claim? An extensive study of the Basque lands in Spain and France together with control groups from non-Basque Asturias and Aragon may settle the question and shed light on the Basque language, which “doesn’t belong to any known linguistic family”. My partner is Czech, and her  mtDNA is haplogroup K. At first glance this is a quirky group associated with Ashkenazi Jews, but it is in fact also a common Slav maternal line. Our youngest son, Hamish, has lived all his life in the Rift Valley. He speaks a little Swahili, but also inherits from his Mum the M17 marker which indicates Kurgan descent. These pre-Scythian nomads glittered on horseback, leaving burial mounds—kurgans—filled with gold across the Eurasian steppe. The Ashkenazi marker is interesting, no question, but the Kurgan brings me back to one of the definitive films of my childhood, “Highlander”, in which two (almost) immortals, a Scottish Highlander played by Christopher Lambert and a Kurgan played by Clancy Brown, engage in mortal swordplay. What does it mean to be a couple of thousand generations removed from Adam when, say, Donne and his sonnets are already a cosmos away after only eight generations? On the level of modern history the genographers are no big deal. A haplogroup is so vague as to be useless to genealogists. I could stand on a street in Edinburgh and find more people who shared my I1a haplogroup than my green politics, much less my star sign. But on the level of deep ancestry the Genographic Project is a very big deal. Matt Ridley, author of  “Genome” and a former science correspondent for The Economist, believes the genome revolution “is the biggest development in human history, bar none”. Within that, “out of Africa is a huge story”. Most of genetics looks forward—to the elimination of disease, cloning, perhaps even the creation of a new species. But if we as a species are but nature’s brief experiment with self-awareness, the Genographic creed is a moment of Copernican consequence, when we truly awake to our origins and journey.

5.  ALL AFRICANS We are all Africans. We originated in Africa. That is proved by the continent’s rich genetic inheritance. Africans are more diverse than the rest of humanity put together, because they are drawn from the pool of humans who did not leave. As Wells points out, two Africans from the same village could be more divergent from each other than either is from a non-African. The question is whether this new understanding will reinforce prejudices against Africans, or help end them. As Africa’s population rises and parts of the continent collapse under economic and environmental pressures, eugenics may reappear. This would be revised eugenics, conceding the physical superiority of Africans in everything from penis size to sprinting, but holding that they are not selected for problem solving, having never benefited from the training ground of the Eurasian steppe (with its need for microliths, clothing and portable shelters). “To give them equality is to sink to their level, to protect and cherish them is to be swamped in their fecundity,” wrote the novelist H.G. Wells, a proponent of eugenics. Rubbish, says Spencer Wells. There are no nasty genetic secrets out there about Africans, “certainly no differences in general intelligence”. Whites’ superior attitudes towards blacks, he reckons, is based on a “general correlation between latitudes and economic development”. Even if National Geographic is suffocated by political correctness and an obsessive need for a tidy narrative, he is right. If Africa is stunted, it is through circumstance, not genetics. Just look at the Nile-Saharan Genetic markers on President Obama’s Y-chromosome. Besides, evolutionary biologists point out that cold rewarded as much as it punished. With plentiful reindeer, fish in the rivers, nutritious roots and berries, more water, more wood and fewer diseases, the living may have been easier in the north. In any case, the genetic questions for Africa come rolling in. Who are the most ancient Africans? Why did some Africans select for milk digestion and others remain intolerant? Did the slave trade weaken natural selection in west Africa or strengthen it? What is the genetic legacy of Arabs and Europeans in east Africa? There is agreement that Y-chromosome Adam would have looked much like a San Bushman of the Kalahari, with an epicanthic fold over the eyes, a hairless cocoa body, and a loose graceful gait. East and southern Africa would have been scattered with hunter-gatherer groups. They probably spoke click languages similar to the San. In modern times they were replaced by farming Bantu from western Africa. Now only the San and a few other groups like the Hadza in Tanzania keep alive the ancient hunter-gatherer traditions.

6.  THE MORMON  QUESTION All this is provocative. Success for the Genographic Project undermines traditional beliefs. When I asked Spencer Wells about it, he took the Genographic Fifth Amendment: genetics tells us where we come from, not why we are here, or where we are heading. “We try to present it as one aspect of their history. We tell them it does not replace their mythos. It just means they are connected to people all over the world.” Ajay Royyuru of IBM admits that he is “not used to using the part of my brain that deals with religious questions”. But he had a revelation, a year in. “The bulb went off in my head. All the differences we see in each other, colour of skin and the rest, I realised they were all so minor.” Religions, he says, have appeared and disappeared since Y-chromosome Adam. Royyuru acknowledges that the research means the end of any literal understanding of large parts of Hinduism. “I came to see these like clothes you wear. The human population has existed through all this.” Try telling a Hindu nationalist or a Mormon, whose Book is confounded by genetics. “American-Indians are not the lost tribe of Israel,” says Wells evenly. “They are from Central Asia.” As science advances, so too will creationism. The clash of cultures will deepen between those who recognise genetic markers and their implications, and those for whom the price of acceptance is too high: ditching their creed. Right now, creationism is winning. The only major religion in Africa to uphold Darwin is the Roman Catholic church. Hominid finds in Kenya are stored in a vault in the National Museum to stop them being destroyed by religious fundamentalists. The persistence of creationism “is something we as evolutionary biologists cry about,” says Wells. “Literally.” Yet the Exodus story as told by geneticists may prove more vivid than any religious tradition. There is poetry in the way the Lord parted the Red Sea for Moses, congealing the waters, then “dasheth in pieces” the pharaoh and his chariots. But the physical arc of the story is puny. Writing this, I’ve been listening to “Exodus” by Bob Marley.

