Tipping Points: Any Cause for Hope?

I just finished reading, two decades after it was published, the book Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. I read it at the same time that I am still trying to get through This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein, about which I wrote earlier. I realized there were things we can learn from comparing the two books.

The most noticeable thing is that Klein’s book is extremely depressing. It is also heavy with references. In contrast, Gladwell’s book (what an appropriate name he has) is optimistic, and has just enough references so that you know he is not making everything up. I read it in a couple of days. Klein’s book will take me months or years to digest.

From Klein’s viewpoint, no matter how much we do, it is not going to make any difference. Unless we totally change our economic system, the Earth is condemned to climatic warming that will exceed the ability of our civilization to tolerate. As I wrote previously, trees are out, weeds are in; this is the world of our future, and we might as well accept it.

But Gladwell’s viewpoint, as indicated right on the cover of his book, is that little things can make a big difference. Some seemingly minor event or process can push just enough on circumstances that they will begin to tip in a new direction. Also, right on the cover of his book is a match. It only takes a spark to start a fire, if the fuel is there and the conditions are right. Gladwell would suggest that we might be able to avoid global climate disaster, if something unexpected and unpredictable occurs that makes people change the way they think and live. It seems impossible, but such things have happened, though on a much smaller scale.

One example from Gladwell’s book is the Broken Windows theory of crime prevention. It would seem that, to reduce crime, which was epidemic in New York City in the early 1990s, it would be necessary to make big economic and sociological changes that would affect and improve the lives of millions of people. In parts of New York that had lots of crime, there were broken windows and graffiti everywhere. These, it would seem, are the symptoms of crime, not the causes. But a campaign to clean up broken windows and graffiti, as if they were the cause rather than the effect, seems to have caused a reduction in the crime rate. If people see broken windows and graffiti everywhere, they to not have a sense of responsibility for their surroundings, while if they see broken windows and graffiti being cleaned up, they begin to identify with their surroundings and notice when bad things happen. Criminals know that they are less likely to get away with their crimes in a neighborhood where broken windows are quickly fixed and graffiti quickly cleaned up. Treating the symptoms is a lot cheaper than addressing the root causes, which might be so large as to be impossible to address.

I have wondered why crime rates are so much lower in France, where I now live, than in America. I wonder if part of the reason is that there is a lot of effort, by property owners and municipalities, to pick up litter. There is a lot of litter in France, but about ten times less than in America (I base this statement on actual counts of I have made). The French do not, or no longer, see their local environments as places to throw garbage, or in which crime is inevitable. One fact that does not fit this interpretation is that practically every public surface in France has graffiti.

Does something like this offer any hope that we might be able to turn around the inevitable global warming? In France, it is seen as perfectly normal for people to walk and take public transit. Even mail delivery is by bicycle. It is not, or is no longer, necessary for municipalities or the government to try to convince people to not drive cars as much.

Gladwell also addresses the problem of smoking in young people, which (at least when he was writing) was increasing even while adult smoking was on the decline. American governments and nonprofits have spent billions of dollars on campaigns that tried to show young people how dangerous smoking is, without much success. I wonder if all the anti-smoking material in my biology classes made any difference. Young people do not respond very much to appeals to evidence and reasoning. Young smokers choose to smoke because of their peers. Smoking is not cool; smokers are cool—the peers whom other young people admire are the rebels who do things precisely because they are dangerous. France and Germany have used graphic images on cigarette boxes in an attempt to scare young people into not smoking, without apparent success.

But how can you make healthy behavior normal or, better yet, cool? And how could you ever get people in general to make healthy choices by making them seem cool?

Gladwell suggests one way to reduce the smoking epidemic. Since there is no way to stop young people from experimenting with cigarettes, the best we can do is to keep them from turning into long-term tobacco addicts. Most young people who play with cigarettes do not, in fact, become lifelong tobacco addicts. Gladwell suggested requiring cigarettes to be below a critical level of nicotine content, so that it would be nearly impossible for a casual smoker to become an addict. The problem is that tobacco industry profits depend almost entirely on addiction. That is how they make their money: customers who cannot not buy the product. Requiring tobacco companies to sell only cigarettes with little nicotine is requiring them to commit economic suicide. Addiction is their product. I see no way out of this problem.

