The electrical system in my apartment building has been beeping since August 14. “Beeping” sounds innocuous, but I invite you to open the front door and walk into my hallway, where you will learn immediately that it is not. Beeping like Chinese water torture, urgent beeping like the climax of a disaster movie set on a submarine. I can hear the beeping in my apartment at all hours of day and night; there is beeping with my morning coffee and beeping as I eat lunch and beeping as I change into my pajamas. My thoughts are punctuated by beeping. Like Edgar Allan Poe said: “‘Leave my loneliness unbroken! - quit the bust above my door! Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!’ Quoth the raven, ‘BEEP.’”
The scary thing is that I’m getting used to it. BEEP. BEEP. BEEP. I alternate between earplugs and opera, and for hours at a time I can actually manage to tune it out. The building superintendent knows about the beeping, and assures me that someone will fix it just as soon as they can. After the second week I woke up with a cold—my throat hurt and my head felt woozy and my legs felt wobbly—and when I tottered out of bed to fix some ginger tea and was met with the wall of beeping, I had a weepy breakdown and wrote my landlady an email using the phrase “I just can’t take it anymore.”
That was on September first, and as I sit here writing, the raven still sits darkly atop my door. I just bought a new box of hot-pink earplugs, and found a bootlegged YouTube video of a complete two-hour production of La Bohème. I’m surviving.
Humans are good at adapting to new circumstances. But we may be so good at scraping out a living from harsh environments that it actually prevents us from realizing how bad our environments have become. In J.B. MacKinnon’s new book, The Once and Future World, he explores the effect of the “shifting baseline.” This is the idea that each generation notices only the environmental degradation that takes place during its own lifetime, and therefore conditions worsen without us really knowing or remembering just how much better things used to be.
The first scientists to hypothesize the shifting baseline were child psychologists Peter H. Kahn Jr. and Batya Friedman, who in 1995 were studying children’s perceptions of pollution in Houston. At the time, Houston was one of the more polluted cities in the States, but to their surprise, Kahn and Friedman found that only about 30 per cent of the kids they asked noticed the hovering smog at all. The researchers theorized:
One possible answer is that to understand the idea of pollution one needs to compare existing polluted states to those that are less polluted. In other words, if one’s only experience is with a certain amount of pollution, then that amount becomes not pollution...what we perceive in the children we interviewed might well be the same sort of psychological phenomenon that affects us all from generation to generation.
MacKinnon recounts how when historical photos of anglers in the Florida Keys standing proudly with their big catches of the day are laid out in chronological order, they offer a time-lapse view of the shrinking of a day’s catch since the mid-20th century. The “small fish” of the 1950s are often bigger than the “big fish” of today. “Most striking of all,” MacKinnon writes, “is that the fishermen look equally pleased with themselves through the generations—the same wide smiles, the same backslapping-with-Hemingway pride.” Current estimates of biodiversity on earth—every living thing, whether it crawls, flies, swims, or runs—say that we are living in a world reduced to just ten percent of the living beings it once boasted. The scary thing for MacKinnon is that we have accepted this state of affairs with barely a batted eyelash—our impoverished nature is so thoroughly “the new normal” as to actually be normal.
Our ability to be just as pleased with a small fish as a big one sounds like a positive attribute of the human race—we can survive and even thrive on very little. But what else does this adaptability—our fish-bowl memories, our ingenious coping strategies—let us put up with that we shouldn’t?
Easter Island has long been a cautionary tale about how humans who destroy their environment destroy themselves in the process. But MacKinnon highlights a new set of studies that suggest something potentially even worse about the history of Easter Island: the people there actually did just fine in the landscape they destroyed. They hunted and fished and logged their island from a paradise of natural abundance to a barren rock on the ocean, but their population worked out ways of getting around the consequences of what they’d done. They sheltered plants with rocks and ate rats. They were better nourished, in fact, than Europeans. They lost everything and yet somehow managed to keep going. The upshot, MacKinnon says, is this: “[I]f you’re waiting for an ecological crisis to persuade human beings to change their troubled relationship with nature, you could be waiting a long, long time.”
BEEP. BEEP. BEEP. When people visit me in my apartment, they are visibly bothered by the beeping. “I’m pretty sure that’s illegal,” several of my friends have told me. I know, I tell them, and then I show them my hot-pink earplugs.
But there’s hope: while the beeping alone might never have been enough to make me change my situation, a different disaster within the ecology of my apartment recently arose. Water has been seeping up through the floor periodically over this rainy summer, and the other day I got out of bed and stepped in a puddle. When I moved some furniture to mop up, I discovered that the wall is finely smudged with mold. I gave notice. I’ve been in other people’s apartments; I still remember what normal looks like. You can adapt and adapt and still survive, but there comes a point when the life possible in your little world is no longer fully human.
Every week, Linda Besner reads a new book and writes on a tangentially related topic.