Exodus: movement of jah people! So we’re going to walk—alright!—through da ropes of creation: We the generation (tell me why!) trod through great tribulation.

It is not the Rastafarian return to the Rift Valley that comes to mind as I listen, genetically elegant though it now seems, but the first hunter-gatherers making it through the Gate of Tears and heading for every point in our world.

FURTHER  READING: “The Human Career” by Richard Klein, 1989.  The authority on human evolution. “The History and Geography of Human Genes” by Luca Cavalli-Sforza, 1994.  The authority on evolutionary genetics. “The Journey of Man” by Spencer Wells, 2002. Zippy if self-promotional. “Genome” by Matt Ridley, 2000. The best overview of the genome. “Self-Made Man and His Undoing” by Jonathan Kingdon, 1993. Rare insights and African knowledge.

Picture Credit: Sand Paper, khym54, whiteafrican, nd.strupler (all via Flickr); Andrew McConnell/WPN (J.M. Ledgard is The Economist‘s Nairobi correspondent and author of “Giraffe“. His next novel is about the ocean. His last piece for Intelligent Life was about the tallest building in the world.)

Jan 05, 2010 – A revealing article in Time Magazine highlights the hypocrisy around the “Iran Crisis”, during which Iran has been relentlessly hounded by Western nuclear nations on suspicions that it too is developing nuclear weapons, while NATO countries have been secretly harboring them for decades.

First mentioned by Humanist philosopher Dwight Gilbert Jones in his 2009 novel “The Humanist”, in which he describes their longtime control by the Dutch military, Time’s article extends their proliferation to three more supposedly nuclear weapon-free countries.

“The truth is that Belgium, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands store nuclear bombs on their air-force bases and have planes capable of delivering them.” writes Eben Harrell, Time, Jan 4/2010. “There are an estimated 200 B-61 thermonuclear-gravity bombs scattered across these four countries.”

Harrell further states that the nuclear weapons’ control  ”…can be transferred to the control of a host nation’s air force in time of conflict.” Given the number of weapons cited, Europe is a nuclear holocaust-in-waiting with no credible enemies.

When asked about his earlier disclosure of the nukes’ reality, Jones was unequivocal.

“It’s the last stand of the militarists.” he said. “If you read The Humanist, the world reacts to this revelation with a boycott  that breaks the nuke countries economically – no trade, no visits – until they finally defer to the UN and a citizen world. The 4N Countries boycott will happen,” he says “and, nota bene, we’ll see the United Nations oversee our species’ governance at last.”

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1943799,00

In this post-Bush era, orthodox religion is once more fading from fashion, and skepticism finds itself in favor. Young people thumb their noses at religious belief and proudly assert their bold affirmation of reason, even if nobody truly cares or listens. Their faith is no longer assumed, all eyes are on Facebook, not the Bible.

Atheism and Humanism are rebounding, while orders such as the Jesuits see their numbers dwindle toward extinction. Some see an opportunity for Humanism’s gentle metaphysics to benefit from a Jesuit-style advocacy, whether formally or with the participation of dissident factions to begin, as they offer each other the missing attributes needed to compete against strong fundamentalist communities.

Humanists Dismissed as Atheists

Humanism has a problem with atheism. It is too often equated with it; while it is in truth a positive philosophy directed at the potential that lies within our own species and lives. In its purest form it is inclusive of religion – historically there was little antipathy to the Catholicism that allowed Humanism to emerge again from its roots in ancient Greece, and to be revived during the Italian Renaissance.

Atheists have effectively hijacked Humanitas for their own purposes, advocating a secular Humanism to (ironically) trumpet their own freedom from religion. Some describe this aggressive atheism as “religion by a back door”. Edd Doerr, the longtime leader of the American Humanist Association, wrote in the NY times last month that he was “embarrassed” by the actions of atheists in the name of Humanism, that “We need to concentrate on what unites us, not on what divides us.”

Prominent science writer Richard Dawkins, despite being a VP of the British Humanist Association, nonetheless moves Humanism to the back burner to sell books to atheists. He extols evolution while relentlessly condemning the influence of religion. In essence atheism has captured the flag of Humanism and sits on it.

Given that Humanism may be the only philosophy Man is ever likely to universally adopt, the stakes may be higher than one might first imagine.

Jesuit Numbers in Free Fall

The Jesuits, the largest order in the Catholic Church and considered to be its most influential, have since Vatican II in 1965 been progressively drifting away from the Roman Catholic Church, while falling into a steep numerical decline. The Jesuit ranks are down by more than half since then, and there are very few novitiates studying to replace a membership whose average age is now over 60.

Jesuits are typically teaching or working with the poor in the 3rd World, safeguarding them from the excesses of capitalism rather than from their own sins. Jesuit writer and candid critic Fr. Malachi Martin described their liberation theology as being “…more communist than Christian”.

The Humanists lack fellowship, ritual, congregation venues and a social mandate; whereas the Jesuits need to rededicate themselves to our species. This is an order that was banned and dissolved in 1773, then revived in 1814, so its reformation today would  not be unprecedented. To again become trusted critics and stewards of human affairs, they clearly must revise their outmoded tenets and allegiances. These two institutions are complementary if each adopts the best features of the other.

The Jesuits’ proven acumen for teaching and management at the highest level could bring forth a communal catechism for the otherwise inchoate theory and practice of Humanism – which awaits a professional organization within its echelons to champion it.