The only way to prevent bad trends is to focus on your own family. That’s what we are doing. We moved to France, rather than to try to raise our grandkids in a social environment that is as wasteful and violent as America. And as for the family context, almost nobody in their immediate or extended French family smokes. Their family, and their peers, enjoy doing healthy and constructive things like taking hikes. And when our grandchildren look around them, what do they see? They see young French people who dart around on electric scooters rather than driving. They look pretty cool and they know it. Young people see their cool peers almost every day on the trams. We do not want our grandchildren to have to choose among their society, their family, and their peers. We want all three levels of influence to maximize the chances that their tipping points will be in the right direction.

All this means that, without us trying to cause it, a tipping point might be reached in which people change their behaviors away from unhealthy and dangerous ones to healthy and constructive ones. It only takes a spark.

Don’t hold your breath in anticipation, however. When a tipping point is reached, the process could tip in a dangerous direction as easily as a healthy one. It is at least as easy for good people to become violent as for bad people to become good. It all depends on who the influencers are. And influencers are very seldom the people who know the truth. A tipping point can accelerate dangerous trends as easily as preventing them.

 

Greetings. I have a felicitous essay with which you can begin your new year.

I have just finished the manuscript of a seventh book that I hope to publish next year (2026), if I find a publisher this year (2025). This is in addition to my sixth book, Forgotten Landscapes, which is scheduled for release July 2025. But right now I want to tell you a little about the seventh book, Every Plant Has a Story.

There are lots of books about botany for the general reader. But almost all of them are about why humans should appreciate plants, e.g., they are sources of food, spices, hallucinogens, etc. That is, plants as slaves of humans. But my book is about the stories the plants tell about themselves, as discovered by scientific research. I will not attempt to summarize it here, but will probably do so a bit at a time in the essays I will post in the coming year.

Every plant has a different story of success in the ruthless Darwinian world of competition. One example is that some plants grow as long-lived trees, while others are short-lived weeds. The long-lived trees (like oak trees) invest a lot of time and energy in building up for the future. They are tremendously successful, but it takes centuries for them to earn back the costs that it took them to build themselves. They epitomize long-term investment. Weeds, on the other hand, do not have a long term. They grow like crazy for, in most cases, a single year, then pour all their resources into seed production. There are all stages in between, such as short-lived trees (like cottonwoods).

Above: sequoia trees invest for long-term success, over millennia; below, weeds such as velvetleaf invest for success only one year into the future, then they die.

Weeds specialize on temporary habitats, such as an area disturbed by fire, flood, or human activity. Trees specialize on habitats that remain stable for many decades, even centuries. Since the Earth contains both kinds of habitats, stable and temporary, the weed approach to investing and the tree approach are both successful, in different places.

The analogy with the human economy is inescapable. You can either invest for the long term, building up savings and assets, preparing for the future. You can manage your life like a tree. Or you can spend quickly and go into debt, as if you have no future. You can be a weed. It is the people who live like trees who make the world a better place, who stabilize it. But there are plenty of people who live like weeds also.

Humans are, however, changing the global climate. Not just heating it up, through the greenhouse effect, but creating a climate that is wildly catastrophic—fires, hurricanes, floods, and all the rest. The entire world now has or will soon have an unstable climate, everywhere. Plants that make long-term investments, such as trees, may not live long enough to be successful. Only weeds, which often live just a year, can survive in a world where the climate changes rapidly. No longer will tree investments and weed investments both be successful at different times and places. Now only the weeds will succeed. I summarize this situation in the last chapter of my book: Trees are out, weeds are in.

Trees are out, weeds are in. This means that if you expect to see old forests with big trees, you’d better see them right away. And then prepare to live in a world in which there are no plants except those that grow and die rapidly. Someday, the giant sequoia forests of California, where huge trees live for millennia, will be regarded as part of a mythological past.

The analogy with human investments is again inescapable. Long-term investments, in which a corporation plans to be a stable force for good over many decades, are on their way out. Short-term investments, to make a killing rather than a living, will soon dominate the economy of the world. Only the long term allows a corporation to invest in reputation: we are a company you can trust for life, we want you to like us. Instead, corporations will all be rewarded for being rapacious, treating their customers like garbage, and they don’t care who knows it. Yes, we dump our wastes into the common space in which we all live; yes, we deny your insurance claims; no, you cannot expect us to actually honor our contracts.  In a truly free economy, consumers can choose to stay away from dishonest corporations. But in many cases, when a corporation treats its customers like garbage, and it starts to collapse, the government will come in and rescue it, or else it will merge with another corporation. Corporations lose their recognizable identities, so you cannot choose to stay away from them. The future of the human world, as of the natural world, will be wildly swerving among disasters, in which you cannot responsibly plan ahead.

