The Human Age

Like her other books, Diane Ackerman’s The Human Age is like a long, informative conversation with a witty woman who has been everywhere, done everything, and talked to everyone who has something interesting to say.

Given the environmental concerns that inspired this book, The Human Age is somewhat more polemical than Ackerman’s other work. But she is persuaded by facts, so the polemic is muted and her positions on technology are balanced. She can’t get over the giddy wonder at the things humans are capable of. And even with the polemic, there are treasures here that you’d be hard pressed to find in any other writer.

She strikes a Jane-Jacobs note in her description of the environment-friendly character of urban life: “Even environmentally, cities can eclipse sparsely settled country life. When roads, power lines, and sewers lie closer together, they require fewer resource. Apartments are insulated by the civil geometric of the buildings, making them easier to heat, cool, and light. Crowded neighborhoods can share public transportation, and most destinations tend to be close, within walking or biking distance; people rarely need cars. As a result, city-dwellers actually create a much small carbon footprint than rural-dwellers do. Cities like New York boast the lowest amount of energy use per household and per person, and so, paradoxically, although the city as a whole uses more energy, each person uses less. It seems counterintuitive, but city life can be a more eco-friendly way for humans to live” (72-3).

She cites studies that demonstrate the differences between animals in “nature” and animals living in human environments. Barbara Helm of the University of Glasgow, for instance, found that “city birds start their workdays earlier and their biological locks tick faster. Just like their human counterparts, they adopt a faster pace, work longer hours, and rest and sleep less in cities. . . . Urban males also molt sooner and reach sexual maturity faster.” Researchers at the Bell Museum at the University of Minnesota concluded that “we’ve cause at least ten urban species – including voles, bats, shrews, and gophers – to grow brains that are 6 percent larger than those of their country cousins.” And University of Tulsa’s Charles Brown found that cliff swallows evolve shorter wings when they live closer to highways: “To cross the road safely, cliff swallows had to weave and dodge at speed, favoring those with the short wings of dogfighting jets. The unlucky swallows with long wings more suited to pastoral life died in accidents, leaving the short-winged swallows to breed and become dominant” (114-6).

And the giddiness is evident in her catalog of the uses of 3D printers: “3D printers are whipping up such diverse marvels as drone aircraft, designer chocolates, and the parts to build a moon outpost from lunar soil. Already, the TV host Jay Leno uses his persona 3D printer ti mint hard-to-find parts for his collection of classic cars. The Smithsonian uses its 3D printer to build dinosaur bones. Cornell archaeologists used a 3D printer to reproduce ancient cuneiform tablets from Mesopotamia. Restorers at Harvard’s Semitic Museum used their 3D printer to fill in the gaps of a lion artifact that was smashed three thousand years ago. In China’s Forbidden City, researchers used a 3D printer to inexpensively restore damaged buildings and artworks” (235). I’m stopping there, but that’s a little more than halfway through the paragraph.

Ackerman’s main theme has to do with how humans have altered nature, and how human technologies even raise the question of what it means to call human beings “natural” beings. We impose human order on the world, and we have accepted as “normal” all sorts of wonders (traveling at high speeds 30,000 feet about earth, for instance) that seemed impossible not too long ago. 

Nature, she says, is still “natural,” but it’s not “other” anymore, since the world is full of “hybrid human-natural systems” (126). That’s an odd formulation and may indicate an underlying problem with the way Ackerman sets up the question: It seems she takes “human-as-other-than-nature” as normative, and is astonished by the way we’ve hybridize. Though the scale of human transformation of “nature” is unprecedented, the fact of it is not. Human beings are cultural creatures, and even the smallest, most technologically primitive human community creates a “hybrid” system.

I had other questions like this along the way, but that does not detract from the delight of this fascinating book.