textfiles/magazines/EUTHANASIA/humansascancer

                               Humans as Cancer
                            by A. Kent MacDougall

When a spot on a person's skin changes color, becomes tough or rough and
elevated or ulcerated, bleeds, scales, scabs over and fails to heal,
it's time to consult a doctor. For these are early signs of skin cancer.
    As seen by astronauts and photographed from space by satellites,
millions of manmade patterns on the land surface of Earth resemble
nothing so much as the skin conditions of cancer patients. The
transformation of the natural contours of the land into the geometric
patterns of farm fields, the straightening of meandering rivers into
canal-like channels, and the logging of forests into checkerboard
clearcuts all have their counterparts in the loss of normal skin
markings in cancer victims. Green forests logged into brown scrub and
overgrazed grasslands bleached into white wasteland are among the
changes in Earth's color. Highways, streets, parking lots and other
paved surfaces have toughened Earth's surface, while cities have
roughened it. Slag heaps and garbage dumps can be compared to raised
skin lesions. Open-pit mines, quarries and bomb craters, including the
30 million left by US forces in Indochina, resemble skin ulcerations.
Saline seeps in inappropriately irrigated farm fields look like scaly,
festering sores. Signs of bleeding include the discharge of human
sewage, factory effluents and acid mine drainage into adjacent
waterways, and the erosion of topsoil from deforested hillsides to turn
rivers, lakes and coastal waters yellow, brown and red. The red ring
around much of Madagascar that is visible from space strikes some
observers as a symptom that the island is bleeding to death.
    If skin cancer were all that ailed Earth, the planet's eventual
recovery would be less in doubt. For with the exception of malignant
melanoma, skin cancer is usually curable. But the parallels between the
way cancer progresses in the human body and humans' progressively
malignant impact on Earth are more than skin-deep. Consider:
    Cancer cells proliferate rapidly and uncontrollably in the body;
humans continue to proliferate rapidly and uncontrollably in the world.
Crowded cancer cells harden into tumors; humans crowd into cities.
Cancer cells infiltrate and destroy adjacent normal tissues; urban
sprawl devours open land. Malignant tumors shed cells that migrate to
distant parts of the body and set up secondary tumors; humans have
colonized just about every habitable part of the globe. Cancer cells
lose their natural appearance and distinctive functions; humans
homogenize diverse natural ecosystems into artificial monocultures.
Malignant tumors excrete enzymes and other chemicals that adversely
affect remote parts of the body; humans' motor vehicles, power plants,
factories and farms emit toxins that pollute environments far from the
point of origin.
    A cancerous tumor continues to grow even as its expropriation of
nutrients and disruption of vital functions cause its host to waste
away. Similarly, human societies undermine their own long-term viability
by depleting and fouling the environment. With civilization as with
cancer, initial success begets self-defeating excess.
    It's easy to dismiss the link between cancer the disease in humans
and humans as a disease on the planet as both preposterous and
repulsive--or as a mere metaphor rather than the unifying hypothesis its
leading proponent claims for it. Only a handful of limited-circulation
periodicals, including this one (see Forencich 1992/93), have granted
the concept a respectful hearing.
    Accepting the humans-as-cancer concept comes easier if one also
accepts the Gaia hypothesis that the planet functions as a single living
organism. To be sure, the Earth is mostly inanimate. Its rocky, watery
surface supports only a relatively thin layer of plants, animals and
other living organisms. But so, too, is a mature tree mostly dead wood
and bark, with only its thin cambium layer and its leaves, flowers and
seeds actually alive. Yet the tree is a living organism. Earth behaves
like a living organism to the extent that the chemical composition of
its rocky crust, oceans and atmosphere has both supported and been
influenced by the biological processes of living organisms over several
billion years. These self-sustaining, self-regulating processes have
kept the Earth's surface temperature, its concentrations of salt in the
oceans and oxygen in the atmosphere, and other conditions favorable for
life.
    James Lovelock, who propounded the Gaia hypothesis in 1979,
initially rejected humans' cancer-like impacts as a corollary, declaring
flatly: "People are not in any way like a tumor" (Lovelock 1988, p.
