Domestication of the Wolf

My favorite all-time movie was released by Disney when I was eleven years old, in 1983.  As the only movie I feel compelled to watch again and again every few years, Never Cry Wolf, always teaches me something new each time I watch it.

The story line in a nutshell is that Mr. Mowatt, a biologist, is hired by the Canadian government to prove that massive declines in the caribou herds are due to wolf predation, thus providing a justification for an expansion of their wolf eradication program. Through observation and interactions with the local natives, he discovers that the herd's problem is not wolf predation but rather a disease outbreak -- one which is being mitigated by the wolves, who hunt down the sick and weakened animals and help prevent further spread of the disease.

While the basic wildlife biology lesson in the movie is a worthwhile one, I'd never thought about how it might apply to my own species until recently.

We like to pretend that we're different from other animals; not subject to the same laws that govern all other living organisms. The course of humanity over the last century has certainly given us plenty of reason to embrace this idea.

We have several "wolves" that have plagued us since time immemorial.  Famine and disease are at the front of the pack. When they fail to cull our herd, war is usually right behind them. There are many lesser wolves which torment us, yet help to keep us healthy either individually or as a species. The physical effort involved in feeding, clothing, and sheltering ourselves is one we've scared off, to the point that obesity runs rampant. In our effort to ward off the disease wolf, we've sanitized our environments to the point that our immune systems have gone haywire, manifesting in numerous autoimmune disorders and severe allergies.  In fact, most every wolf we've managed to ward off has left us with unintentional consequences which are ultimately worse than those were were first trying to avoid.

In an effort to ward off the Wolf of Economic Malaise in the face of energy and resource decline, we're now amassing ever growing piles of debt on a global basis. This wolf feeds on debt, which will make him far more ferocious when he returns. Debt is little more than a promise to pay at some future point, and the more debt there is, the more likely this promise will be broken.

The Famine Wolf has been kept at bay for so long that few in the industrialized world have any memory of it. The development of the Haber-Bosch process, which allows us to artificially fix atmospheric nitrogen for use in fertilizer and vastly improve agricultural yields, gave famine a near-fatal blow. When it was developed at roughly the time my grandparents were born, the world's population had reached 2 billion. Various inventions have dealt other serious blows, from the McCormick Reaper to tractors using internal combustion engines and the modern combine. Though it came at a cost in the nutritional quality of our food, the development of hybrid crops also greatly expanded production.

The Disease Wolf was beaten off in large part through scientific knowledge of microorganisms, such as the work of Louis Pasteur. The development of antibiotics and vaccines dealt another great blow, and greatly reduced childhood mortality. By the time my parents were born in the mid 20th century, the world population had crept up to 2.5 billion.

Shortly before I was born, Norman Borlaug took another swing at the Famine Wolf with his development of dwarf wheat varieties. He's credited with averting a massive famine in India, whose population has now nearly tripled in the time elapsed. He knew, however, that he hadn't scared it off for good, and warned that we should use the time he gave us wisely.

The War Wolf has also been scared off, in much of the world anyway. The development of nuclear weapons have kept it at bay for several decades now, though it's by no means a certainty that they can continue to keep it away indefinitely. As our population continues to climb and resource conflict intensifies, this wolf grows ever more menacing.

I frequently see conservative media pointing the finger at Thomas Malthus, exclaiming how very wrong he was about the future, simply because his schedule for the arrival of the famine wolf was off. They seem to think that our ability to scare this wolf off for a few years is the same thing as killing it.

Every time we scare off of yet another wolf, our population grows. The 2 billion people in my grandparents' childhood world have now exploded to 7.5 billion in my world.  It's apparent that the wolves are never killed, but are scared off into the forest, where they grow ever more hungry the longer they're kept away.

The story of perpetual progress we like to tell each other is not one that ends happily ever after.  Human societies have always grown as they scared off the wolves, and collapsed as the unintended consequences arose. Such was certainly the case with Greece and Rome, which overshot their resource base just as we're now doing. Now that our society and the overshoot of our resource base is global, collapse threatens to also go global. Just as the caribou need wolves to regulate their population, humans need the wolves we've fought away for so long.

So am I advocating for the abandonment of scientific knowledge? No, not really. Promoting ignorance doesn't seem like a good idea in any case. I do think, however, that we should try to domesticate our wolves by regulating ourselves as they once did. As difficult as that may be, it's far better than the alternatives we're now facing.