JUST NOT YET You're on earth. There's no cure for that.1 Risking your soul for the things that decay...2 Anxiety about our species and our myriad relationships to each other and to other fauna and flora gnaws at our concept of self and, at the same time, helps engineer who we are. Days ago I was talking with a friend, an artist. We were drinking beer and discussing Breaking Bad, a television series about a cancer-­‐riddled Albuquerque high school teacher becoming a cartel-­‐quality meth cooker. My friend said that the first time he tuned into this TV drama someone's throat was being slashed with a knife. He preferred not to watch. Though violent and aggressive this television series certainly scores well below the mean on the Charles Taylor atrocity chart.3 I continue to be puzzled by my friend's reaction. Maybe I missed the applicable adaptation. I argue with myself that there is probably some good adaptive reason to have a negative reaction to violent endings of life–not an uncommon end for Homo sapiens. We tend to wrap such events in moral diapers and they get kind of stinky, Shakespearean stinky. Clarity about moral choices is anything but spotless. I hunt fish. When I was ten and eleven, almost daily during the summers I worked my way out onto concrete abutments below dams on Wisconsin rivers. I hung a two-­‐inch piece of red yarn on a fishhook and dropped my hook, line and sinker into pools behind tumbling water and daily caught scores of large and tasty yellow perch. I put the fish into a potato sack tied to my belt, took them home, cleaned them and sold them to neighbors. Most of the perch were alive when I cleaned them. Their movement, their dying vitality, seemed at the time to be more a nuisance than a life and death struggle. There was for me no moral predicament. The fish were fresh and delicious. Honduras currently leads the world with the highest per capita murder rate. In 2011, eighty-­‐six of every one hundred thousand people were murdered. Murder rates in Guatemala and El Salvador now chase toward Honduras. In Mexico eighteen were murdered per one hundred thousand and in the United Kingdom, one per one hundred thousand.4 If we project the Honduran murder rate onto the 2012 world's population, the annual murder toll will be six million people, more than two Chicago's a year. In the United States in 2009, death from auto accidents was about 11.1 per one hundred thousand. In 2004 car accidents in the U.S. were the major cause of death of children 1 Samuel Beckett, Endgame (New York: Grove, 1958), 68. 2 J. H. Carr and F. J. Berry 1912 Trio Music Co. in Gospel Pearls, 1921 Sunday School Publishing Board National Baptist Convention, Nashville, TN 1921, no. 108. 3 BBC News Africa, "Liberia ex-­‐leader Charles Taylor gets 50 years in jail," 30 May 2012, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-­‐africa-­‐18259596. 4 Linda Pressly, "Honduras murders: Where life is cheap and funerals are free," BBC News Magazine, 2 May 2012, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-­‐17870673; Suemedha Sood, "Travelwise: Central America’s shift in safety," BBC Travel, 3 Aug 2012, http://www.bbc.com/travel/blog/20120803-­‐travelwise-­‐central-­‐americas-­‐shift-­‐in-­‐safety. between three and fourteen years of age.5 According to the World Health Organization about fifty-­‐
five thousand people die from rabies each year. Dogs are the primary villains.6 During World War II somewhere between forty and seventy-­‐two million people, 2 to 3 percent of the world's population, died as a result of the global conflict. No war induced carnage can quite match the 8th century An Lushan Rebellion in China during which 14-­‐15 percent of the world's population was killed over an eight year period. The Holocaust managed to cut life short for perhaps as many as seventeen million people. Jews certainly dominated but Romani, Polish and Soviet civilians, religious and political dissidents, homosexuals and more succumbed to the Nazi agenda. And perhaps the record for genocide, or if you prefer the more inclusive term, democide, was set over a longer period (1490-­‐1900) by European peoples who colonized the so-­‐called New World. Low assessments calculate about two million indigenous people lost their lives to colonial violence, disease and more. Other scholarly estimates range between one hundred and one hundred and forty million over a bit more than four hundred years.7 If war, murder and disease do not impress, how about starvation? Between 1958 and 1961, twenty to forty million people in China starved to death. It was the Great Leap Forward, also known as "Three Bitter Years".8 And Belgium's King Leopold II's colonization of the Congo in central Africa diminished the entire population by possibly fifty per cent. Some scholars estimate that eight to ten million Africans died as a result of disease, exploitation or murder in the twenty-­‐three years between 1885 and 1908.9 Such large numbers encourage concern. One starving child tends to have less authority than ten thousand. But as fatalities drift into daily experience, the grip of numbers diminishes and singular experiences govern. The large numbers above are, by no means, undisputed. The gaps between low and high estimates hint at the challenge of approximations. Written records about the depth and breadth of such matters are occasional. Still, the increased documentation of historical events over the last several centuries suggests that self-­‐inflicted reduction of our species is a stable pattern. The numbers and frequency seem distasteful, yet Stephen Pinker notes that we are actually getting kinder and softer, less violent and aggressive.10 But while records have increased in number they are often not reliable. Record keeping has often been managed by governments or elites or colonizers or conquerors brandishing swords. As a result, documents are spare, misplaced, classified or non-­‐