177). But before long he modified this view, observing: "Humans on the
Earth behave in some ways like a pathogenic micro-organism, or like the
cells of a tumor or neoplasm" (Lovelock 1991,p. 153).
    Others have stated the connection more strongly. "If you picture
Earth and its inhabitants as a single self-sustaining organism, along
the lines of the popular Gaia concept, then we humans might ourselves be
seen as pathogenic," Jerold M. Lowenstein, professor of medicine at the
University of California, San Francisco, has written. "We are infecting
the planet, growing recklessly as cancer cells do, destroying Gaia's
other specialized cells (that is, extinguishing other species), and
poisoning our air supply....From a Gaian perspective... the main disease
to be eliminated is us" (Lowenstein 1992).
    Dr. Lowenstein isn't the first physician to examine the planet as a
patient and find it afflicted with humanoid cancer. Alan Gregg pioneered
the diagnosis. As a long-time official of the Rockefeller Foundation,
responsible for recommending financial grants to improve public health
and medical education, Dr. Gregg traveled widely in the years following
World War II and observed the worldwide population boom. By 1954 he had
seen enough. In a brief paper delivered at a symposium and subsequently
published in Science, Gregg (1955) compared the world to a living
organism and the explosion in human numbers to a proliferation of cancer
cells. He sketched other parallels between cancer in humans and humans'
cancer-like impact on the world. And he expressed hope--unrealized to
this day--that "this somewhat bizarre comment on the population problem
may point to a new concept of human self-restraint."
    It has fallen to a physician who is also an epidemiologist to flesh
out and fill in Gregg's sketchily drawn analysis. Warren M. Hern wrote
his Ph.D. dissertation on how the intrusion of Western civilization has
increased birth rates among Peruvian Amazon Indians. He does his bit to
keep the US birth rate down by operating an abortion clinic in Boulder,
Colorado. Hern (1990) published a major article that laid out in detail,
and buttressed with anthropological, ecological and historical evidence,
the ways in which the human species constitutes a "malignant eco-tumor."
He proposed renaming us *Homo esophagus* (for "the man who devours the
ecosystem"). Illustrations accompanying the article included aerial
photographs of US cities juxtaposed with look-alike photos of brain and
lung tumors.
    Dr. Hern has delivered papers on the hypothesis at symposia
organized by the Population Association of America, the American
Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Public
Health Association. Two papers have subsequently been published (Hern
1993a, 1993b). But in general the scientific community doesn't take his
hypothesis seriously, preferring to see it as a mere metaphor or
analogy. Indeed, it has evoked hostility in some quarters. When Hern
presented the hypothesis at the International Conference on Population
and Development in Cairo in 1994, listeners reacted angrily, with one
threatening, "Are you ready to die?" A Denver radio talk show host
called Dr. Hern an "ecoquack" and a "fellow-in-good-standing of the
Sky-Is-Falling School."
    Such disparagement can be seen as yet another parallel between
cancer the scourge in humans and humans as a carcinogenic scourge on the
world. For just as Warren Hern encounters indifference, denial and
downright hostility to his views, until recently American doctors
routinely kept their cancer patients in the dark about the nature of
their illness. The aim was to spare patients the shock, fear, anger and
depression that the bad news commonly evokes. Families were reluctant to
admit that a relative had died of cancer, and newspaper obituaries
referred euphemistically to the cause of a death from cancer as "a long
illness." In Japan, cancer remains a taboo topic. Public opinion polls
indicate that people would rather not know if they have cancer and
doctors would rather not tell them. When Emperor Hirohito was dying of
cancer of the duodenum, his doctors lied, telling both him and the
public that he had "chronic pancreatitis" (Sanger 1989).
    In the United States, even some environmentally enlightened analysts
remain in denial when it comes to the humans-as-a-planetary-cancer
hypothesis. Christopher D. Stone, a law professor at the University of
Southern California and son of the late leftist journalist I. F. Stone,
authored an influential essay on environmental law, *Should Trees Have
Standing? Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects*. But in his latest
book Stone (1993, p.4) casts doubt on the proposition that "the earth
has cancer, and the cancer is man." "The interdependency of the earth's
parts does not amount to the interdependency of organs within a true
organism," he notes. "The earth as a whole, including its life web, is
not as fragile...the Gaian relationships are not so finely, so
precariously tuned."
