Paul S. Martin

September 16th, 2010

Paul was an Emeritus Professor at the University of Arizona from 1989 to his death three days ago on Monday, September 13.

I expect that most of Paul’s obituaries will be confined to his vision that the abrupt, end-Pleistocene disappearance of the America megafauna was caused by a “blitzkrieg” — an overkill — carried out by newly-arrived members of our species.

His account of the American extinctions is, however, only a part of Paul’s insight into the roots of the phenomenon of human-caused extinction.  He was the first person to realize that this extinction started long before Homo sapiens entered the Americas at the end of the Pleistocene — that it started, in fact, in the early Pleistocene, on the continent of Africa.  (See his “Africa and Pleistocene Overkill,” 1966, 212  Nature, pp 339-342).

I re-read this Nature article when I got the news about his passing, and was struck, again, by now well-reasoned and persuasive it was.  I couldn’t help thinking, though how little archeology, how little paleontology, how little chronology Paul had at his disposal when he wrote it.  It took an extraordinary level of intellectual acuity, and a great deal of courage, to make that 1966 conjecture about the African beginnings of the phenomenon of human-caused extinction.

Since Paul offered that daring, prescient theory more than forty years ago, evidence in support of his view has been accumulating at a steady rate.  Surprisingly early acquisition of technological power by our genus was evidenced, firstly, by the more or less simultaneous discovery in South and East Africa (By Bob Brain and Randy Bellomo among several others) that humans had learned to use fire well over a million years ago.  Very recently (and very dramatically), the use of stone tools to butcher larger animals by hominins has been pushed back by nearly a million years to 3.4 mya at Dikika, Ethiopia.  (Sharon P McPherron et al, Nature 466, August 2010, 857-860.)

But Paul’s vision of the ecological history of our species still hasn’t been universally accepted.  I have to admit that I’m surprised that that his insights into our species’ ecological history are still regarded as controversial.  All the more so, because the issue of the human-caused extinction is anything but an academic quibble.  We are not going to be able to stop the human-caused tinction, and save a worthwhile part of the biosphere, by trying to apply the strictures of the still-current, pre-Paul Martin paradigm, which tells us that ecological salvation can be achieved if the attitudes of “indigenous,” “native,” or “primitive” peoples are universally adopted, and urges us to learn to live, as they did, in harmony with the land and its animals.

I’m immensely grateful for the privilege of having been able to interact intellectually with this remarkable man, and would like to express my sympathy with all those who loved and admired him.

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THOUGHTS ON THE ECOLOGICAL ASSUMPTIONS UNDERLYING JAMES CAMERON’S

January 23rd, 2010

THOUGHTS ON THE ECOLOGICAL PHILOSOPHY UNDERPINNING JAMES CAMERON’S “AVATAR”

I love Cameron’s movies.  TERMINATOR 2, in particular, is one of my all-time favorites.  Do I hear someone saying that it’s a trivial flick because it shows stuff like airborne 18-wheelers and massive explosions?  Of course it’s got those things!  Cameron makes commercial movies designed to be seen by millions of people, not art flicks which are going to appeal to small coteries of self-proclaimed intellectuals.

So yes, TERMINATOR 2 was unashamedly produced to be a successful action flick.  But it also transcends that genre, because it’s a thoughtful treatment of two very real and important problems: the containment of the nuclear genie our species let out of the bottle around seventy years ago, and the control of the machine intelligence we started developing at about the same time.

There’s no way, though, that I can agree with Cameron’s Luddite prescription for neutralizing those dangers.  I was moved, sure, by the scene in which the Arnold Schwarzenegger robot destroys itself to save humanity from the sophistication of the chip which drives its intelligence, but I remained unsentimentally conscious of the naivety of trying to save ourselves by destroying our technology.  Let’s just say that I found Cameron to be more convincing as a story-teller/movie-maker than as an eco-political philosopher.  And what a magic story-teller he is.  I was even more moved by the poetic, near-metaphysical ending to his crypto-Luddite but wonderful TITANIC.

AVATAR is also an entertaining action movie, and it, too, deals with a serious and important problem: what can be done about the fact that humans are destroying the natural world?  With this latest film, though, Cameron goes WAY too far down the Luddite path–goes all the way, in fact, to acceptance of the “noble savage” solution to our ecological woes.  Adopt the ways of “indigenous” peoples such as the American Indians and the Australian Aborigines, he tells us in this movie, and the industrial way of life which is destroying our planet can be forsaken.

That’s a completely unrealistic prescription to treat the hemorrhage of biodiversity our planet is experiencing.  The real etiology of the that hemorrhage lies in the evolution of human ingenuity, and we can’t abdicate from that ingenuity any more than we stop breathing.  (My Merriam Webster’s Medical Dictionary defines “etiology,” by the way, as “all the causes of a disease or abnormal condition.”)

Do I hear someone out there telling me to lighten up?  That AVATAR’s just a movie?  That it isn’t meant to be treated as a scholarly examination of the biodiversity crisis?  Sure AVATAR isn’t scholarly, but it’s all the more powerful and influential for that very reason.

Yes, James Cameron, you’re quite right: the biosphere which nurtured our species is in dire jeopardy.  But if we do manage to stop the human-caused extinction spasm, we’re not going to do so by limiting the power of our species.  We’ll do it, on the contrary, by continuing to develop and expand the knowledge and awareness which underlies that power.  We stand, today, on the threshold of understanding and accepting the real etiology of the mass extinction which is presently occurring on our planet, and nothing makes that etiology as clear as the emerging history of our impact on the big animals with which we co-evolved

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