I have been reading Naomi Klein’s 2014 This Changes Everything. She makes it abundantly clear that our world economy cannot possibly avoid climate-related collapse. Any company, or country, that invests in the future rather than in immediate profitability is swept aside. Countries, companies, and individuals who choose sustainability are usually beaten down. Unless solar energy is, without subsidies, cheaper than government-subsidized fossil fuel energy, it will be driven into extinction. The time is coming, soon, when sustainability will be essentially illegal. By choosing to spend less money, I am making myself an enemy of the consumerist economy. I am basing this view on Klein’s 2014 numbers. It is much worse today.

I was expecting that my seventh book would be a cheerful celebration of the diversity of plant adaptations even to the most challenging environments. I did not plan for it to be an activist book. The time is past when I delude myself into thinking that any book I could possibly write would change the views of any readers who did not already agree with me. But, despite my plans, my seventh book has become an activist book, a voice of a prophet in the wilderness, from what the short-horizon leaders of the world economy think of as the extreme left.

This represents an almost complete departure from everything I wrote in previous years. Before, I was hoping to help change the world. Now, I just want those of you who care about the long-term well-being of humankind to feel a little better about the way you are living.

Trees are out; weeds are in. Happy New Year.

Wild Child

I just finished reading a collection of short stories by T. C. Boyle (T. Coraghessan Boyle). The title of the collection is the same as the last and longest story: Wild Child.

T. C. Boyle’s fiction is able to romp through all the fields of the imagination, including many scientific topics that might scare away other fiction writers. His imagination is wild, and yet every story is something that could, conceivably, have happened, and many of them are based on real events, as in the rich couple who spent a quarter million dollars to clone their dog.

But Wild Child is straight historical fiction. It sticks fairly closely to the known facts of the wild boy of Aveyron, in France, at the end of the eighteenth century. The boy, apparently aged about five, was left for dead in the forest by a family who could not afford another mouth to feed, but he survived. Legend has it that wolves raised him, but this is unconfirmed and Boyle does not use this element in his plot.

The boy was completely a brute. He knew only how to catch small animals with his bare hands and eat them raw, or dig potatoes from farmers’ fields (again with bare hands). When he was captured by well-meaning peasants, and later raised in special institutions that tried to rehabilitate him, his reaction was fierce and violent. He had no conscience, sense of shame, or capacity for empathy. Eventually the teacher who tried the most to rehabilitate him had to give up. The former wild child died at age forty without language, with minimal capacity to learn anything, and with continuing hostility.

What is interesting about this story for this blog is what it does and does not tell us about human evolution. Scientists at the time thought that the child represented an earlier stage of human evolution, before language and social skills developed. But we know today that this is not the least bit true. The Wild Child was the product of severe abuse—his throat had been cut when he was left for dead. He was not pre-verbal; if he was about five when abandoned, he had started to develop human skills and then forgot them. He may have had normal human capacity for language, conscience, and empathy, but these were cut short forever. All during human evolution, people lived in groups, where they had fully functional social skills. They hunted together and shared food. Families helped each other to raise the kids. Most mammals live in social groups. There has, for them or for us, never been a Wild Child stage of evolution.

While I was reading this story, I was watching and playing with my grandson, who is younger than the Wild Boy was when he was abandoned. Leo is always talking, exploring, being very expressive. We played catch with some of his stuffed animals. It was not just motor skills he was developing. He made up stories about the animals. This was imagination that he would not have had, or might have lost, if he had been abandoned in the forest like the Wild Child. He is cheerful, which is one of the options of human nature. The Wild Child might have been cheerful also, if he had a chance. Leo asked me what I was reading, and I told him it was about a little boy who grew up by himself until it was too late, so he did not know how to talk, or to get along, or do practically anything that Leo can do. Leo understands that his time spent with his parents, his sister, his grandparents, or his friends is essential for his normal growth.

One of the worst things about abuse is that it shatters the normal evolutionary social connections that every animal needs, especially humans who crave it most.