    Even deep ecologists acknowledge that Earth is qualitatively
different from a true organism, that its legitimate status as a
superecosystem falls short of qualifying it as a superorganism. Frank
Forencich, who argued in "Homo Carcinomicus: A Look at Planetary
Oncology" (Forencich 1992/93) that "the parallels between neoplastic
growth and human population are astonishing," concedes that even a
nuclear winter wouldn't completely destroy the living biosphere, much
less the inanimate lithosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere. "We can't
kill the host," he says. "Civilization will break up before the
biosphere goes" (Forencich 1993).
    Still another objection is that any generalization about cancer is
suspect because cancer is not a single disease, but rather a group of
more than 100 diseases that differ as to cause and characteristics. Some
cancers--breast cancer, for instance--typically grow rapidly and spread
aggressively. Others, such as cancers of the small intestine, usually
grow slowly. Prostate cancer often grows so slowly that it causes no
problem. "It's completely possible for an organism to have cancer cells
for its entire lifetime and suffer no ill effects" (Garrett 1988, p.43).
    The lack of a perfect correspondence between cancer the disease in
humans and humans' cancer-like effects on the Earth invalidates the
humans-as-cancer concept for some observers. But Warren Hern insists
humans-as-cancer is a hypothesis because it is subject to verification
or refutation and because it is useful as a basis for further
investigation. Frank Forencich, in contrast, is content to consider the
concept a metaphor. "That humans are like cancer is indisputable," he
says. "But humans are not cancer itself."
    Whether as metaphor or hypothesis, the proposition that humans have
been acting like malignant cancer cells deserves to be taken seriously.
The proposition offers a unifying interpretation of such seemingly
unconnected phenomena as the destruction of ecosystems, the decay of
inner cities and the globalization of Western commodity culture. It
provides a valuable macrocosmic perspective on human impacts, as well as
a revealing historic perspective in tracing humans' carcinogenic
propensities back to the earliest times.
    The progenitors of modern humans exhibited one of cancer cells' most
significant characteristics, loss of adhesion, one to two million years
ago. Because cancer cells are attached more loosely to one another than
normal cells are, they separate easily, move randomly and invade tissues
beyond those from which they were derived. Our direct ancestors, *Homo
erectus*, demonstrated this trait in migrating out of Africa. Living in
small mobile groups, these foragers/scavengers/hunters spread across
Asia and Europe. The next hominid species in the evolutionary line,
*Homo sapiens*, extended the dispersal into previously uninhabitable
northern forests and tundra. Their successors, anatomically modern *Homo
sapiens sapiens*, have spread to every continent and major ice-free
island. With the aid of clothing, shelter, technology and imported
supplies, they now occupy forests, wetlands, deserts, tundra and other
areas formerly considered too wet, too dry, too cold, or too remote for
human habitation. Humans now occupy, or have altered and exploited,
two-thirds to nine-tenths (estimates vary) of the planet's land surface.
It seems only a matter of time before they take over all the remaining
"empty" spaces.
    Humans' ongoing expropriation of the planet has proceeded apace with
the eruption of human numbers; and the eruption of human numbers has
features in common with the proliferation of cancer cells. In a healthy
body, genetic controls enable a large number of individual cells to live
together harmoniously as a single organism. Genetic switches signal
normal cells when it is time to divide and multiply, and when it is time
to break apart and be absorbed by neighboring cells. When the genetic
switches are damaged, as by chemicals, radiation, or viruses, they can
get locked in the "on" position. This turns normal cells into malignant
cells that divide and multiply in disregard of the health of the entire
organism.