A Reformation Based on Reason

The current expansion of home churching and Humanist meetings is evidence that there is a hunger in society for reformulating faiths from a grassroots level, and in some degree these home groups can be expected to coalesce into conventional churches again over time.

This pathway of recycling human aspiration back into our legacy institutions – bricks, mortar, and ethics included, could result in Humanist families choosing to celebrate their lives in churches – the orphaned edifices of hope left to them by their elders. Apostate atheists would not be among them.

As they share the songs of Seeger, with their children downstairs in Sunday school learning of Darwin and Debussy, Humanists would be building a species-centered faith on the shoulders of our great thinkers. And doing it in church, cementing its legitimacy.

Sources:

1. The Jesuits: The Society of Jesus and the Betrayal of the Roman Catholic Church, by Malachi Martin, Simon & Schuster, 1987

1. Farewell to the Holocene

Our world, our old world that we have inhabited for the last 12,000 years, has ended, even if no newspaper in North America or Europe has yet printed its scientific obituary.

This February, while cranes were hoisting cladding to the 141st floor of the Burj Dubai tower (which will soon be twice the height of the Empire State Building), the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London was adding the newest and highest story to the geological column.

The London Society is the world’s oldest association of Earth scientists, founded in 1807, and its Commission acts as a college of cardinals in the adjudication of the geological time-scale. Stratigraphers slice up Earth’s history as preserved in sedimentary strata into hierarchies of eons, eras, periods, and epochs marked by the “golden spikes” of mass extinctions, speciation events, and abrupt changes in atmospheric chemistry.

In geology, as in biology or history, periodization is a complex, controversial art and the most bitter feud in nineteenth-century British science — still known as the “Great Devonian Controversy” — was fought over competing interpretations of homely Welsh Graywackes and English Old Red Sandstone. More recently, geologists have feuded over how to stratigraphically demarcate ice age oscillations over the last 2.8 million years. Some have never accepted that the most recent inter-glacial warm interval — the Holocene — should be distinguished as an “epoch” in its own right just because it encompasses the history of civilization.

As a result, contemporary stratigraphers have set extraordinarily rigorous standards for the beatification of any new geological divisions. Although the idea of the “Anthropocene” — an Earth epoch defined by the emergence of urban-industrial society as a geological force — has been long debated, stratigraphers have refused to acknowledge compelling evidence for its advent.

At least for the London Society, that position has now been revised.

To the question “Are we now living in the Anthropocene?” the 21 members of the Commission unanimously answer “yes.” They adduce robust evidence that the Holocene epoch — the interglacial span of unusually stable climate that has allowed the rapid evolution of agriculture and urban civilization — has ended and that the Earth has entered “a stratigraphic interval without close parallel in the last several million years.” In addition to the buildup of greenhouse gases, the stratigraphers cite human landscape transformation which “now exceeds [annual] natural sediment production by an order of magnitude,” the ominous acidification of the oceans, and the relentless destruction of biota.

This new age, they explain, is defined both by the heating trend (whose closest analogue may be the catastrophe known as the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum, 56 million years ago) and by the radical instability expected of future environments. In somber prose, they warn that “the combination of extinctions, global species migrations and the widespread replacement of natural vegetation with agricultural monocultures is producing a distinctive contemporary biostratigraphic signal. These effects are permanent, as future evolution will take place from surviving (and frequently anthropogenically relocated) stocks.” Evolution itself, in other words, has been forced into a new trajectory.

2. Spontaneous Decarbonization?

The Commission’s coronation of the Anthropocene coincides with growing scientific controversy over the 4th Assessment Report issued last year by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC is mandated to establish scientific baselines for international efforts to mitigate global warming, but some of the most prominent researchers in the field are now challenging its reference scenarios as overly optimistic, even pie-in-the-sky thinking.

The current scenarios were adopted by the IPCC in 2000 to model future global emissions based on different “storylines” about population growth as well as technological and economic development. Some of the Panel’s major scenarios are well known to policymakers and greenhouse activists, but few outside the research community have actually read or understood the fine print, particularly the IPCC’s confidence that greater energy efficiency will be an “automatic” byproduct of future economic development. Indeed all the scenarios, even the “business as usual” variants, assume that at least 60% of future carbon reduction will occur independently of greenhouse mitigation measures.

The Panel, in effect, has bet the ranch, or rather the planet, on unplanned, market-driven progress toward a post-carbon world economy, a transition that implicitly requires wealth generated from higher energy prices ultimately finding its way to new technologies and renewable energy. (The International Energy Agency recently estimated that it would cost $45 trillion to halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.) Kyoto-type accords and carbon markets are designed — almost as an analogue to Keynesian “pump-priming” — to bridge the shortfall between spontaneous decarbonization and the emissions targets required by each scenario. Serendipitously, this reduces the costs of mitigating global warming to levels that align with what seems, at least theoretically, to be politically possible, as expounded in the British Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change of 2006 and other such reports.

Critics argue, however, that this represents a heroic leap of faith that radically understates the economic costs, technological hurdles, and social changes required to tame the growth of greenhouse gases. European carbon emissions, for example, are still rising (dramatically in some sectors) despite the European Union’s much praised adoption of a cap-and-trade system in 2005. Likewise there has been little evidence in recent years of the automatic progress in energy efficiency that is the sine qua non of the IPCC scenarios. Although The Economist characteristically begs to differ, most energy researchers believe that, since 2000, energy intensity has actually risen; that is, global carbon dioxide emissions have kept pace with, or even grown marginally faster than, energy use.

