Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?

by Bill McKibben

  People are using the same tactic regularly now—in Nebraska, in Canada, in Australia, wherever a big new fossil fuel project is proposed. Some nuns recently built a chapel with a solar roof in the path of a pipeline. If you’re an oil company, whom would you rather fight? A guy with a rifle is no problem; you’ve got access to all the rifles in the world. But a guy with some solar panels, access to social media, and a clever streak will drive you three kinds of nuts.

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  Imagine the last few hundred years of technological progress as a man spending an evening in a casino. He’s had a remarkable run, one hot hand after another. There’ve been some losses along the way, sure, but he’s always doubled down and made it back. Now, though, the bets are getting larger and larger, and his luck seems to be ebbing: if he doubles down again, he might lose it all. He sits and thinks a moment, and then, maybe, he takes his chips to the window and cashes them in, leaving with winnings that can secure the rest of his life.

  Solar energy and nonviolence are technologies less of expansion than of repair, less of growth than of consolidation, less of disruption than of healing. They posit that we’ve grown powerful enough as a species, and that the job now is to make sure that that power is shared and controlled. They are, to use the first of several words that I wish we used more often, the technologies of maturity. They imagine a society interested more in economic and political maintenance and contentment than in exhilaration and extension.

  In our current culture, we find the idea of maturing less exciting than the idea of growth because, I think, in our own lives, maturation is bittersweet. When we were young and growing, we could do and choose anything; no options had been foreclosed. Maturity—“growing up” as opposed to “growing”—means making choices: to commit to one person, one career, one community. In past times and places, that maturity was honored—look no further than the respect paid elders in more traditional societies, a respect reserved mostly for youth in our own consumer culture. But I’d guess that even a lot of Trump voters, in their heart of hearts, think most highly of those friends who have matured fully, which means those who have placed limits on their own behavior in the interests of the community. Such people find their fulfillment in working for others, in mentoring, in passing on—in behaving in precisely the altruistic ways that Ayn Rand and her followers so abhor. If we admire individuals for those traits, it’s possible we can learn to admire societies for the same things.

  Societies have already learned to accept some limits, and happily. For instance, I live on the edge of a federal wilderness area in the Green Mountain National Forest. For decades, that land has been set aside and protected: people are allowed in, but only as visitors. They wander the few trails, but most of the forest’s tens of thousands of acres don’t see a boot print from one year to the next; these are instead reserved for the turkey, the bear, the spruce. Yes, we gain from the arrangement, even financially: by cleaning the air and filtering the water, this wilderness provides “ecosystem services” that economists can measure, and those measurements assure us that the intact forest is a good bargain. But we forgo the quick cash, the growth, that would come from the liquidation of those forests into, say, wood pellets that could be burned in boilers to generate electricity. (This is, in fact, the current fate of too many American forests, especially in the Southeast.) And, of course, no particular person gets rich from this wilderness; it enriches us only as a society. So, setting aside wilderness is a statement that as a people we’ve reached the point where we can have a new ethic, in much the same way that getting married is a hopeful declaration that you’ve reached a place in your life where you want a new set of values to apply. And it’s a popular statement—an “overwhelming majority” even of Trump voters opposed the president’s plan to roll back the size of the nation’s protected areas.1

  That doesn’t mean that one needs to look back in horror at the days before such limits. There’s much in our history to abhor, of course (slavery, sexism, and the way that Native Americans were treated, just for starters), but there’s plenty to admire, too, or at least to look at with respect. Paul Bunyan, or the actual woodsmen on which he was modeled, managed to cut down most of the continent’s forests with crosscut saws. That’s harder work than I’ll ever do, and it helped pave the way (literally) for the prosperity I enjoy. I bear no grudge to the Vermonters who came before me, whose stone walls you can find deep in the woods. They worked to build the world we know. But I also honor Vermonters such as George Perkins Marsh, the first American to postulate the ideas we now know as environmentalism. His careful nineteenth-century measurements of stream flows showed that cutting down forests was leading to spring flood and summer drought, unleashing great waves of silt. Given that there was no longer a New World for Americans to move on to, Marsh argued that we should set some limits on our behavior to keep this one healthy. And so, we did, beginning in the Adirondacks and Yellowstone, in an effort that spread around the world. Now 15 percent of the Earth’s surface is protected. Societies are measured not just by the things they build, but also by the things they can bring themselves to leave alone: whales, bright-plumed birds, mountains, children kept safe from Dickensian labor.

  People, alone among creatures, can decide to put such limits on themselves. None of these fights is easy; as I finish this manuscript, the Trump administration has just announced a new attack on the Endangered Species Act, on the grounds that it “impedes people’s livelihood.”2 But in a world where algorithms are starting to take over, where Facebook and Amazon know us much too well, these self-imposed limits help keep us human. Our great literary conscience, the Kentucky farmer-writer Wendell Berry, said it best, long before anyone had heard of Cambridge Analytica:

  Love the quick profit, the annual raise,

  vacation with pay. Want more

  of everything ready-made. Be afraid

  to know your neighbors and to die.