Why We Get Fat

I just posted a video about why we get fat. It results from cravings for high-calorie foods. These cravings were given to us by natural selection. They were an essential part of survival back in cave man days. Cravings made us eat every bit of food we could find. Our bodies then stored excess calories in the form of body fat. We would feast on food when it was briefly available, then live off of the stored calories in our body fat during times when food was not available—times of deprivation or famine.

Body fat is the safest way for us to store calories. The calories are safe from pests and mildew. And body fat has advantages other than just storing calories, which is its main function in natural selection. Visible accumulations of fat can make sexual characteristics more noticeable, and thus be favored by sexual selection as well. Also, since we walk upright on two legs, we also sit upright, and it is very nice to have a fat butt to sit on.

But today, our bodies are storing calories for a famine that never comes. There are more obese people than hungry people in the world today. Today, for our health, we have to deliberately do things for which our caveman ancestors had no choice. We must limit our calorie intake, and make sure many of those calories are in healthy food—that is, just about the only kinds of foods available to our evolutionary ancestors. We also need to make sure we get plenty of exercise, something our evolutionary ancestors had no choice about.

This is just one example of many in which modern medical problems are best understood in the light of our evolutionary history.

Vanishing Utopias

We all know that utopias cannot ever exist. But, according to historian Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, we keep getting closer to it. In fact, our approach to it is accelerating.

It is a long book, almost 500 pages, but it covers the entirety of human prehistory and history, up until the present day, which for the author was 2014. You will not find lists of empires and dates. In this way, it is almost the exact opposite of what is still perhaps the most famous overview of world history, the Outline of History by H. G. Wells.

Instead, the author seeks general trends and explanations for everything that has happened. Here is an example. Why did human evolution seem to proceed so slowly before the arrival of modern humans? For example, Homo ergaster stone tools in Africa remained unchanged for a million years. Harari says that all other animal species, and all humans before Homo sapiens, have or had a biological constraint on their ability to think of new ways of living. Before the human lineage could make any progress, we needed an innovation, invisible in bones and DNA, which allowed us to imagine the future. Neanderthals, for example, he said, did not have “the ability to compose fiction.”

But the author suffers from the delusion of technological optimism, which is very common among writers of popular sociology. Here are two examples which considerably erode the credibility of the conclusion of the book.

First, he seems to assume we will never run out of energy. This is because we invest some of the profits from the old kinds of energy into developing new ones. This has, in fact, happened. One obvious example is that England was running out of wood, so they invested money and research into using coal, which required the invention of the steam engine. Before modern times, all energy was either from burning wood or from human and animal muscle power. Medieval people did not even imagine steam, hydroelectric, or atomic power.

But this will happen only if we deliberately invest in new technology. Right now we need to invest in green technologies such as wind and solar energy. We have done so, but powerful ideological and political forces oppose the adoption of green technology. Donald Trump has made it very clear that his solution to our future energy needs is to pump more oil. Technology will not save us, because Trump will lead us boldly into the twentieth century.

Harari also speculated that wars were becoming rare. It is true that there were fewer wars in 2014 than there had ever been in the past. This was easy to believe in the balmy days of the Obama administration. But almost as soon as Harari’s book was published, Putin decided to invade the Ukraine, for reasons that are not clear even to his supporters, who do not dare to have an independent opinion; and Harari’s own country, Israel, is waging what many observers claim to be a war of extermination against the Palestinians.

Harari even speculated about how to be happy. Happiness is, he said, the product of serotonin levels in the brain. No matter what your external circumstances happen to be, no matter if you are in pain or slavery, you will be happy if you have a lot of serotonin. I think this opinion is a product of the author’s scarcely-hidden admiration for Buddhism. And, he implies, serotonin levels are not only biologically determined—you are either a happy or a depressed person—but also remain unchanged during your life. But this is true only for people who are clinically depressed. They need more serotonin but I do not. Also, I am certain that I am happier now, having completed so many of my life goals, than I was back when I had no idea if my future would be successful.

We need to admit that lots of things are getting better—the same message as Steven Pinker’s Better Angels of Our Nature—but that we still have a lot of work to do and our success is not assured.

We all live in imagined realities. Despite the absence of evidence for spiritual realities, we will be individually unhappy and collective failures if we live in the way the apostle Paul described in one of his epistles: Eat, drink, for tomorrow we die. We have to at least imagine that we can make the world better.