Coal production, especially, is undergoing a dramatic renaissance, as the nineteenth century has returned to haunt the twenty-first century. Hundreds of thousands of miners are now working under conditions that would have appalled Charles Dickens, extracting the dirty mineral that allows China to open two new coal-fueled power stations every week. Meanwhile, the total consumption of fossil fuels is predicted to increase at least 55% over the next generation, with international oil exports doubling in volume.

The United Nations Development Program, which has made its own study of sustainable energy goals, warns that it will require “a 50 percent cut in greenhouse gas emissions worldwide by 2050 against 1990 levels” to keep humanity outside the red zone of runaway warming (usually defined as a greater than two degrees centigrade increase this century). Yet the International Energy Agency predicts that, in all likelihood, such emissions will actually increase in this period by nearly 100% — enough greenhouse gas to propel us past several critical tipping points.

Even while higher energy prices are pushing SUVs towards extinction and attracting more venture capital to renewable energy, they are also opening the Pandora’s box of the crudest of crude oil production from Canadian tar sands and Venezuelan heavy oil. As one British scientist has warned, the very last thing we should wish for (under the false slogan of “energy independence”) is new frontiers in hydrocarbon production that advance “humankind’s ability to accelerate global warming” and slow the urgent transition to “non-carbon or closed-carbon energy cycles.”

3. Fin-du-Monde Boom

What confidence should we place in the capacity of markets to reallocate investment from old to new energy or, say, from arms expenditures to sustainable agriculture? We are propagandized incessantly (especially on public television) about how giant companies like Chevron, Pfizer Inc., and Archer Daniels Midland are hard at work saving the planet by plowing profits back into the kinds of research and exploration that will ensure low-carbon fuels, new vaccines, and more drought-resistant crops.

As the current ethanol-from-corn boom, which has diverted 100 million tons of grain from human diets mainly to American car engines, so appallingly demonstrates, “biofuel” may be a euphemism for subsidies to the rich and starvation for the poor. Likewise “clean coal,” despite a vigorous endorsement from Senator Barack Obama (who also champions ethanol), is, at present, simply a huge deception: a $40 million advertising and lobbying campaign for a hypothetical technology that BusinessWeek has characterized as “being decades away from commercial viability.”

Moreover there are disturbing signs that energy companies and utilities are reneging on their public commitments to the development of carbon-capture and alternative energy technologies. The Bush administration’s “marquee demonstration project,” FutureGen, was scrapped this year after the coal industry refused to pay its share of the public-private “partnership”; similarly, most U.S. private-sector carbon-sequestration initiatives have recently been cancelled. In the United Kingdom, meanwhile, Shell has just pulled out of the world’s largest wind-energy project, the London Array. Despite heroic levels of advertising, energy corporations, like pharmaceutical companies, prefer to overgraze the commons, while letting taxes, not profits, pay for whatever urgent, long-overdue research is actually undertaken.

On the other hand, the spoils from high energy prices continue to gush into real estate, skyscrapers, and financial assets. Whether or not we are actually at the summit of Hubbert’s Peak — that peak oil moment — whether or not the oil-price bubble finally bursts, what we are probably witnessing is the largest transfer of wealth in modern history.

An eminent Wall Street oracle, McKinsey Global Institute, predicts that if crude oil prices remain above $100 per barrel — they are, at the moment, approaching $140 a barrel — the six countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council alone will “reap a cumulative windfall of almost $9 trillion by 2020.” As in the 1970s, Saudi Arabia and its Gulf neighbors, whose total gross domestic product has almost doubled in just three years, are awash in liquidity: $2.4 trillion in banks and investment funds according to a recent estimate by The Economist. Regardless of price trends, the International Energy Agency predicts, “more and more oil will come from fewer and fewer countries, primarily the Middle East members of OPEC [The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries].”

Dubai, which has little oil income of its own, has become the regional financial hub for this vast pool of wealth, with ambitions to eventually compete with Wall Street and the City of London. During the first oil shock in the 1970s, much of OPEC’s surplus was recycled through military purchases in the United States and Europe, or parked in foreign banks to become the “subprime” loans that eventually devastated Latin America. In the wake of the attacks of 9/11, the Gulf states became far more cautious about entrusting their wealth to countries, like the United States, governed by religious fanatics. This time around, they are using “sovereign wealth funds” to achieve a more active ownership in foreign financial institutions, while investing fabulous amounts of oil revenue to transform Arabia’s sands into hyperbolic cities, shopping paradises, and private islands for British rock stars and Russian gangsters.

Two years ago, when oil prices were less than half of the current level, The Financial Times estimated that planned new construction in Saudi Arabia and the emirates already exceeded $1 trillion dollars. Today, it may be closer to $1.5 trillion, considerably more than the total value of world trade in agricultural products. Most of the Gulf city-states are building hallucinatory skylines — and, among them, Dubai is the unquestionable superstar. In a little more than a decade, it has erected 500 skyscrapers, and currently leases one-quarter of all the high-rise cranes in the world.

This super-charged Gulf boom, which celebrity architect Rem Koolhaas claims is “reconfiguring the world,” has led Dubai developers to proclaim the advent of a “supreme lifestyle” represented by seven-star hotels, private islands, and J-class yachts. Not surprisingly, then, the United Arab Emirates and its neighbors have the biggest per capita ecological footprints on the planet. Meanwhile, the rightful owners of Arab oil wealth, the masses crammed into the angry tenements of Baghdad, Cairo, Amman, and Khartoum, have little more to show for it than a trickle-down of oil-field jobs and Saudi-subsidized madrassas. While guests enjoy the $5,000 per night rooms in Burj Al-Arab, Dubai’s celebrated sail-shaped hotel, working-class Cairenes riot in the streets over the unaffordable price of bread.