    When humans lived in semi-nomadic bands in harmony with an
environment they did not dominate, they limited their numbers so as not
to exceed the supply of food they could gather, scavenge, and hunt. Nor
did they produce more young than they could carry between seasonal
camps. Their contraceptive measures included coitus interruptus
(withdrawal), pessaries, and prolonged breastfeeding to depress the
hormones that trigger ovulation. When these methods failed, they
resorted to abortion and infanticide. Like normal cells in a healthy
body, hunter-gatherers seemed to know when to stop growing.
    However, technological and cultural contaminants upset this delicate
natural balance, permitting humans to multiply beyond numbers compatible
with the harmonious health of the global ecosystem. The first and still
the foremost contaminant was fire. By 400,000 years ago--perhaps even
earlier--hunter-gatherers had learned to control and use fire. Thus
began the transformation of humans from just another large mammal in
competition with other fierce predators into the undisputed overlord of
all species, plant and animal. Addiction to combustion has defined human
existence ever since, and has escalated into the current orgy of
fossil-fuel burning with the potential of overheating Gaia and
jeopardizing the existence of all her inhabitants.
    Fire was generally benign when used by hunter-gatherers to thin
dense forests into more open and park-like landscapes supporting more
game. But the increase in food supply that more effective hunting and
the cooking of tough meat and fibrous vegetable matter made possible
swelled hunter-gatherer populations. As humans proliferated and spread
out, overhunted and overgathered, large game and suitable wild foods
became less abundant. This made hunting and gathering less efficient,
leaving horticulture, which previously hadn't been worth the extra
effort, as the only viable alternative.
    Clearing forests to farm began some 10,000 years ago in Asia Minor.
About 2000 years later, shifting horticulturists began slashing and
burning their way northwestward across Europe. They overwhelmed and
pushed aside less numerous hunter-gatherers before giving way in turn to
agriculturalists whose plow cultivation of permanent fields permitted
more intensive food production and denser populations.
    Agriculture condemned peasants to a short, harsh life of monotonous
toil, an inadequate diet, the constant threat of crop failure and
starvation and exposure to virulent contagious diseases. It fostered
social stratification and sexual inequality, cruel treatment of animals,
despotism and warfare. And it encouraged further cancer-like
encroachment on wilderness to feed increased populations and to replace
fields and pastures eroded and depleted of soil fertility by
overcropping and overgrazing. The elites that came to dominate sedentary
agrarian societies caused still more woodland to be cleared and
marshland to be drained to maximize production they could expropriate
for their own use. This economic surplus, in turn, helped support an
increasing concentration of people in river valleys, along seacoasts,
and in cities.


    The massing of humans into cities is all too similar to the way
crowded cancer cells harden into tumors. Whereas normal cells in a
tissue culture stop reproducing when they come in contact with other
cells, cancer cells continue to divide and pile up on top of one
another, forming clumps. Normal cells display contact inhibition,
growing only to the limits of their defined space and then stopping.
Cancer cells never know when to quit.
    Likewise, human populations grow even under extremely crowded
conditions. The very essence of civilization is the concentration of
people in cities. As scattered farming villages evolved into towns, and
some towns became trading, manufacturing, ceremonial and administrative
centers, the city was born. Fed by grain grown in the provinces and
served by slaves seized there, the administrative centers of empires
grew large; Rome may have reached one million people at its height in
100 C.E. Yet not until industrialization and the extensive exploitation
of distant resources after 1800 did cities really begin getting out of
hand, and in 1900, still only one in ten people lived in cities. Half
will in 2000, with 20 metropolitan areas expected to have 10 million or
more people each.
    The propensity of modern cities to spread out over the
countryside--absorbing villages, destroying farm fields, filling in open
land, and creating vast new agglomerations--was noted early in this
century by the Scottish garden-city planner Patrick Geddes. Geddes
(1915) identified half a dozen such "conurbations" in the making in
Britain, and he foresaw the approach of a 500-mile megalopolis along the
northern Atlantic seaboard in the United States. Geddes compared urban
sprawl to an amoeba, but it fell to his American protege Lewis Mumford
to liken disorderly, shapeless, uncoordinated urban expansion to a
malignant tumor, observing that "the city continues to grow
inorganically, indeed cancerously, by a continuous breaking down of old
tissues, and an overgrowth of formless new tissue" (Mumford 1961, p.
