The Glaciers are Coming!

It is fairly common knowledge that since about 1960, the world's climate has been deteriorating. It is also commonly known that throughout history, weather has moved in cycles. Some can be short, such as the 11-year cycle of sunspots; some, for unexplained reasons, can last for a century or two. The Danes fell victim to such a long cycle about 1250 A. D. The previous centuries had been so mild that the Danes had established their colonies even in Greenland--then aptly named--and pressed on with their explorations of America. But then came the switch. Pack ice pushed down from the arctic to deny further navigation and Greenland could no longer be reached. Western exploration was abandoned.

We have had no such cycle of cold since the Industrial Revolution and the beginnings of the present population explosion. What would happen today if we faced a century or two of deep winters, late springs, early frosts, floods and droughts? Such cycles do occur with moderate regularity every few centuries.

On January 26, 1972, a group of scientists representing many nations and many fields of study met at Brown University, in Rhode Island. The report of the meeting was drawn up by two world authorities on climate, George Kukla and R. K. Matthews, and was published inconspicuously in Science later in the year. The subject was a chilling one, indeed: When and how will the present interglacial end? If the authors of the Brown report are correct, the weather reversals we are currently experiencing may not be the results of a mere cycle: We may be approaching the end of our interglacial, and the end may well be abrupt.

In January 1972, a significant bit of evidence appeared on Baffin Island, Canada's enormous arctic island. For 30 or 40 years, Baffin Island had been free of snow in summer. Now it was permanently snow-covered. And photographs taken by weather satellites the very winter when the scientists were meeting revealed that it would be the worst in recent history. Permanent snow cover and ice pack increased by 12 percent and failed to melt away with the summer.

According to one authority, in the past half million years, we have experienced climates comparable to our own only ten percent of the time. I have seen other estimates as low as five percent. We know that the only time there occurred a period a shade warmer than the present was about 120,000 years ago. In Hawaii, on the island of Oahu, there are coral beaches seven meters higher than present sea level. The volume of past glaciers is therefore quite easily calculated in terms of water subtracted from the sea, while dates are today reliably calculated by means of a variety of radiogenic scales reflecting the regular decay of unstable isotopes. Thus, we can determine the depth of the ice in the American Midwest 20,000 years ago. And we know, because the sea then stood higher than now, that about 120,000 years ago, less water than today was captured by the icecaps of Greenland and Antarctica. We know from coral beaches at Barbados that this warm period lasted for probably no more than 5000 years. Our own interglacial reached what is known as the Climatic Optimum about 4000 B.C. Ever since, it has been slowly deteriorating. Benevolent climate has been most unusual in the past half million years.

Those of us who have made a study of the ice age have recognized that the age of the glaciers is not over. Civilized man is as much a child of the ice age as was Neanderthal. We happen to inhabit a more gracious period. Even so, we who have assumed interglacial status have also comfortably assumed that glaciations come and go at a very slow rate and that what will happen to us in a few thousand years need not press too sharply on our nerve ends today. The Brown report ruined that assumption. The Camp Century ice core bored in the Greenland cap showed that 90,000 years ago, within one century, there was a drop in temperature that, if encountered today, would wipe out all the food-growing regions of temperate climates, north or south. The kill would include all of Canada, most of the American Mississippi Valley, virtually all of the Soviet Union, a fair part of China and the wheat-growing regions of Australia.

One may say, "Well, that was 90,000 years ago." But like the bugles blown to announce the entrance of the king, that was the moment announcing the arrival of the Würm glaciation. We should all have studied more carefully the hasty, documented exit of the last glaciation to learn how rapidly the next one could accumulate. The Brown conference revealed that there never has been an interglacial resembling our own that has lasted for more than 10,000 years. Ours has lasted 10,000. The famous victory of warm over cold, about 120,000 years ago, lasted only 5000. According to the Barbados record, in another 5000 years or so, sea levels had dropped tens of meters, to give one a rough idea of how rapidly ice was accumulating on the continents. About the same time, cold subarctic waters in the North Atlantic extended as far south as northern Florida and warmth-loving plankton species vanished from the Gulf of Mexico. Around Prague and Brno in Czechoslovakia, broadleaf forests were replaced by grasslands, the grasslands by dust, torrents and badlands. In Greece, the interglacial forest was replaced by grasslands, in England, the Netherlands and Denmark by tundra, all within a few centuries.