4. Can Markets Enfranchise the Poor?

Emissions optimists, of course, will smile at all the gloom-and-doom and evoke the coming miracle of carbon trading. What they discount is the real possibility that a sprawling carbon-offset market may emerge, just as predicted, yet produce only minimal improvement in the global carbon balance sheet, as long as there is no mechanism for enforcing real net reductions in fossil fuel use.

In popular discussions of emissions-rights trading systems, it is common to mistake the smokestacks for the trees. For example, the wealthy oil enclave of Abu Dhabi (like Dubai, a partner in the United Arab Emirates) brags that it has planted more than 130 million trees — each of which does its duty in absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. However, this artificial forest in the desert also consumes huge quantities of irrigation water produced, or recycled, from expensive desalination plants. The trees may allow Sheik Khalifa bin Zayed to wear a halo at international meetings, but the rude fact is that they are an energy-intensive beauty strip, like most of so-called green capitalism.

And, while we’re at it, let’s just ask: What if the buying and selling of carbon credits and pollution offsets fails to turn down the thermostat? What exactly will motivate governments and global industries then to join hands in a crusade to reduce emissions through regulation and taxation?

Kyoto-type climate diplomacy assumes that all the major actors, once they have accepted the science in the IPCC reports, will recognize an overriding common interest in gaining control over the runaway greenhouse effect. But global warming is not War of the Worlds, where invading Martians are dedicated to annihilating all of humanity without distinction. Climate change, instead, will initially produce dramatically unequal impacts across regions and social classes. It will reinforce, not diminish, geopolitical inequality and conflict.

As the United Nations Development Program emphasized in its report last year, global warming is above all a threat to the poor and the unborn, the “two constituencies with little or no political voice.” Coordinated global action on their behalf thus presupposes either their revolutionary empowerment (a scenario not considered by the IPCC) or the transmutation of the self-interest of rich countries and classes into an enlightened “solidarity” without precedent in history. From a rational-actor perspective, the latter outcome only seems realistic if it can be shown that privileged groups possess no preferential “exit” option, that internationalist public opinion drives policymaking in key countries, and that greenhouse gas mitigation could be achieved without major sacrifices in upscale Northern Hemispheric standards of living — none of which seems highly likely.

And what if growing environmental and social turbulence, instead of galvanizing heroic innovation and international cooperation, simply drive elite publics into even more frenzied attempts to wall themselves off from the rest of humanity? Global mitigation, in this unexplored but not improbable scenario, would be tacitly abandoned (as, to some extent, it already has been) in favor of accelerated investment in selective adaptation for Earth’s first-class passengers. We’re talking here of the prospect of creating green and gated oases of permanent affluence on an otherwise stricken planet.

Of course, there will still be treaties, carbon credits, famine relief, humanitarian acrobatics, and perhaps the full-scale conversion of some European cities and small countries to alternative energy. But the shift to low, or zero, emission lifestyles would be almost unimaginably expensive. (In Britain, it currently costs $200,000 more to build a zero-carbon, “level 6″ eco-home than a standard unit of the same area.) And this will certainly become even more unimaginable after perhaps 2030, when the convergent impacts of climate change, peak oil, peak water, and an additional 1.5 billion people on the planet may begin to seriously throttle growth.

5. The North’s Ecological Debt

The real question is this: Will rich counties ever mobilize the political will and economic resources to actually achieve IPCC targets or, for that matter, to help poorer countries adapt to the inevitable, already “committed” quotient of warming now working its way toward us through the slow circulation of the world ocean?

To be more vivid: Will the electorates of the wealthy nations shed their current bigotry and walled borders to admit refugees from predicted epicenters of drought and desertification like the Maghreb, Mexico, Ethiopia, and Pakistan? Will Americans, the most miserly people when measured by per capita foreign aid, be willing to tax themselves to help relocate the millions likely to be flooded out of densely settled, mega-delta regions like Bangladesh?

Market-oriented optimists, once again, will point to carbon offset programs like the Clean Development Mechanism which, they claim, will allow green capital to flow to the Third World. Most of the Third World, however, probably prefers for the First World to acknowledge the environmental mess it has created and take responsibility for cleaning it up. They rightly rail against the notion that the greatest burden of adjustment to the Anthropocene epoch should fall on those who have contributed least to carbon emissions and drawn the slightest benefits from 200 years of industrialization.

In a sobering study recently published in the Proceedings of the [U.S.] National Academy of Science, a research team has attempted to calculate the environmental costs of economic globalization since 1961 as expressed in deforestation, climate change, over-fishing, ozone depletion, mangrove conversion, and agricultural expansion. After making adjustments for relative cost burdens, they found that the richest countries, by their activities, had generated 42% of environmental degradation across the world, while shouldering only 3% of the resulting costs.

The radicals of the South will rightly point to another debt as well. For 30 years, cities in the developing world have grown at breakneck speed without any equivalent public investment in infrastructure services, housing, or public health. In large part this has been the result of foreign debts contracted by dictators, payments enforced by the International Monetary Fund, and public sectors wrecked by the World Bank’s “structural adjustment” agreements.