543).
    A malignant tumor develops its own blood vessels as it grows.
Similarly, cities vascularize with aqueducts, electric power lines,
highways, railroads, canals and other conduits. A tumor uses its
circulation network to pirate nutrients from the body. Similarly, cities
parasitically tap the countryside and beyond to bring in food, fuel,
water, and other supplies. However, just as a tumor eventually outgrows
its blood supply, causing a part of it, often at the center, to die,
inner city neighborhoods and even older suburbs often atrophy. Alan
Gregg (1955) noted this parallel 40 years ago, observing "how nearly the
slums of our great cities resemble the necrosis of tumors."
    Humans are increasingly concentrated along seacoasts. Sixty percent
of the world's people now live within 100 kilometers of a seacoast. In
Australia, one of the world's most highly urbanized nations, nine of
every ten people live along the coast. The boom in international trade,
from which coastal areas receive a disproportionate share of the
benefits, helps explain the worldwide trend; but the pattern goes back
thousands of years and parallels yet another carcinogenic process:
metastasis.
    In metastasis, a tumor sheds cancer cells that then migrate to
distant sites of the body and set up secondary growths. The medium for
the migration of the cells is the blood and lymphatic systems. In the
ancient world of the Mediterranean, another fluid--water--facilitated
the migration of people and goods. The Phoenicians, Greeks,
Carthagenians and Romans all took advantage of the relative ease of
travel and transport by water to establish colonies all around the
Mediterranean. At the height of the Roman Empire, no fewer than 500
settlements flourished along the African coast from Morocco to Egypt.
    Just as secondary tumors in the human body destroy the tissues and
organs they invade, colonizers of the ancient Mediterranean devastated
the fertile but fragile ecosystems of the coastal regions they
colonized. They logged coastal forests for ship timbers and building
materials, to provide charcoal to fire bricks and pottery and smelt
mineral ores, and to create farm fields and pastures. Overcropping,
fires, sheep and goats prevented regeneration. Intense winter rains
washed the thin, easily eroded soil down hillsides into coastal plains
to smother farm fields, choke the mouths of rivers, create malarial
marshes, bury port cities and strand many of them miles from the sea.
The slopes, left barren, have not recovered to this day.
    The voraciousness of secondary tumors as they invade and consume
tissues and organs has its counterpart in the orgies of destruction that
states and especially empires have engaged in for 5000 years. In many
cases, the destruction has exceeded what was in the destroyer's own
self-interest. Many invaders routinely obliterated the cities they
conquered, massacred their inhabitants, and destroyed their fields and
flocks instead of just taking them over. Carpet bombing of cities and
the mass slaughter of their civilian noncombatant populations during
World War II constitute the modern equivalent. Ancient Romans ransacked
their empire for bears, lions, leopards, elephants, rhinos, hippos and
other live animals to be tormented and killed in public arenas until
there were no more to be found. European invaders of North America and
Siberia did in the fur trade from which they so hugely profited by the
self-defeating overkill of fur-bearing animals.
    Human destruction of ecosystems has increased relentlessly since
industrialization. The annihilation of 60 million bison on the North
American Great Plains was made possible by the intrusion of railroads
and the invention of the repeating rifle. The reckless exploitation of
whales was speeded by the invention of the explosive harpoon,
cannon-winch and engine-driven ship. Enormous nets towed by today's
factory trawlers permit oceans to be strip-mined for fish--and any other
creature unlucky enough to become ensnared in these curtains of death.
Tractors and other modern farm machinery alternately compact and
pulverize topsoil, increasing its vulnerability to erosive winds and
rains. Chain saws and bulldozers level forests faster than axes and hand
saws ever could. Dynamite and drag line excavators permit strip mining
on a scale hitherto unimaginable, decapitating mountains, turning
landscapes into moon craters, and rendering islands such as
phosphate-rich Nauru in the South Pacific all but uninhabitable. Boring
holes in the earth to get at minerals, of course, resembles the way
cancer bores holes in muscle and bone. As Peter Russell (1983, p.33) has
observed, "Technological civilization really does look like a rampant
malignant growth blindly devouring its own ancestral host in a selfish
act of consumption."