existent, for hundreds, likely thousands, of the disappeared, of groups of human beings, social aggregates in cool objectification, lost or eliminated as a result of aggression, not to mention their own choices. 5 U.S. Census Bureau, "Table 1103. Motor Vehicle Accidents-­‐Number and Deaths: 1990 to 2009," in Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2012, Transportation, 693; Traffic Safety Facts, 2004 Data, www-­‐nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/809906.pdf. 6 World Health Organization, "Rabies, Fact Sheet No 99, September 2011," http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs099/en/. 7 See, for example, David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: the Conquest of the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992) and Noble D. Cook, Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492-­‐1650 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 8Stéphane Courtois (ed.), The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). 9 Michiko Kakutani, "'King Leopold's Ghost': Genocide With Spin Control," New York Times, 1 Sep 1998, http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/08/30/daily/leopold-­‐book-­‐review.html. Also, see librarian Matthew White's humbling website, http://necrometrics.com/. The numbers in this paragraph were gleaned from his wide-­‐ranging compilation last updated in 2011. 10 Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking, 2011), For an abbreviated version see: Steven Pinker, "Violence Vanquished," Wall Street Journal, 24 Sep 2011, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904106704576583203589408180.html. My neighbors immediately to the east have, or had, chickens and ducks in their backyard. I enjoyed hoeing and watering my vegetable garden hearing the cluck and quack of these birds. Once or twice a week I would peer over the fence and look at them, white ducks, maybe Campbells, and reddish-­‐brown chickens, perhaps Rhode Islanders. I am guessing about the breeds. The other day I let the dog out at about six in the morning. Somewhat in a fog of early rising, I looked up and saw a red fox running from east to west along our fence. (One winter a fox, perhaps the one I saw that morning, took up residence under our backyard shed. He or she basked in the sun during the day and escaped underneath the building if anything threatened it.) The morning fox stopped as I opened the backdoor wider. It looked at me, looked at our dog, looked at our cat and then ran behind the storage shed and out of sight. That evening I returned home from work, surveyed the garden and heard nothing. I looked over the fence and the chickens and ducks were not there. Other processes, other than those self-­‐inflicted, are perhaps even more mortally ruthless for populations of Homo sapiens (as well as for other flora and fauna): glaciation, meteor impact, vulcanism, adaptation of viruses, overpopulation, habitat degradation and much more. These also are not uncommon events. They are timely, repeated with specific and wonderful (at least from a distance) variations. For example, 90 percent of all marine species and 70 percent of terrestrial species from the Permian period (ending about 250 million years) became extinct. This included both flora and fauna. While scholars labor to pinpoint the various causes of this steep decline, the biodiversity in the later Cenozoic is equally astounding. Pinker's observations concerning recent decreases in human on human violence is persuasive, but the end of the Pleistocene some twelve thousand years ago also paved the road for an acquisitive human adaptation, agriculture (including animal husbandry), the caloric backbone for industrialization. The agencies of this adaptation continue to be documented and may reasonably be argued to have generated, in part, the purchase of the planet's current precarious environment. Increasing deforestation, engorged carbon footprints, extensive resource extraction, excessive erosion, high rates of species depopulation and extermination, contaminated water supplies, and much more herald the possibility of another round of extinctions with a different flavor. The irony is not lost that Homo sapiens steadily augmented its brain functions to more robustly advance these processes. And, of course, possibly save itself. The global consequences have been doggedly clear: "Eden occupied was a slaughterhouse."11 This brings me to the artists in this exhibition. All teeter through life as individuals whose very presence, next step, drawn line, shutter clicked, software written, canvas painted, movie edited, phrase uttered rebound as singularly distinctive and representative of our species. Each image, every technique, every one of the artists in Just Not Yet wades into worlds saturated with uneasy relationships, unpredictable transformations, or tenuous adjustments. All art is, after all, a residue of human behavior. It is all social, all political, all economic, all environmental. These artists are not inclined toward preaching. The artists scan fragments. They observe, digest, and give us knots. Untangling them may be misspent effort. If any equilibrium exists among them, gaps and incongruities promptly undermine it. Crossroads of cause and effect relationships among their works of art and political, economic, social or environmental dimensions tend toward fabrication of "just so" stories or wayward rationalizations: smokescreens and puffy generalizations. 