The general conclusion at Brown was that if we eventually had to face the worst, then the worst would be a long time coming. Optimistically, the end of our interglacial might be 2000 years away. By that time, we probably should have submitted ourselves to nuclear annihilation, exhausted our natural resources, so poisoned our environment that life became untenable, so overcrowded it that life became unendurable. A mere ice sheet could represent nothing but novelty to doomsday philosophies and lend, in truth, a certain spice to our less glorious meditations. But what if the crisis came sooner rather than later? Nothing in the Brown evidence indicated that the change would necessarily be gradual. The ice core in Greenland indicated what could happen in 100 years; the rapid retreat of the last ice sheet demonstrated quite simply that nature is in charge. What could happen in 2000 years could happen tomorrow.

The Brown meeting received little attention, perhaps because its report on the movements of the armadillo fascinated the popular press while turning off responsible authorities. A Nebraska specialist reported that the warmth-loving beast had moved from Mexico into the American Midwest by mid-century and was now heading back Mexico way. For the press, it was good fun. For the student of the ice age, the migration was perturbing. All warmth-loving species had started heading south soon after the Climatic Optimum, 6000 years ago.

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Before all the present consternation about climate began, I had been disturbed about the Soviet Union's virgin-lands scheme. For a variety of reasons, agriculture has been the most spectacular failure in the Russian utopian dream. Half of the Soviet population could feed the other half only in good years. (During the year following the disastrous winter of the Brown meeting, the cagey Russians bought the Americans out of wheat and home.) Much earlier, however, when the shrewd peasant Khrushchev became number one, he had inaugurated the daring scheme of converting thousands of square miles of Siberian lands to grain fields. Admittedly, the land was marginal. But the experience of the previous half century gave the Soviet Union every reason to suppose that in any ten-year cycle it would get two crop failures, two fair years and six bumper crops. The virgin-lands scheme, into which the Soviet Union poured incalculable resources, could not have encountered worse timing. It matured in about 1960 to witness crop failures in 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965 and 1966. When that bold and amiable despot suddenly became an unperson in 1964, he was a victim as much of climate as of conspiracy.

Reid Bryson, director of the Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin, has written that the half century preceding 1960 has had no equal or near equal, in terms of benevolence, in 1000 years. Even the armadillo got tricked into going north. Understandably, the Russians presumed that the next half century would resemble the last, and so embarked on their vast scheme. Not even the Danes in their time of exploration had weather as warm as ours. Nor, back in 1250 A.D., when the crash came, was there a global problem of feeding three and a half billion people.

One of Bryson's contributions has been the demonstration of what a small change in average annual temperature can do to a crop. In Iceland, a drop of one degree centigrade (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) shortens the growing season by two weeks. But that is not the full extent of the damage, since the cooler growing days promote less growth. The actual crop damage is 27 percent. This is approximately what has happened since 1960. Compensations can be arranged: More land can be cultivated, more fertilizer applied, hardier crops planted. But let the average temperature drop by 2.4 degrees centigrade and the damage will be doubled to 54 percent. (continued on page 80)Glaciers are Coming!(continued from page 74) For this there can be no compensation. It is a catastrophe.

But a climate expresses its deterioration in more ways than cooling. The spread of cold from the poles toward the equator has the effect of increasing the disparity--what is usually called steepening the gradient--between climate belts. It is the reverse of what happened when the last great ice sheet so suddenly retreated. Normal wind patterns, like the prevailing westerlies and the monsoons, shift their courses, creating drought here, floods there. In a study of rainfall at various stations in northwest India, it was discovered that before 1920, over a period that might truly be regarded as normal, a dry year with less than half normal rainfall had the probability of occurring every 8.6 years. From 1920 to 1960, so much had the weather improved that the chance fell to one every 14 years. We are all familiar with what happened to India's population in those 40 years. While I do not have drought-expectancy figures for the period since 1960, it is fair to ask what happens to India now if rains merely return to normal. We do not have to ask what has happened to the peoples of the Sahel states bordering the Sahara.

As I find it understandable that the Soviet Union could not know what lay ahead when the virgin lands were planted, I find it understandable that what is happening to our climate is a matter of controversy today. It has all happened so fast. There are those who see the industrial pollution of our atmosphere as a large contributor. Surprisingly, Bryson is among them. I find the opposite judgment irresistible, since we suffered such sudden, longtime changes long before smokestacks. Whatever industry's many-splendored sins, the experience of the Danes cannot be one of them. Bryson likewise discounts the Kuklas' study of increased albedo, which I find most persuasive.