This planetary deficit of opportunity and social justice is captured in the fact that more than one billion people, according to UN-Habitat, currently live in slums and that their number is expected to double by 2030. An equal number, or more, forage in the so-called informal sector (a first-world euphemism for mass unemployment). Sheer demographic momentum, meanwhile, will increase the world’s urban population by 3 billion people over the next 40 years (90% of them in poor cities), and no one — absolutely no one — has a clue how a planet of slums, with growing food and energy crises, will accommodate their biological survival, much less their inevitable aspirations to basic happiness and dignity.

If this seems unduly apocalyptic, consider that most climate models project impacts that will uncannily reinforce the present geography of inequality. One of the pioneer analysts of the economics of global warming, Petersen Institute fellow William R. Cline, recently published a country-by-country study of the likely effects of climate change on agriculture by the later decades of this century. Even in the most optimistic simulations, the agricultural systems of Pakistan (a 20% decrease from current farm output predicted) and Northwestern India (a 30% decrease) are likely to be devastated, along with much of the Middle East, the Maghreb, the Sahel belt, Southern Africa, the Caribbean, and Mexico. Twenty-nine developing countries will lose 20% or more of their current farm output to global warming, while agriculture in the already rich north is likely to receive, on average, an 8% boost.

In light of such studies, the current ruthless competition between energy and food markets, amplified by international speculation in commodities and agricultural land, is only a modest portent of the chaos that could soon grow exponentially from the convergence of resource depletion, intractable inequality, and climate change. The real danger is that human solidarity itself, like a West Antarctic ice shelf, will suddenly fracture and shatter into a thousand shards.

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Mike Davis is the author of In Praise of Barbarians: Essays against Empire (Haymarket Books, 2008) and Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (Verso, 2007). He is currently working on a book about cities, poverty, and global change.

I had the privilege of knowing and working with Norman Borlaug — who has been aptly described by the Nobel Peace Prize Committee as the greatest hunger fighter of our time — for nearly 50 years. I first heard him in 1953 outline an innovative strategy for combating wheat rusts at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

From 1963 onwards, he visited India in March every year to see the wheat crop. During his extensive travels by road, he used to stop frequently, talk to the farmers, and examine the state of the health of the plants. Plants and farmers became his life-long friends and companions. Eliminating the wheat rust menace became his unrelenting mission.

Dr. Borlaug started his research career in agriculture in Mexico at a time when the world was passing through a serious food crisis. During 1942-1943, nearly two million people died of hunger during the Great Bengal Famine. China also experienced widespread and severe famine during the 1950s. Famines were frequent in Ethiopia, the Sahelian region of Africa, and many other parts of the developing world. It was in this background that Dr. Borlaug decided to look for a permanent solution to recurrent famines by harnessing science to increase the productivity, profitability, and sustainability of small farms.

The work he did in Mexico during the 1950s in breeding semi-dwarf, rust-resistant wheat varieties and its extension to India, Pakistan, and other countries during the 1960s brought about a total transformation in the atmosphere for the possibility of achieving a balance between human numbers and the human capacity to produce food. Developing nations gained in self-confidence in their agricultural capability. He disproved prophets of doom like Paul and William Paddock and Paul and Anne Ehrlich — who even advocated the application of the ‘triage’ principle in the selection of countries that should and should not be saved from starvation through American assistance.

The introduction of Mexican semi-dwarf varieties of wheat in India in the early 1960s not only helped improve wheat production but also led to the union of brain and brawn in rural areas. The enthusiasm generated by the new technology can be glimpsed in the following extract from an article I wrote in 1969 for an Indian magazine: “Brimming with enthusiasm, hard-working, skilled and determined, the Punjab farmer has been the backbone of the revolution. Revolutions are usually associated with the young, but in this revolution, age has been no obstacle to participation. Farmers, young and old, educated and uneducated, have easily taken to the new agronomy. It has been heart-warming to see young college graduates, retired officials, ex-armymen, illiterate peasants and small farmers queuing up to get the new seeds. At least in the Punjab, the divorce between intellect and labour, which has been the bane of our agriculture, is vanishing.”

The five principles Dr. Borlaug adopted in his life were (to use his own words): give your best; believe you can succeed; face adversity squarely; be confident you will find the answers when problems arise; then go out and win some bouts. These principles have shaped the attitude and action of thousands of young farm scientists across the world. He applied these principles in the field of science and agricultural development, but I guess he developed them much earlier in the field of wrestling, judging from his induction into the Iowa Wrestling Hall of Fame in 2004.

Having made a significant contribution to shaping the agricultural destiny of many countries in Asia and Latin America, Dr. Borlaug turned his attention to Africa in 1985. With support from President Jimmy Carter, Ryoichi Sasakawa, Yohei Sasakawa and the Nippon Foundation, he organised the Sasakawa-Global 2000 programme. Numerous small-scale farmers were helped to double and triple the yield of maize, rice, sorghum, millet, wheat, cassava, and grain legumes.

Unfortunately, such spectacular results in demonstration plots did not lead to significant production gains at the national level, owing to lack of infrastructure such as irrigation, roads, seed production, and remunerative marketing systems. This made him exclaim: “Africa has the potential for a green revolution, but you cannot eat potential.” The blend of professional skill, political action, and farmers’ enthusiasm needed to ignite another Green Revolution as in India was lacking in Africa at that time.

