Of Ants And Humans
By Jean-Louis Turcot & Emily Spence05 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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