Of
Ants And Humans
By Jean-Louis Turcot & Emily Spence
05 October, 2007
Countercurrents.org
In some periodical or other,
one of the authors of this piece once read that, based on size and weight,
ants proportionally consume more than do humans. In addition, the current
number of ants present in the world, according to E. O. Wilson's judgement,
is between ten to the sixteenth and ten to the seventeenth (roughly
100,000,000,000,000,000) in totality [1].
This set of facts, in turn, brings up a question: Should we reduce their
population as there are ever so many of them and they use up so much?
To further consider this question, let's examine what the ants do for
a living. They work in a colony and perform specific tasks, the most
important of which is to obtain nourishment since nothing else is possible
unless they can eat and drink as a precondition to staying alive. Therefore,
they consume, rest at night and go out on the next day to forage for
further provisions to devour.
During the winter, they settle down to use up the rations that they
accumulated during the other seasons, at least they do so in Canada
wherein harsh winters do not allow ants to do much else except for a
few other curtailed activities. They, also, don't drive cars, don't
live in homes heated by fossil fuels, nor eat exotic fare imported from
far away places. Likewise, they don't wear clothes made by people, who,
themselves, have a hard time to eat well because they are paid slave
wages on which they can barely survive.
Similarly, they don't go to the races, don't watch sporting events whose
teams fly all over the world to compete and don't fly across the globe
to relax. Meanwhile and without checking statistics, one could assume
that there might be as many as 10,000 fossil fuel burning planes in
the sky at any given time, which fly diplomats, environmentalists and
politicians around the globe to discuss the ways to reduce greenhouse
gases.
In contrast, ants pretty much stay close to where they were born. It
could be kind of dull, but at least they don't have a propensity to
travel long distances in order to slaughter huge numbers of each other
in fights over resources elsewhere on the Earth. Indeed, they, in all
likelihood, don't fight all that often with other colonies as they largely
DO remain stationary and simply use whatever is immediately close at
hand within their respective territories.
In a similar vein, ants don't watch TV and don't travel to South Sea
Islands on five star cruise ships. At the same time, they don't get
obese because they know limits in personal consumption. Furthermore,
they don't have banks that control their money because they don't need
any money and, if the rent is not paid at the end of the month, they
don't get an eviction notice. Moreover, they simply walk to work.
Furthermore, they don't go out in winter because whatever they need
was stored prior to the winter, as mentioned. So, they do plan ahead
and they don't buy on credit so as to get themselves in hock during
any unforeseen lean times.
In addition, they don't go to movies, spend time at the bar, talk about
politics, get married and face divorce. Overall, they are probably not
happy, although who can say for sure? Yet, then again, neither are we,
perhaps.
In any case (and if we can cope with the idea that we are just extraordinary
animals much like ants), we might begin to see that we are closer to
the mentality of ants than to the mentality of divine Gods. In other
words, we want to survive in our finite forms at all costs. (Most people
do so, anyway. Therefore, they haven't unconditionally shared all of
their assets with those who are hungry, especially as doing so would
possibly lower themselves into the ranks of the poverty struck masses
without providing any assurance of long term relief on account of the
magnitude of the problem. For example, it is estimated that, while the
number of overweight people has topped one billion, the number of chronically
malnourished is roughly 850 million or fifteen percent of the population.
Meanwhile, their number is on the rise. [2])
All the same, we need to understand that, were we not to evict each
other from our homes and abandon each other to starve, we could likely
be able to live in relative peace. Alternately put, we would probably
be smart enough to produce enough food for everyone alive today were
we able to learn about equitably sharing the planet and its bounty,
while not destroying each other in the process. (There is, also, ample
space for the seven billion people who inhabit the Earth. Two billion
three bedroom modest homes occupy, it would appear, an area of about
one hundred thousand square miles, an area smaller that the State of
California.)
At the same time, we could likely learn to gather free energy from the
sun and sink holes into the Earth for geothermal benefits, as well as
connect homes to an intercontinental solar grid energizing heat pumps
to acclimatize living spaces. So, it's not that we are not smart enough
to be able to comfortably live with our present population size. It's
not even that we can't figure out plans to overcome our addiction to
fossil fuels, curtail global warming and limit resource depletion.
Instead, it's just that we are not smart enough to get along, truly
help each other and let each other live in peace... Ants, just as we
do, work together. However, they do not compete with each other to get
the biggest monetary gain and the largest cache of goods, which all
together represent a largess way beyond whatever might be needed to
survive well.
This in mind, we need to change the way that we treat others. In short,
we need to alter the way that we think and go about life to survive,
both as individuals and as a species.
Meanwhile, homelessness and starvation, without doubt, have plagued
us ever since our ancestors decided to make an exodus from the forests
and plains. Yet while ants build ant hills and tunnels to address homelessness
and starvation, we make weapons of mass destruction, warships and armies
to ensure that we get whatever we want when we want it. Simultaneously,
we create the conditions in which some humans don't deserve to live
in a home, even when they are simply small helpless children -- such
as those listless bodies with those pitifully bloated bellies and spindly
toothpick limbs -- who are occasionally pictured on glossy magazine
covers. All considered, do they represent our collective atrocious callousness
towards humanity or some other sort of pathology? Can you ever imagine
an adult ant abandoning its larvae in such a fashion when calamity strikes?
All the same, human adults, who cannot pay the mortgage, are thrown
out with their entire families like garbage on the street, and never
mind those who still manage to keep their shelters, while freezing to
death as they struggle to keep themselves warm, without heat and electricity,
even though they live in areas of the world wherein there is an abundance
of everything needed for survival...
In the end, we may not be as smart as ants, one might conclude. Nonetheless
(if we can wisely imitate them to at least some degree), the longevity
of our species may yet far outstretch the time span of the infamous
Dodo birds.
All the same, our innate nature perhaps is such that we cannot share
the planet. Consequently, we will perhaps have to fight to the "bitter
end" in order to outlive each other, have ever more glitzy products,
look more fashionable, feel more special and so on, even though it isn't
necessary one iota to behave this way.
Furthermore, Bush or one of his counterparts may yet pull the nuclear
or some other major trigger, an act that will surely reduce our numbers
to a more "acceptable" level after which those who are left
won't have so many others with whom to compete for special services
and goods. Yet, what will the survivors have gained other than the creation
of more horror and the same old cycle that we already have?
All of this in mind, any real change could only transpire if those remaining
alive would, finally, learn to live without making war on and denying
a basic living to each other. Then again, this is a tall order to achieve.
All the same, how could any real improvements for our kind and the world
as a whole be possible otherwise?
In the end, we can passively wait to see the way that this human period
on Earth will ultimately turn out or we can each better try to bring
about the type of world that we want for ourselves and each other. As
Mahatma Gandhi urged, “We must become the change we want to see.”
Doing so, certainly, poses a monumental task given our propensity to
hoard and fight. Yet if someone like this single unassuming peace-loving
man can adjust so well, surely the rest of us can begin our struggle
to learn to follow suit. Let us consider starting it now.
[1] This information is from: Number of Ants in the world vs. Number
of Leaves@Everything2... (everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1793020).
[2] Discussions of this topic are located at: Chronic Hunger and Obesity
Epidemic Eroding Global... (www.worldwatch.org/node/1672), Malnutrition
- Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malnutrition),
842M Malnourished People Worldwide Due to Poverty, AIDS ... (www.thebodypro.com/content/art11611.html),
World Hunger Notes--World Hunger Facts 2007 by World Hunger ... www.worldhunger.org/articles/Learn/world%20hunge
and BBC NEWS | Health | Overweight 'top world's hungry' (news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4793455.stm).
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