Our planet's heat comes almost entirely from the sun. Albedo is the reflection of sunlight from the earth's surface with its consequent loss of heat. Calm ocean reflects back only five to ten percent, vegetated ground perhaps 15 to 20 percent. But pack ice and snow-covered land act like a mirror, reflecting about 80 percent of received sunlight back into interplanetary space, with almost total heat loss. There is a kind of chain reaction in a time of rapid cooling. The winter of 1971, for example, increased the permanent ice and snow cover by 12 percent, increasing the heat loss through albedo proportionately. A situation was created that made all the more likely comparable winters in following years, each with comparable increases of albedo. So it is that a major glaciation can come about so rapidly. Bryson disagrees not at all with the proposition that the shift from interglacial to glacial climate occurs probably within a single century or so.

There will be other arguments, since we know so little. The critical century may be the one we are entering, and we must shudder. Or we may be entering a cold cycle of long duration, such as we have survived before, another long step down yet with a reprieve still to come. We have never suffered such an experience, however, since world population passed a billion. Or then again, we may be lucky and get back to normal. But since what we regard as normal has occurred only once in the past 1000 years, the odds seem poor. Changes of climate move in no straight line, and two or three excellent seasons with excellent crops can be enough to brush away from our minds the seemingly absurd fears of the scientists. Yet a good season or two will not affect the longterm trend.

I can understand and admire the hope that invests us. But what I can neither understand nor forgive is the opportunism of political and religious leaders, such as was expressed during 1974 at Bucharest and at Rome, claiming that the population explosion is a myth and that population control is a genocidal plot on the part of the imperialist powers to reduce the numbers in impoverished countries for whom the rich would otherwise be responsible. When again and again the monsoons fail, and again and again the great northern fields of wheat and maize and soybean shrink before the onslaughts of sodden springtimes and early frosts, then we shall have some dark monuments to commemorate yesterday's obscenities as we dig mass graves.

When self-delusion and opportunism become luxuries that none can longer afford, then a bit late we shall see ourselves in evolution's long perspective. The cultural animal has fallen into a biological trap. Within the first 5000 years after our supreme invention, the domestication of plant foods with its huge expansion of food supply, we had produced more human beings than could ever return to the hunting way. Within the next 5000 years--to this date--through unrestricted breeding, we produced such global populations that they could be supported even by plant foods in only the best, the most luxurious, the most aberrant of times. There is one way back, of course--starvation and death. But the prospect is most unpleasant.

If Homo sapiens sapiens, that able but vulnerable, unsophisticated hunting being who stumbled out of his tundra and his grasslands onto fields and pastures where he would delude himself that now he was the master of nature--if this increasingly civilized being had a profound intuition and, feeling a bit nervous about it all, invented a personal God, then I cannot wonder. I can only wish that he had created a God better informed concerning the nature of the ice age.

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There is a question that must concern us now, since it must concern us mightily at some future date. Just how willingly will one human being sacrifice his own interests for another? Strict Darwinism says never--except in terms of reproduction. The mother, and occasionally the father, will boast genetical equipment necessary for the survival of the next generation. Beyond that, forget it.

I was unconvinced. In The Territorial Imperative, I put forward the concept that I called the amity-enmity complex. Natural amity is scarce in the world of living beings. But when adults face a common enemy, amity is generated in an approximate equivalent to threat. I could think of innumerable examples, both animal and human. And I included natural hazard as a uniting force, recalling those countless experiences of sudden amity, remarkable self-sacrifice, that can occur when human strangers encounter the flood or the blizzard.

My argument did not go down too well with those who, following the Rousseau tradition, believe that generosity, amiability and goodness are a portion of the primal human endowment. (Whether these people have ever read history or raised a few children still bewilders me.) The biologists, on the whole, accepted the amity-enmity complex as in accord with Darwinian devotion to self-interest. But then, in The Social Contract, I moved on to examine the genetical fixation of altruistic traits, which I believed could have come about in the long history of our hunting bands and interdependent hunting societies. Though the chimp, threatened, might take to his arboreal refuge even before alerting his fellows to danger, we in our terrestrial life could not. As a group, we lived or died according to the willingness of individual males or females to face danger. In the millions of years there must have been a discarding of those groups in which individuals were unwilling to accept self-sacrifice.