  And you will have a window in your head.

  Not even your future will be a mystery

  any more. Your mind will be punched in a card

  and shut away in a little drawer.

  When they want you to buy something

  they will call you. When they want you

  to die for profit they will let you know.

  So, friends, every day do something

  that won’t compute. Love the Lord.

  Love the world. Work for nothing.

  Take all that you have and be poor.

  […]

  As soon as the generals and the politicos

  can predict the motions of your mind,

  lose it. Leave it as a sign

  to mark the false trail, the way

  you didn’t go. Be like the fox

  who makes more tracks than necessary,

  some in the wrong direction.

  Practice resurrection.3

  Wendell Berry is heir to a long countercultural heritage stretching back to the Buddha and running through the Christ, a tradition that incorporates people such as Thoreau and Gandhi, Dorothy Day and Ella Baker, and millions more women and men we’ve never heard of. This tradition celebrates limits, insisting that people are most fully human when they manage to restrain their own egos and desires. We’ve always paid it a good deal of lip service—America, for instance, is said to be a “Christian nation”—but now we might actually need that countercultural tradition to become more … cultural. The atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide is a practical argument for what has previously been a moral stance; the periodic table is pointing us in the same direction as the Hebrew prophets.

  And it’s not just sages and gurus and cranks who have imagined such a thing. Perhaps, actually, it’s best not to dwell on them, Jesus being literally a tough act to follow and Thoreau not the kind of guy you can imagine with a family to care for. Let’s even tone down the language: maturity is perhaps a little stern and parental. Instead, let’s add another word to our lexicon: balance. After forty years of liber
tarian dominance in our politics, ever since Ronald Reagan won by insisting that government was the problem and Thatcher by declaring that there was in fact no such thing as society, it’s hard for us to see quite how lopsided our politics has become. The percentage of Americans who remember the New Deal grows tinier each day, and even Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society seems from a different age. But we need to remember, because it’s with such laws that human solidarity becomes everyday instead of exceptional.

  You can’t spend your entire life building movements—almost by definition, they burn bright and then burn out. (This is why greed usually wins, of course: the Kochs are at it 24/7. If a high-priced lobbyist succumbs to cirrhosis after the millionth cocktail reception, they just hire a new one.) So, we need structures that make fraternity real and relatively easy: labor unions, voting rights, a social safety net. Maybe state banks, like the one in North Dakota. Truly public utilities. These are not bizarre, Communist ideas. You can find examples of them around the continent and around the world, from the municipally owned internet service in Chattanooga (top-ranked by Consumer Reports) to the publicly owned nonprofit football team in Green Bay, Wisconsin (top-ranked by Cheeseheads). In Germany, 850 local cooperatives control much of the renewable energy that increasingly powers the country, most of them financing their operations from one of the country’s thousand cooperative banks.4 Saying “We need balance” is not the same as saying “The economy’s not important and we should live on craft beer and good vibrations.” A quick transition to renewable energy would employ millions around the world by every estimate—millions of people, not robots, as clambering onto your roof and installing solar panels remains a high-skill, high-judgment job. When far more young people tell pollsters that they identify with socialism more than with capitalism,5 they don’t mean they want to live in North Korea; they mean they want a fair chance, not the loaded system they’ve inherited. Again, solidarity doesn’t require saintliness. It requires the institutions that the antigovernment right has been trying to dismantle for decades.

  Scale is the third and final word that seems crucial to me. If the only things you wanted in the world were efficiency and growth, then you’d scale things up—and we have: large corporations, large nations. But we’ve reached the point where size hinders as much as it helps, where it reduces the many ways the human game might be played down to just a few. Some of this has happened naturally. As humans explored the globe and ran into one another, the number of separate games dwindled. Mexicans no longer have a world to themselves: now the rest of us have corn and chili peppers, too—for which, many thanks. But when NAFTA turned the glut of corn into destitution for Mexican farmers, it showed how scale might become too big.

  Protectionism is a vulgar word for economists because it’s inefficient, but inefficiency is often just another way of saying that you serve more than one end. Amazon is incredibly efficient—I can have something that I may or may not need at my doorstep tomorrow—but when it puts actual stores out of business, it sacrifices the other services those actual stores provided: “gossip, help for old people, surveillance of the street.”6 Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland are incredibly efficient—I can buy food for very little money—but when they put local farmers out of business, we lose rural communities, pastoral landscapes, agricultural diversity. (Also, we grow plump on corn syrup.) We find out what those benefits are worth only when they evaporate, and even then, the losses register mostly unconsciously—you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone, by which point you’re usually pretty well accustomed to the replacement.

