Beowulf and Population

Any predator / prey relationship can be stable until the predator starts using tools.

We humans are the only / known instance / of that class predator.

This post began / as a reaction / to a post below / on fisheries.
Then the population of words exploded until there was a whole page, then more beyond control. Population can do that.

The verse / surprises still. / I doubt that I / am channeling Beowulf. / It's very weird / and unexpected.

Cut and paste / time plus time / we have another essay / up and smiling.
Our words / unlike us born so easy / need never eat / or bleed.

Yes, many practices are sustainable when the human population level is low compared to the niche it occupies. Fishing, for example.

Low human population / environmental balance: / entrancing concepts.
On par with / the Noble Savage / of Rousseau.

Determining the instance / of every living creature / population change / the ratio birth to death.

Fish produce millions of spawn for a population at least two orders of magnitude lower. I don't know exactly what the number is. Whether or not that figure is off by 1000%, the idea is the same. If you are prey species, you must reproduce furiously.

Predators are fewer / maturing in proportion to their prey / defending toothy shares.

It seems, as a predator population, humans have a death problem. The death rate is too low to keep our population in check. All numbers relative here, but I recall that the human population of the Planet Earth in The Year of Our Lord 1800 was on the order of five million. We have increased roughly 100 times since then. Two orders of magnitude.

So the ONLY thing that keeps / human populations low / is death on steroids.
Reproductive rates fall / in "advanced" societies / an eddy in the flow of time /
the "demographic transition" / a poor weapon / to brandish at the future.


Lots of practices are sustainable at low levels. Every fish in the sea is eventually eaten by something. Like every other life-form, human populations expand until they fill their ecological niches. When the niche is full, some resource becomes limiting. Only so much water (to pick one limited resource). Not all individuals will survive. Less food, famine. More food, lots of happy babies.

The wiliest, largest, best surviving female fish have the highest number of surviving healthy young. If her genetics had something to do with her survival, her progeny will spread her genes and a slight adaptation occurs. So what made the Tuna Club in Avalon famous?

The biggest, oldest fish / Hemingway's fish / our grandfather's fish / a grandmother.

Poor choice if you are looking for a sustainable fishery, but they weren't.

Their new way of fishing / light line and all / was the struggle / the metaphoric victory / men over beasts / of the cruel endless ocean.

Today we have some stuffed specimens and a bit of literature, but no more of their beasts. Just smaller versions, less productive. Our imagination's poverty, thinking over time. Now always trumps later.

We eat what our grandmothers considered trash fish. We eat fish inferior to theirs because that is all we have left. It's probably a good thing we have come to like invertebrates. Still squid and shrimp. When you find a successful preparation for jellyfish, tell me. We have scads of those now as the shoreline dies, as we feed their prey with farming runoff.

Humans can occupy virtually every environmental niche on Earth. Some support large numbers, some only a scattered few.

We adapt culturally / much faster than genetically. / We invent culture / even more efficient / than biology/ at adaptation.

Human culture / collapses with every death / and must be re-assembled / by children.

Best not to count on anything particular surviving. This is why our species cannot learn from history. Horror second-hand loses it's power to to stop cycles of mistakes. Our species is built to make huge adaptations with each generation. We cannot avoid repeating mistakes. We also cannot trans-generationally remember horror. Probably net good for species survival.

With the same sized brain that developed flaked flint choppers and progressed to Folsom points, replaceable, interchangeable stone tips for spears, we have perfected sonar and nylon nets. To bad for the fish.

Over the history we know about, more than a few civilizations have collapsed. Read Jared Diamond. For humans, collapse is almost always strongly connected with environmental damage, either caused or exacerbated. When the Sahara becomes a desert, few people live there without outside support.

Famine, disease, pestilence, war - all of these curb human population. This is scientifically undeniable if ethically painful. Of course, as politics shows, everything is deniable, anything is believable.

I accept that famine, disease, environmental degradation and the rest are all proportional to population. All serve to limit population size. As people, our survival instincts fundamentally oppose anything that kills people like us.

Savages we're willing to kill / while developing better guns / muskets over arrows / breech load better still / now mow repeating rifles / with sharper machine guns.

The history of colonialism would be much shorter if arms technology had somehow stopped with the repeating rifle. The aboriginals always manage to obtain your old technology to use against you

Our better sort / see aboriginal souls / need saving / from their nakedness. / Dark skinned people / resembling us / but slower. / Easier converts / than our countrymen.

A blink later we see / suddenly. / All people are family / some starving as we watch.

To fight disease / we poison insects / and unintended / consequences / weaken eggshells.

We eliminate smallpox, would banish hunger. We inflate the carrying capacity of the Earth for humans by harnessing a million year's dead.

Over two hundred years / we've fought death / with eon's power condensed / in fossil flesh / not just plants.

All the old limits are still out there, waiting for a string of "bad" weather, ethnic or religious wars, whatever destabilizes the fragile technological framework that supports however many billions of us are here now. How much infrastructure needs to deteriorate before we can't make cellphone chips?

Then death will bring us / closer to numbers / our planet can support. / Death in small ways / gigantic terrifying death / as only death's imagination / can conceive.

We have not escaped Malthus, we simply keep bad things at bay with credit cards. Plastic credit cards, plastic from oil of course. How much population debt can we carry?

One human, I don't like the message either. God grant us some escape from the fruit of our good works, too many of us. We ignore consequences too horrible to think about. Denial will not change the logic of overpopulation, but it might keep us sane for now, until the reaper comes.

We have been here before as a species. A currently successful species, resourceful and adaptable. A minimum human breeding population contains enough genetic variation to survive bad times and keep recessive genes from killing too many of us.

We descend through / an unbroken series / of successful mothers.

But sometimes there are very few of us, 50,000 perhaps, and sometimes there are millions. We tend to see our species in the mirror, right now. At most we recognize the ruins of 5,000 year old settlements. But our species, people like us genetically but with different cultures, have nearly died off and then rebounded more than once over millions of years. Many of our close genetic relatives died out. Met any Neandertal lately? Did we kill them more often than we slept with them? Recent scientific suggestion: Non-Africans have small traces of Neandertal DNA. So does it matter?

I cannot imagine what will force / a more-than-minimum sized / human breeding population / through the next environmental bottleneck. We should remember that life is the exception and death the norm.

It will involve a lot of death, slowly or quickly, death the same. The Four Horsemen will ride unchecked. I think the Book of Revelation in the Christian Bible probably has the suffering down close enough. Violence and death were more familiar in St. John's time. Violence and death have been invented. All we can improve on is how many how fast. We've had that answer for 65 years, almost exactly coinciding with my entire life.

We might disagree concerning / the supernatural role / in such poetic violence / the looming Apocalypse.

But the wailing women / crying out 'round Beowulf's funeral pyre / ashen and distraught / they knew. / Keening as the fire died / they knew.

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My Beowulf is limited to several passes through Seamus Heaney's wonderful bilingual edition since it came out in 2001. I could not recommend a better peek into the early European imagination. Can't find it just now or I would not have written my own version above.