What I was discussing was group selection, the survival value to the group of such a genetical factor in the gene pool. While I recognized that group selection is a matter of controversy in biology, until I published my book I did not know just how hot the controversy was. Some biologists supported me. But most, including some for whom I have the highest respect, gave me the whip. Nothing--not even in the most far-out population genetics--confirmed the assertion that altruism could have a genetical foundation. I held fast in my thinking. Concerning the generality of species, I did not intend to enter the debates of population geneticists for which I was quite unequipped. My (continued on page 94)Glaciers are Coming!(continued from page 80) interest was and remains the human species. And reflecting on our long dependence on food sharing and on concerted attack and defense, it seemed to me improbable that some minimum altruistic tendency had not come about in our genetic equipment. But then came a book.

In 1972, Colin Turnbull published The Mountain People. Turnbull is among the most able of anthropologists. His perceptive study of the Pygmy in the deep Congo forest, in a book called The Forest People, had not only made his reputation but had inspired him to study a hunting society living under radically different environmental conditions. He chose the Ik (pronounced eek), a people never before studied, who live in the mountains of northeastern Uganda. So little did science know of them that we even had their name wrong and called them Teuso. And, as Turnbull was to discover, we were wrong about their hunting, for they no longer did.

Earlier, it had been different. As long as Homo sapiens sapiens had inhabited the area, the Ik probably dwelt and hunted in the mountains. Like certain pygmies, they had been net hunters. It is a technique demanding that the whole society hold a widespread net while drivers press the game into the trap. Their cooperative demand resembles far more the old-time days of the hunting band with hand-held weapons than does more individualistic hunting done with blowpipe, spear or bow and arrow. But a tragedy had befallen the Ik. The independent Uganda government had designated their hunting territory as a game reserve where hunting was forbidden. Deprived of their age-old way and the society based upon it, the Ik as individuals fell to pieces. That is how things were when Turnbull arrived.

The Mountain People is a scientific book without a footnote, a straightforward account told by a sophisticated, objective and most compassionate observer. And it is the most ghastly testament ever to have emerged from the human sciences. Read even on its most superficial level, the book records what hunger--and this must concern us--can do to people.

When Turnbull arrived, the Ik, spread about in their small, stockaded villages, were a hungry lot. They had been denied their ancient hunting way. The government had furnished them with seeds and a few instructions concerning the planting and care of crops. Hunters do not take easily to the farming discipline. The Ik were indifferent. And, besides, there was drought and what little effort they expended was largely wasted. It was man against man, husband against wife, parents against children. If an altruistic gene exists in humanity, the Ik failed to demonstrate it. Turnbull records that he can be grateful to the Ik that they treated him no worse than they treated one another.

Regarding the family, Turnbull related: "The Ik seem to tell us that the family is not such a fundamental unit as we usually suppose.... Children are useless appendages, like old parents. Anyone who cannot take care of himself is a burden and hazard to others." They regard family ties as insane. "The other quality of life that we hold to be necessary for survival, love, the Ik also dismiss as idiotic and highly dangerous."

Gone, too, to the incredulity of any primate student, is even the bond between mother and child. Nevertheless, I recalled the late Professor C. R. Carpenter's experience with some 400 rhesus monkeys that he was transporting from India to form a colony on an island off Puerto Rico. This was before World War Two. when Carpenter, almost alone in the scientific world, was making the earliest observations of primates in a state of nature. The idea of a colony (so successful that it is still a principal object of study) was to establish in semiwild conditions a habitat where the monkeys could be observed under laboratory conditions. On the ship providing the transport, however, there was a necessity to habituate his subjects to new foods and, to do this, to keep them hungry. Turnbull's exposure to non-hunting hunters was an accident. So was Carpenter's when, to his horror, he had to observe on the long sea voyage what happened to individual rhesus monkeys when the exigencies of transportation destroyed their natural societies. Hungry mothers not only neglected their young but tore food away from them. At the end of the voyage, there were ten dead infants.

Turnbull's experience was comparable. The Ik mother nurses her child for three years, then throws it out. The toddling child will join its peers in a scavenging existence. Turnbull writes of a nursing mother who put her infant down beside a water hole, where a leopard snatched it and made off. "She was delighted. She was rid of the child and no longer had to carry it about and feed it, and still further it meant that a leopard was in the vicinity and would be sleeping off his dinner and thus an easy kill." She was right. The men found the sleeping leopard, killed it. cooked it and ate it, semidigested child and all.

Or one might turn to the record of the mother whose crawling infant approached closer and closer to the village fire. The men watched in silent suspense. When the infant got burned and screamed, the men erupted in laughter. Pleased, the mother retrieved the child who had so amused the men.