  This is why I think it’s useful that both nonviolence and solar panels nudge us, at least a little, toward a smaller-scale world less obsessed with efficiency. Movements are often reminders about precisely the things that have been sacrificed in the name of efficiency. We can thank organizers for eight-hour days and five-day weeks; for Social Security and minimum wages; for the fact that we have cleaner air in our big cities and cleaner water in our rivers. Really, we can thank them for all the things the Koch brothers don’t like. Solar power accelerates this transition. Because it comes from everywhere, it gives everywhere the chance to provide for more of its own needs. Instead of bleeding capital off to Saudi Arabia or Texas, we can increasingly supply one of our most important commodities close to home. We’ll have to fight to make sure this happens—that communities control their local energy sources, and that those sources are developed with everyone’s interests in mind—but at least it’s a possibility. Home, community, is the ground on which we can actually play the human game, and it is false efficiency to undermine it.

  I think I’m not alone when I say I find America increasingly perplexing: three hundred million may be past the population size at which any of us can feel fully at home or completely responsible. I try to imagine Donald Trump coming to a town meeting in my small community, the first-Tuesday-in-March gathering where we vote on the budget for the year and discuss community business. His foul mouth and obvious disdain for detail would mean that no one would pay him much mind; if he kept up his ranting, he’d be asked to sit down so that the rest of us could do the necessary work of making sure there was money to buy sand for the road crew and of figuring out if the roof on the town office had another year of life in it. Donald Trump, I think, would have had a hard time being elected a mayor or a governor, because the damage he’d have done would have hit too close to home. But given the size of America, people could vote for him for president on the theory that he’d “shake things up,” reasonably confident that they wouldn’t be hit by the falling pieces.

  What I’m trying to say is what worked in the past doesn’t automatically work in the future. At one point, growth provided more benefit than cost. Light regulation spurred expansion. Larger scale offered efficiencies that made us richer. Fine. You want your child to grow—if she doesn’t, you take her to the doctor. But if she’s twenty-two and still shooting up by six inches a year, you take her to the doctor, too. There’s a time and a place for growth, and a time and a place for maturity, for balance, for scale. And the risks we’re currently running, the risks I’ve spent this book describing, suggest that that time is now. In fact, the damage we can already see, from soaring temperatures to soaring inequality, should tell us that our goals need to fundamentally shift: toward repair, toward security, toward protection.

  The overarching goal is to keep the human game going. To return to our casino metaphor, what if we collected our winnings from the last few hundred years and then decided we’d take a rest, play some lower-stakes hands for a while. Perhaps our job, at this particular point in time, is to slow things down, just as basketball teams do when they’re ahead. If we don’t screw up the game of being human, it could last for a very long time; compared to other species, we’re still early in our career. (Consider horseshoe crabs, 445 million years old, so old that their blood is copper-based. Now that’s a good long run.) And calculate the risks: if we manage to screw up the human game, through some combination of environmental destruction and technological usurpation, we prevent the hundreds of billions of perfectly interesting and amiable lives we could otherwise expect in the eons ahead. We also waste, in some sense, the work that every poet, philosopher, and scientist has done over the last ten millennia. Given that there’s no finishing line to the human game, no obvious goal toward which we are racing, then why exactly are we so intent on constantly speeding up?

  Indeed, we’re surrounded by signals flashing amber, telling us to slow down. That’s how to read the graph of a rising temperature, or the astonishing data on skyrocketing inequality. There are subtler indications, too, that we’re at or near the top of a curve. To take the least important first, the performance of our athletes has begun to plateau, as records get harder to break by even tiny margins: the 2000s were the first decade in a century of measuring when no man ran a faster mile; the 2010s so far are the second. As the sportswriter Clint Carter points out, at least a dozen track-and-field even
ts, including the 3,000- and 1,500-meter runs, haven’t seen a single new record in more than two decades. “The long-jump record has gone untouched for 27 years; the shot-put record for 28 years. Both discus and hammer-throw records were established more than 30 years ago,” he observed in the summer of 2018.7 Indeed, in some sports, times have begun to slow as authorities have managed, at least for the moment, to crack down on dopers. (It takes authentic humans longer to climb the Alpe d’Huez than it took Lance Armstrong.)

  It’s not just elite athletes who have hit a plateau; at least in the Western world, almost all of us seem to be stalling out. Recent studies seem to show that while “the twentieth century was an unprecedented period of improvement for human capabilities and performances, with a significant increase in lifespan, adult height, and maximal physiological performance,” the data now show “a major slowdown occurring in the most recent years.” Just as we’re no longer dramatically increasing our crop yields the way we did after World War II, we’ve also stopped growing much taller; the rate at which our lifespans lengthen has also begun to slow.8