Concerned with the lack of adequate recognition for the contributions of farm and food scientists, Dr. Borlaug had the World Food Prize established in 1986, which he hoped would come to be regarded as the Nobel Prize for food and agriculture. My research centre in Chennai, India [the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation] is the child of the first World Food Prize I received in 1987. Throughout his professional career, Dr. Borlaug spent time in training young scholars and researchers. This led him to promote the World Food Prize Youth Institute and its programme to help high school students work in other countries in order to widen their understanding of the human condition. This usually became a life-changing experience for them.

When Mahatma Gandhi died in January 1948, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru said: “The light has gone out of our life, but the light that shone in this country was no ordinary light. A thousand years later, that light will be seen in this country, the world will see it, and it will give solace to innumerable hearts. For that light represented the living, eternal truth, reminding us of the right path, drawing us from error, taking humankind to freedom from hunger and deprivation.” The same can be said of Norman Borlaug. His repeated message that there was no time to relax until hunger became history will be heard so long as a single person is denied the opportunity for a healthy and productive life because of malnutrition.

Norman Borlaug was a remarkable man who was supported by a remarkable family —wife Margaret, son William, and daughter Jeanie. To my mind, Margaret who died in 2007 is the unsung heroine of the Green Revolution. Without her unwavering support, Dr. Borlaug might not have accomplished nearly so much in his long and demanding career.

Dr. Borlaug was not only a great scientist but also a humanist full of compassion and love for fellow human beings, irrespective of race, religion, colour, or political belief. This is clear from his last spoken words on the night of Saturday, September 12, 2009. Earlier in the day, a scientist showed him a nitrogen tracer developed for measuring soil fertility. His last words were “Take the tracer to the farmer.” This life-long dedication to taking scientific innovation to farmers without delay set Dr. Borlaug apart from most other farm scientists carrying out equally important research.

I was present when he was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 2007. He pointed out that between 1960 and 2000, the proportion of “the world’s people who felt hunger during some portion of the year had fallen from about 60 per cent to 14 per cent.” But the latter figure still “translates into 850 million men, women and children who lack sufficient calories and protein to grow strong and healthy bodies.” So he added: “The battle to ensure food security for hundreds of millions of miserably poor people is far from won.”

This is the unfinished task Norman Borlaug leaves scientists and political leaders worldwide. It will be appropriate for the Norman Borlaug Institute for International Agriculture to become the flagship of the movement for a world without hunger.

(This article is based on the Norman Borlaug memorial address given by the author at the Rudder Auditorium, Texas A&M University, U.S., on October 6, 2009.)

The greatest hunger fighter of our time warned against complacency, observing even towards the end of his life that ‘the battle to ensure food security for hundreds of millions of miserably poor people is far from won.’

A philosopher revives an ancient and noble philosophy that inspires our species, but alienates the military. A 16th century religious order in dire straits offers an alliance. Set on the West Coast just eight years from now, this prophetic novel forgoes fireworks for ideas, and makes evident the potential that lies within our species. The reader must always ask – why are we not doing this now?

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The accepted history of Humanism is largely a tale of free thinkers battling orthodox Christianity over the past five centuries, and that battle has effectively been won. With the Bush era concluded in America, we can expect to see fundamentalism fade from influence in much the same way that it has in Europe. So the issue for us becomes: whither Humanism as we know it?

It is often said that organizing Humanists is like herding cats, so any initiative toward collectivizing them at first seems ill-advised. Humanists today largely associate themselves with free thought, which is the virtual opposite of anything organized, and that free thinking is usually centered on a proud atheism or agnosticism. With a few encomiums to be compassionate and to enjoy our one life appended – this mini-philosophy is pretty much all that Humanism currently offers up.

It’s not enough, and if we leave it there, we’ll just remain a small sect of social-climbing god-baiters.

If Humanism is to live up to its greater promise and become a credo that unites our species, it must see its avowed Human attributes brought forward, acknowledging that:

1) Atheism is Tired in the West. Humanism can be expanded conceptually to be seen as the philosophy of our species, Homo sapiens. It begs for new parameters beyond strident atheism – which by itself is obvious and banal to the young – why embrace a counter-religion?

2) Atheism is Not Tired in the developing world. Large obstacles remain in India, the Arab world, Africa, Indonesia and parts of Asia and South America to displacing religions with secular education, science and compassionate human rights. This is the theatre where free-thinking individual Humanism must continue to be championed.

3) Species Governance Humanism will assume new stature if it incorporates an attitude of responsibility toward human affairs that is astute, constructive and visionary.

Who speaks out now on behalf of the United Nations and disarmament? Who decries corruption in the Third World? Who rescues women, children and the aged as they get bypassed or run over by fundamentalism, globalization and heroic consumerism?

Many small agencies and NGO’s do try, yes – but these are matters for Humanity as a whole to gain formal control of, as its legal infrastructure. The issue is responsible species governance, and it’s a mantle that’s there for Humanists to assume, if we can augment our tenets to demonstrate a wider perspective.

Where to Start? It is evident that individual Humanism still faces a struggle outside the western world, and requires our continuing support. Nonetheless, militarism and greed threaten to impoverish or compromise every sector of our society, and those are problems on our home front.

The United States, for example, with just 4% of the global population, wastes more on military spending than the rest of the world combined, and not because it fears invasion or attack. It is incumbent on American Humanists to move beyond debating fundamentalists and to begin bringing their attention to a war machine that is out of control and the prime source of discord globally. Is our weapons “culture” an appropriate matter for Humanists to address? If not, we must explain for children why we condone specters like nuclear submarines, each of which can each lay ruin to entire countries. This matter is an insult to every living human being, our great species cancer, and it is the job of Humanists to become identified with its termination. Every war weapon is a sad monument to Human failure.