Not all was a matter of hunger. That was bad enough, but there was the deeper level that Turnbull recognized. When he returned to the Ik, the droughts were over, their crops flourished, rotting tomatoes and pumpkins hung from the village stockades and baboons consumed the ripening maize. But the Ik, if possible, were worse off than ever. Now government relief was available at an aid station some miles distant and those from the mountain villages who went to fetch it had their stopping places along the road back where they ate till they vomited, moved on, stopped, ate till they vomited. The objective was to have as little as possible left when, on their return, they would be forced to share.

It was a Hobbesian world of Everyman against Everyman, from which Hobbes deduced the necessity for the all-powerful state. It is a concept that I have eternally rejected, for excellent reason. In animal societies, nothing like the Ik experience could have occurred. While rejecting the stranger, animals look after their own. But Turnbull in the course of his book broods on the possibility that self-delusion is the only truly unique human quality. And he presents his conclusion: "The Ik teach us that our much vaunted human values are not inherent in humanity at all, but are associated only with a particular form of survival called society, and that all, even society itself, are luxuries that can be dispensed with."

Colin Turnbull is an honest dealer, and his descent into a particular human inferno presents us with a gallery of horrors that no honest reader can deny. While it would be going too far to generalize all humanity's fate on the experience of a single tribe, warning signals must flash. When catastrophe struck the Ik and they lost their hunting life and the social traditions that way commanded, they failed to exhibit the least trait of inherent altruism. For the Ik, Turnbull predicts certain extinction.

When decimation comes our way, then through natural selection we may discover a sorting of the peoples. There may be those in which, unlike the Ik, and against the predictions of most biologists, a streak of genetic altruism has developed. Or, far more likely, there may be those with a more united social mind, a stronger social will, perhaps a deeper habituation to the ways of cooperation. Whatever the quality of our catastrophe, these would be the survivors. What is saddening is to glance about at our precatastrophe world and to find such prerequisites for survival so seldom on the ascendancy.

Yet the modern evolutionist is a persistent optimist. We are not the last station on the line. Over three billion years have passed since living organisms began to take form on our earth. That is two thirds as long as the history of the planet itself. An unbroken chain of life connects those swampy beginnings with your presence on earth and mine. There have been calamities and extinctions as one line or another failed to adapt to environment (continued on page 192)Glaciers are Coming!(continued from page 94) and went into natural selection's discard pile.

The rationalist sometimes accuses the evolutionist of substituting nature for God. It is an oversimplification. Never would the evolutionist bow his head and murmur, "Nature's will." Never would he look on nature as the creative force, but only life, that single portion of the natural world. Yet there is a small seed of truth in the accusation, for the evolutionist gains faith from his contemplations. I know of few rationalists who, placing their hopes on the omnipotent human brain, find much encouragement in our bewildering time.

The story of evolution, despite all of its failures and extinctions, is one of most improbable success. Enough of us have survived to reassemble our genes and temporarily perfect a still more able animal to tackle another of nature's nightmares, the successive waves of the ice age.

Our interglacial experience has been just one more test that accident has thrown our way. I cannot regard our immense production of food--despite its horrendous biological consequences leading inevitably to a most gruesome population outcome--as anything but necessary in the long evolution of Konrad Lorenz' human-being-to-be. We failed the test, it is true. From our brief experience with benevolence, we learned hedonism, gross materialism and institutionalized injustice; entertainments such an mass slaughter, massive destruction, massive reproduction--and, of course, hubris, and the delusion that we were masters of nature. Faced now by a ruthless future, we may, through our greed and our quarrels and our scrambles, take the easy way out and most decisively blow ourselves up. Every logic would support the probability.

Yet I find the proposition dubious. Were we beings without history, were we dependent on nothing but rationality and conditioned learning, my pessimism would be fathomless. But we do have our history, and it is older than the hominid, older than the ape or the monkey, older than the tiny arboreal mammals of 100,000,000 years ago. It is older than the reptiles who bore them, older than the first air-breathing fish, as old as those first microscopic organisms, in our earth's young years, who perfected before all others a determination to survive.

There will be those of us of rare courage and endowment who will accept, perhaps welcome, certainly adapt to a new kind of icy world that in truth is a very old kind of world that we have survived before. I doubt that those survivors will remember interglacial man as harshly as we sometimes see ourselves. The beauty that Cro-Magnon invented we took to soaring heights of sounds, words and spires. Perhaps a few shrines will remain, in the valley of the Nile or on a warm Sicilian shore, and they will visit them as we once visited the caves of the Dordogne. They may rightly guess that a past race that so loved beauty in fortunate circumstances may have loved one another.

