The depth of our environmental concerns mimics our evolutionary heritage

(Early humans probably traveled only short distances and only worried about short intervals of time into the future.)

Last year at the annual meeting of the Western Political Science Association in San Diego, CA, University of Missouri professor David Konisky reported on the results of his survey of 1,000 adults regarding their environmental concerns in a paper titled "Environmental Policy Attitudes, Political Trust and Geographical Scale". “The survey’s core result is that people care about their communities and express the desire to see government action taken toward local and national issues,” said Konisky, a policy research scholar with the Institute of Public Policy. “People are hesitant to support efforts concerning global issues even though they believe that environmental quality is poorer at the global level than at the local and national level. This is surprising given the media attention that global warming has recently received and reflects the division of opinion about the severity of climate change.”

In other words, people are more concerned about what happens in their own backyard than they are about the global environment. “Americans are clearly most concerned about pollution issues that might affect their personal health, or the health of their families,” Konisky said. Global warming ranked 8th among the environmental concerns reported by the respondents.

Is this really an unexpected result? On the surface, it seems surprising that given all the media attention to the problem of global climate change (e.g., rising ocean levels, melting glaciers, demise of polar bears and penguins, mass extinctions, shifts in agriculture, etc.) that it would not rank as the number one concern among a sample of Americans. But thinking as an evolutionary biologist for a moment, something I try to do a lot, the results could be viewed exactly as expected.

Throughout the Pleistocene epoch, which lasted from about 1.8 million years BP until about 11,000 years BP, humans lived in relatively small nomadic groups, or clans, of related individuals. They probably did not live much past the age of 40 and they probably did not travel long distances. The landscape must have been a dangerous place, so I have to presume that individuals went only as far as they needed to obtain the requisites of life: food, water, animal skins for clothing, wood for a fire. Occasionally there would be a dispersal event to colonize new territory, but the world you knew was only as large as the area you walked during your relatively short life. What another hominid clan did three valleys away had no effect on your life whatsoever, and it seems likely that humans living 100 miles apart never even knew of each other’s existence. What I have briefly described here is what evolutionary psychologists call the “environment of evolutionary adaptedness” or EEA. That is, conditions of life during the Pleistocene were such that humans were selected to be adapted to that environment, where life was short and known distances and effects were spatially small.

But times have changed. Now, the lifestyle of Americans, or Europeans, or Chinese threatens the well-being of a Bangladeshi living on the coast through the effects of global warming and rising ocean levels. The demand for furniture in Japan made of tropical woods can eliminate the habitat and homeland for native wildlife and humans living in parts of Indonesia. Radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine resulted in resettlement of more than 300,000 people locally, but the fallout was detected in North America. And on, and on, and on.

Somehow we have to rise above our evolved concerns focused on immediate issues of time and space, but I still do not know exactly how to bring that about. We are all at least aware of how local actions can have global effects, and that is a start. And many of us pay lip service to our responsibility to future generations. But it seems to me that overcoming the "small distance-short time" dilemma is critical to solving 21st century environmental problems. The evolutionary problem is simply this: what is best for us and our family right here and right now may be harmful to others further away and not yet born. This dilemma manifests itself over and over again. Recognizing it is a first step to overcoming it.

What does cigar smoking have to do with global warming?

(Cover of Cigar Magazine.)

Recently I experienced a convergence of two of my interests that was totally unexpected. I was catching up on past issues of Cigar Magazine when I came across an article in the summer 2008 issue titled “Secondhand smoke and global warming: More connected than you think?” by James M. Taylor. I could not even imagine how smoking and global climate change could be interrelated, so I read on. Realize that CM is a first rate glossy magazine and, in my opinion, is the best rag on the market about all things cigar.

Although CM is a fine resource for finding ratings on various cigars, the history of the industry, new products on the market, etc., there is always a theme running through its pages critical of anti-smoking legislation and the general problem a cigar smoker has in finding a suitable place to indulge in their most cherished hobby. There is plenty of anti-government, anti-Big Brother, and even anti-medical science between the covers of CM. Anytime a writer for CM finds an ounce of reason to believe that medical science got it wrong—that smoking is not as harmful as claimed or that the harmful effects of secondhand smoke is unfounded—they will articulate their argument as forcefully as they can.

So in Taylor’s piece in CM, he uses the “debate” about climate warming as an analogy for the medical science/anti-smoking issue. Taylor claims that there are more scientists who believe that global warming either does not exist or that it is not caused by humans, and he cites the “Global Climate Change Project” and refers us to the website that hosts this project at Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine. The site claims to have 31,000 signatures from scientists and other highly-educated people who do not believe in the scientific conclusion that global warming is real and is caused by human activity. Taylor’s argument is that the media often ignores, exaggerates, or misconstrues the “scientific community” in its reporting to the public. Fair enough. But in this argument, he is claiming that the REAL scientific community with respect to global warming is that group who signed the Petition (rather than the climate scientists who authored and signed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report), and that the media is ignoring the Petition Project group. If the media is ignoring these “real” scientists and telling us that climate change is imminent, the media may also be hyping and exaggerating the claims of medical scientists who tell us that smoking is not healthy. His fear is that such propaganda might result in special restrictions and higher taxes for cigar smokers. But this logic all seems to be a sort of anti-intellectual attitude borne out of fear that we may not like the messenger’s message.

There are many criticisms of the Petition Project and these are well-articulated in an essay blogged by Gary J. Whittenberger on eSkeptic in November 2008. I will not attempt to reiterate the points made by Whittenberger regarding what is wrong with the results of the petition, because that is not the point of this essay. My point is that it is usually difficult for the public to know who the real experts are on some topic, to know who is summarizing the experts’ views accurately to the public, and to distinguish what is truth from what we want the truth to be. Taylor does not want the medical profession to be correct about the harmful effects of smoking or its impact on cigar smokers; if all true and the public takes it seriously, cigar smokers might have to change their smoking behavior even more than they have already. Similarly, many people I talk with in the general public do not want climate scientists to be correct that global warming is caused by human activity because, if true, we might have to change our behavior regarding our energy consumption.

Humans have a proclivity to believe what they want to believe, or to continue to believe what they have always believed. I hypothesize that this tendency is usually adaptive, and that what worked in the past is likely to work in the future. But those days may be over. The earth is strained to capacity and changes occur rapidly now. The future may not look like the recent past at all.