    Just as a fast-growing tumor steals nutrients from healthy parts of
the body to meet its high energy demands, industrial civilization usurps
the resources of healthy ecosystems that their natural plant and animal
inhabitants depend on for survival. In 1850, humans and their livestock
accounted for 5 percent of the total weight of all terrestrial animal
life. Today, that portion exceeds 20 percent, and by the year 2030 it
could reach 40 percent (Westing 1990, pp. 110-111).
    "Never before in the history of the earth has a single species been
so widely distributed and monopolized such a large fraction of the
energetic resources. An ever diminishing remainder of these limited
resources is now being divided among millions of other species. The
consequences are predictable: contraction of geographic ranges,
reduction of population sizes, and increased probability of extinction
for most wild species; expansion of ranges and increased populations of
the few species that benefit from human activity; and loss of biological
diversity at all scales from local to global" (Brown and Maurer 1989).
    Decline in diversity is common to both cancer and civilization. In
both cases, heterogeneity gives way to homogeneity, complexity to
simplification. Malignant cells fail to develop into specialized cells
of the tissues from which they derive. Instead, "undifferentiated,
highly malignant cells tend to resemble one another and fetal tissues
more than their adult normal counterpart cells" (Ruddon 1987, p.230).
    De-differentiation in human societies is at least as old as
agriculture and animal husbandry. Farmers have been replacing diverse
species of native plants with pure stands of domesticated crops for
thousands of years. Instead of the thousands of kinds of plants that
pre-agricultural peoples gathered for food, just seven staples--wheat,
rice, maize, potatoes, barley, sweet potato and cassava--now supply
three-quarters of the caloric content of all the world's food crops. The
world's astonishing abundance and variety of wildlife is going fast,
with many species soon to be seen only in zoos and game parks, their
places taken by cattle, sheep, goats, pigs and other domesticated
livestock.
    Despite their value in providing wildlife habitat, modulating flood
waters and filtering out pollutants, more than half of the world's
swamps, marshes, bogs, seasonal flood plains and other wetlands have
been drained, dredged, filled in, built on or otherwise destroyed.
Temperate forests dominated by trees of many species and of all ages are
giving way to single species, same-aged conifer plantations supporting
far fewer birds and other wildlife. And the tropical forests that harbor
more than half of all species on Earth are being mowed down faster than
their bewildering biodiversity can be identified, leading some experts
to warn that we are causing the greatest mass extinction since the
disappearance of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
    The tendency of civilizations to homogenize and impoverish
ecosystems is nowhere clearer than in urban areas. Major cities are
becoming indistinguishable from one another in appearance and
undifferentiated in function. Central business districts so resemble one
another that travelers can be forgiven for forgetting whether they are
in Boston, Brussels or Bombay. Shanty cities in poor countries look
alike, as do suburbs in rich countries.
    As Lewis Mumford pointed out more than 30 years ago, the archetypal
suburban refuge in the United States consists of "a multitude of
uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform
distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste, inhabited by
people of the same class, the same income, the same age group,
witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless
pre-fabricated foods, from the same freezers, conforming in every
outward and inward respect to a common mold, manufactured in the central
metropolis. Thus the ultimate effect of the suburban escape in our time
is, ironically, a low-grade uniform environment from which escape is
impossible" (Mumford 1961, p.486).
    Globalization of the economy is enclosing the entire world in a
single market for machine-made goods that are increasingly standardized
whatever their country of origin. Western material values and capitalist
commodity culture, led by American television, movies, music, street
fashions and fast food, are dominant internationally. Local and regional
individuality, along with indigenous cultures, languages and world
views, are fading fast.
    The decline of natural and cultural diversity is as threatening to
the planet as undifferentiated cells are to the cancer patient. Whereas
a well-differentiated prostate cancer tends to grow slowly, remain
localized and cause no symptoms, a poorly differentiated one often
spreads aggressively. Similarly, traditional farmers who keep weeds,
pests and plant diseases in check by rotating crops, fertilizing
naturally, and maintaining the tilth of the soil don't threaten Earth's
health the way single-crop plantations relying on pesticides, synthetic
fertilizers and heavy machinery do. Unfortunately, monocultural
agriculture is becoming the norm on every continent.