They will keep much of value that we created, while discarding most as baggage that the new bail-weather animal cannot afford. There will be the art of cooking and certain seeds to help them along in their few favorable climates and poor tropical soils. There will be old books that they will read with amusement wondering at the way we were, until they come to seem too heavy to be worth lugging about or, more likely, the pages disintegrate. In the meantime, however, it would be a curious inheritance from all our technological paraphernalia if the one compulsory artifact remained eyeglasses. Evolution never had the opportunity to encourage eyes fit for reading.

We were truly not too bad a sort--stupid, it is true, much given to self-delusion and as tempted by sentimentality as by savagery--but, on balance, an experimental being who. while so often doing his worst, not too infrequently did his best. Though we weren't too strong about morality, still we thought quite a bit about it and could feel guilty once in a while. Though genetic altruism may have eluded us, still we were always preaching it in anticipation of a glowing collection plate. (Still, there were always those few, let us not forget, who weren't that concerned about the collection plate.) And there was this idea of education. While normally it consisted of the most callous brainwashing, still it was an idea that some future people could make use of.

What I must suspect is that the survivors of this glacial calamity that will befall and decimate us will, through most appalling natural selection, discard the Ardreys with their hyperdeveloped brains, paunch bellies, bad knees and flat feet and pool their collective genes into one more subspecies of Homo sapiens in a few tens of millennia and take one more step away from the ape in the direction of the human being. And I suspect that in an infinitely rigorous climate, with eternally hostile environmental demands, their mythology will become more pragmatic, and yet more demanding of belief. As the Greek poets and dramatists went back to Agamemnon and their centuries-old predecessors to whip into the Greek populace what was right, what was wrong, so I suspect that our ice-age inheritors, whatever their literate capacities, will turn back to the villains and heroes of interglacial man for the lessons of what and what not to do. It could be our greatest legacy.

As an interglacial man, I feel no embarrassment--except that we ended the hunting way. It had shaped us, given us anatomically and socially the way we are. But we killed off our fellow species in the natural world. The death of the hunter and the hunted must be the sin that interglacial man committed in the memories of his inheritors. How do you live when the tundra returns but not the reindeer, the aurochs, the extinct mammoth!?

Animal species--if they are not truly extinct--have a way of reviving when ecological changes encourage a return. It isn't just a matter of the human predator. Far more important is the land to roam without interference from farmers. As farmers must surely decline in number, so may the ecological elbow room of species increase. So perhaps--and only perhaps--animal prey may expand to relieve the problem of food supply for the endangered species--future man--and man the hunter may again have his day.

Yet again, I must express my doubt. We shall not have gone back to the bow and arrow, let alone the hand-held weapon. We shall keep, beyond eyeglasses, technological advances in killing, so that our descendants will never be on equal terms with other animal species. The hunter died when he achieved supremacy.

Perhaps the death of the hunter will be the long monument to interglacial man. We denied a future to our successor beings. Evolution will show one day whether the balance between nature and evolving man--from the risen ape to the human being--will have been restored. I cannot know, nor can you, since we all shall long have been gone.

All I can assert is that I was happy, even proud, to have been an interglacial man. We sailed the world, we explored the universe of the mind, touched on the moon, demonstrated through our molecular genetics that all life is one and demonstrated through natural selection how life outlives accident. We did so many things that could not have been done without our benevolent interglacial. Now we must retreat as nature resumes its hostility. And were I cursed to live long enough to witness the change--an impossibility at my age--I should find myself nostalgic for the good old interglacial days.

I should miss the opportunity of movement and the chance, for example, to enter an African kraal and recognize that long before their northern counterparts, these people created through tribal acceptances compassionate and most realistic welfare states. I should miss wandering along the Seine or through the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. I should miss the overconfident architectural monuments of Piccadilly and the endless green spread of Seattle's garden homes. I should miss window shopping on New York's Madison Avenue or Rome's Via Condotti, as I should miss my crab meat on San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf. I should miss so much the happy cry of children as they ride the carrousel on a Paris boulevard.

Well, sooner or later it will all be gone. As an interglacial man, I shall regret it. As a risen ape. however, I must have no regret but, rather, a warm sort of pride for an ape that has risen so far along the Lorenzian course of becoming a human being. His future rests beyond an icy horizon. We have come this far, and that is about all one can say.

I am haunted by the happy cries of children and the clamor of the calliope.