Humanism will find wider support when it addresses world affairs and represents our species per se – we must recast it into a larger envelope and mandate. Bringing forth an inclusive Humanism around an expanded array of principles, with a proactive agenda, is where our generation will succeed or flounder as architects of a Humanist civilization.

The IHEU has specified that Humanism no longer be prefaced with an adjective, such as “secular Humanism” is. That said, we can still speak of an “inclusive Humanism” and simply be referring to a larger numerical constituency and distribution, not another philosophical variant.

Vision and Destiny The appropriate public face of  Humanism must be that it is inclusionary. A common observation among Humanists is that we often envy the community and fellowship that many religious people enjoy via their churches; they find companionship, a sense of belonging and peer comfort within their congregations and rituals.

A rapprochement with religion is not inconceivable. It has occurred to some Humanists that we might put together our own hymnary e.g. That speaks of human love and loss, to be shared by our membership, if we might permit ourselves. The Internet has displaced the need for buildings and congregations, while affording us the opportunity to share our thoughts and beliefs within forums and online communities that have their own advantages.

These attributes of conventional religion have much to teach us about our own movement. They are invaluable assets to theists and we lose more people for not having them than any other reason. Our numbers languish while fundamentalism booms around the world because the major religions comment and advise on inter-human issues and individual destiny, and we Humanists do not.

An example: the motto of the British Humanist Association is “For the one life we have.” Not only is it depressing, with its focus on mortality, it’s admonishing us for thinking evil thoughts like having an afterlife. Meanwhile the fundamentalists continue to sell seats in heaven (not realizing they already live there), while our best minds are employed writing dystopian plots for video war games.

Let’s put those young people back to work on healthy Human projects. Let them examine just where and how we can get to a point where our species can anticipate the coming centuries as a golden age of co-operative celebration. Make that a few millennia – our sun is patient, time’s canyons are wide and if we reduce our numbers the Earth might reward us with a languid and verdant glory that we have never dared dream of.

Humanism is a Major Philosophy While Humanism has become associated with its roots as an atheist rearguard action, it is important to take the concept into our own hands, roll it over, and examine it more closely.

Notice how the word Human makes up most of its structure, as it’s ostensibly about Humans, not gods. Ask yourself what this has truly come to mean. Is modern Humanism about Humanity, or is it being miniaturized conceptually, hijacked and abused as fancy packaging for atheism? Should we care?

Care indeed, because ideas such as Humanism are very rare within our species, and we need these ideas to gain traction, lest competing nations kindle more wars or the planet be lost to dissonance. No other term can identify a credo that is as free of other motives and agendae as ‘Humanism’ does.

The religions and NGO’s overseas aid programs usually include their own provisos along with their plans for peace and prosperity. None stands cleanly alone like Humanism, to represent Humans per se, not to be embedded with other homilies and beliefs.

Recognizing our station as a responsible species, first and foremost, is a fresh concept that begs for this name, regardless of its historical usage. If it must be morphed toward that connotation, so be it. As Napoleon commented “Men are like sheep and must be driven to the pasture.”

What’s New Here? Is inclusive Humanism a novel concept? Are there other grand ideas that center on the species, rather than the individual, that perceive our existence as a distinct franchise with its own responsibilities and promise? Some will say science does, and while science achieves many things, it is really an intellectual method that Humans adopt; science does not define us or speak for us.

Historians may view the Renaissance as Humanism’s high point, but that was more accurately a salient of emerging intellectual awareness, our coming-out party. It trumpeted new freedoms and was a voice of optimism for mankind, but the Renaissance’s rediscovery of Greek and Roman classicism did not emphasize social responsibility and environmental stewardship. Nor did it proscribe species violence or worry about pollution; it was all about me, an awakening that heralded the apogee of first-generation individual Humanism.

In the 19^th century the French sociologist Auguste Comte championed ‘social feeling’ as the successor to ‘selfish feeling’, to create a ‘collective consciousness’. This was Humanism being born as a species-wide idea. Of course, Marx and Hitler would later exploit this pan-Human expansion to include classes or nations, their tribal jingoism writ large, and these societies were seen to be emerging from or struggling with other Human groups. That will never be Humanism.

Humanism affirms all of Humanity as its membership, and whether this seems facile or not, like a mother’s love for her child – Humanism is not conditional. And the child’s inalienable responsibilities to her are not conditional either. Like it or not, all Humans are inclusionary of each other.

Humanism remains a pure notion that is centered on Humanity alone and cannot be diverted to some collateral consideration like a disbelief in the supernatural. It is critical that it not be missed, dismissed or ignored, the way a youth may lazily wave off his family or elders, because as a species we are not going to get an indefinite number of opportunities to coalesce and realize the gifts of life, this planet and our potential together. We cannot continue to direct our economies toward improbable wars and unbridled consumerism, then wake up one fateful day and find that critical resources and our once-virgin planet are irretrievable.

For this reason Humanism must become our species advocate and defender, warts and all, as its responsible watchdog and final arbiter. Once it becomes evident that Humanism is unifying our societies, institutions and activities within a sustainable environment, its credibility will be unquestioned – we are Humans and not ashamed of the fact.

Until then, it is incumbent on us to recognize this Faberge egg for what it is, hold it with both hands, and re-enroll it into a nobler cause than its outdated identification and obsession with simple atheism.

Dwight Jones studied Physics (McGill), Engineering (Laval) Biosciences (UC Berkeley) and Philosophy (B.A., Simon Fraser) and is currently an author of speculative fiction.