    Hemorrhaging is still another symptom of the carcinogenic process.
The first sign of cancer is often spontaneous bleeding from a body
orifice, discharge from a nipple, or an oozing sore. Vomiting can warn
of a brain tumor or leukemia. Signs that Earth, too, has cancer abound.
Cities vomit human sewage and industrial wastes into adjacent waterways.
Mines and slag heaps ooze mercury, arsenic, cyanide and sulfuric acid.
Wells gush, pipelines leak and tankers spill oil. Farm fields discharge
topsoil, fertilizers, pesticides and salts to silt up and poison rivers
and estuaries. Cattle feedlots add manure. Most serious of all,
deforested, eroded hillsides hemorrhage floods of mud.
    Fever is another symptom of cancer in both humans and the planet.
Cancer patients become fevered because of increased susceptibility to
infection caused by a depressed immune system. Chemotherapy and
irradiation can also cause fever, as can temperature-elevating
substances released by a malignant tumor. Global warming is the
planetary counterpart. Waste products released by industry and motor
vehicles, deforestation and other feverish human activities pump
inordinate quantities of carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, methane,
chlorofluorocarbons and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere where
they trap heat and raise temperatures.
    Wasting, or cachexia, is still another sign of advanced cancer. A
cancer patient becomes fatigued and weak, losing both appetite and
weight as the tumor releases toxic hormones and makes metabolic demands
on the body. "Many cancer patients die not of cancer itself, but of
progressive malnutrition" (Rosenbaum 1988, p.264). The planetary
counterpart includes loss of forests, fisheries, biodiversity, soil,
groundwater and biomass.
    It's not in a tumor's self-interest to steal nutrients to the point
where the host starves to death, for this kills the tumor as well. Yet
tumors commonly continue growing until the victim wastes away. A
malignant tumor usually goes undetected until the number of cells in it
has doubled at least 30 times from a single cell. The number of humans
on Earth has already doubled 32 times, reaching that mark in 1978 when
world population passed 4.3 billion. Thirty-seven to 40 doublings, at
which point a tumor weighs about one kilogram, are usually fatal
(Tannock 1992, pp. 157, 175).
    Like a smoker who exaggerates the pain of withdrawal and persists
because the carcinogenic consequences of his bad habit don't show up for
20 or 30 years, governments generally avoid the painful adjustments
needed to prevent social, economic and environmental disasters in the
making. "Governments with limited tenure, in the developing as well as
in the developed countries, generally respond to immediate political
priorities; they tend to defer addressing the longer term issues,
preferring instead to provide subsidies, initiate studies, or make
piecemeal modifications of policy" (Hillel 1991, p. 273). So it usually
takes a crisis, often a catastrophe, before even the most commonsensical
action is taken--and then it is often too late to avoid irreversible
ecological damage.
    Is the prognosis for the planet as grim as it is for a patient with
advanced cancer? Or will infinitely clever but infrequently wise *Homo
sapiens* alter geocidal behaviors in time to avoid global ruin? Even the
most pessimistic doomsayers concede that humans have the capacity to
arrest Gaia's deteriorating condition. Cancer cells can't think, but
humans can. Cancer cells can't know the full extent of the harm they're
doing to the organism of which they are a part, whereas humans have the
capacity for planetary awareness. Cancer cells can't consciously modify
their behavior to spare their host's life and prolong their own, whereas
humans can adjust, adapt, innovate, pull back, change course.
    Gaia's future, and humans' with it, depends on their doing so.

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Forencich, Frank. 1993. Personal communication.
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*A. Kent MacDougall (911 Oxford St., Berkeley CA 94707) is professor
emeritus of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. He
completed his 25-year newspaper reporting career in 1987 with a
24,000-word series of articles for the Los Angeles Times on
deforestation around the world and through the ages. The series won the
Forest History Society's John M. Collier Award for Forest History
Journalism.*

[END]

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