11 Edward O. Wilson, The Future of Life (New York: Knopf, 2002): 102. My inability to have any impact on the ferocity of daily life has me wondering about my expectations. When I was in high school, my family lived in a rural area on a farm settled in the late 19th or early 20th century. We converted the barns to house horses. My father made some business arrangements and soon, in addition to our personal mounts, we boarded horses specialized for jumping and polo. My job, along with my two brothers, was to provide care for these horses. Feed them, water them, exercise them, brush them, clean the stalls, spread fresh straw and so forth. The winter mornings were the worst time for this work: dark, bitter cold and frozen water lines. During the summer and early fall we cut feed hay with a sickle bar cutter, raked it into rows and baled it. Out in the hay fields, rabbits and birds were plentiful. Most birds easily escaped the cutter but many rabbits were less fortunate, especially young bunnies. I cringed as spurts of blood vomited from the freshly cut hay and parts of bunnies were strewn about. I stopped the tractor hoping that survivors ran away to breed again. But the horses had to be fed. They paid the rent. Homo sapiens is likely to become extinct. In particular, each of us will. When? It's a guess. Overall the background rate of extinction is between ten and one hundred species per year. Currently, the rate has been estimated at twenty-­‐seven thousand per year and higher, up to one hundred and forty thousand per year, what Edward O. Wilson calls "megadeath".12 Mammalian species average a life span of about one million years.13 Some paleontologists argue that the lifespan of warm-­‐blooded animals decreases as the size and sociability of the species increases. Here is one somewhat optimistic (for our "weedy" species, at least) summary: Given the average species lifespan for mammals, the background extinction rate for this group would be approximately one species lost every 200 years. Of course, this is an average rate -­‐-­‐ the actual pattern of mammalian extinctions is likely to be somewhat uneven. Some centuries might see more than one mammalian extinction, and conversely, sometimes several centuries might pass without the loss of any mammal species. Yet the past 400 years have seen 89 mammalian extinctions, almost 45 times the predicted rate, and another 169 mammal species are listed as critically endangered...14 Humanity's main impact on the extinction rate is landscape modification, an impact greatly increased by the burgeoning human population. Now [1991] standing at 5.7 billion and growing at a rate of 1.6 percent per year, the population of the world will double in 43 years if growth continues at this pace. By draining wetlands, plowing prairies, logging forests, paving, and building, we are altering the landscape on an unprecedented scale. Some organisms do well under the conditions we've created: They tend to cope well with change, tolerate a broad range of habitats, disperse widely, and reproduce rapidly, and they can quickly crowd out more specialized local species. City pigeons, zebra mussels, rats, and kudzu and tamarisk trees -­‐-­‐ these are examples of what biologists call "weedy" species, both animals and plants. Many weedy species will probably survive, and 12 Edward O. Wilson, The Future of Life (New York: Knopf, 2002): 96. 13 http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/03/2/l_032_04.html. 14 The Living Planet Index, developed for the World Wildlife Living Planet Reports, "suggests that across the globe, vertebrate populations were on average one-­‐third smaller in 2008 than they were in 1970. This is based on trends in the size of 9,014 populations of 2,688 mammal, bird, reptile, amphibian and fish species...(p. 18) Living Planet Report 2012: Biodiversity, Biocapacity and Better Choices, WWF http://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/all_publications/living_planet_report/. even thrive, in the face of the current mass extinction. But thousands of others, many never known to science, are likely to perish. And what is the fate of our own species likely to be, if we really are in the midst of a sixth mass extinction? One possibility is that as diversity and abundance wither, the species causing it all -­‐-­‐ Homo sapiens, the most dominant species in history -­‐-­‐ could also be on the road to oblivion. But another possibility is that Homo sapiens, which has proved to be a very effective weedy species itself, will persist. That's the view of paleobiologist David Jablonski, who sees us as one of the survivors, "sort of picking through the rubble" of a world that has lost much of its biodiversity -­‐-­‐ and much of its comfort. For along with that species richness, the ecosystem is likely to loose (sic) much of its ability to provide many of the valuable services that we take for granted, from cleaning and recirculating air and water, to pollinating crops and providing a source for new pharmaceuticals. And while the fossil record tells us that biodiversity has always recovered, it also tells us that the recovery will be unbearably slow in human terms -­‐-­‐ 5 to 10 million years after the mass extinctions of the past. That's more than 200,000 generations of humankind before levels of biodiversity comparable to those we inherited might be restored.15 We tend to embed our notions of self in our experience. We insure our value, the meaningfulness of our existence, our conscious understanding of whom each of us is, a sense of self. We are inclined to spawn generalizations and predictions based on our individual observations. We thrive on making our lives critically important. We are agents of survival, fixers, meaning givers. How can it be otherwise? One possibility is not to think about such matters. Leave them alone and just coast. Yet, we uncover or manufacture details to improve or change or alter or advance. We yearn for insight and create purpose for ourselves, for the planet, for the universe, for the galaxies. We seem to be wired for this. But the only meaning is what we give; there is no other. There is no destination. There is no foreseeable end. There is no intrinsic value. Things are not getting better or worse. And any prediction of a future station remains as it started. It is just not yet and it will never be. Peter S Briggs Helen Devitt Jones Curator of Art Museum of Texas Tech University 15 Evolution Library, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/03/2/l_032_04.html.