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Interview
12 June 2022 2.00 h

Eudald Carbonell

ARCHAEOLOGIST AND GEOLOGIST

“We are speeding towards another glacial period”

Archaeologist Eudald Carbonell argues that it is too late for humans to avoid disaster but that there is hope for the species if we can learn from our mistakes

“Globalisation is probably the biggest mistake homo sapiens have ever made” “THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN LIFE IS, AS A SPECIES, NOT TO MAKE MISTAKES”

Set­tled for 15 years in Castile and León, where the ar­chae­o­log­i­cal site of At­a­puerca is lo­cated, ar­chae­ol­o­gist and an­thro­pol­o­gist Eu­dald Car­bonell was re­cently in Cat­alo­nia. His new book, Hu­man­ització o ex­tinció, will be out in Oc­to­ber.

You say the col­lapse is al­ready here and that it is ir­re­versible.
For 20 years, many sci­en­tists have been talk­ing about the in­abil­ity of hu­mans to man­age our processes. We enter into a process nat­u­rally, but then we’re un­able to take con­trol. When­ever there’s a change in so­cial sys­tems, as hap­pened in the In­dus­trial Rev­o­lu­tion, it ends up in major wars and a huge loss of human life. The First and Sec­ond World Wars took the lives of two hun­dred mil­lion peo­ple. The col­lapse of the sci­en­tific-tech­no­log­i­cal rev­o­lu­tion has begun; every­thing is in place for the same thing to hap­pen and the loss of 20% of the pop­u­la­tion.
How would you de­fine the cur­rent era?
We are in an age char­ac­terised by fun­da­men­tal is­sues such as his­tor­i­cal ac­cel­er­a­tion, that is, things that once hap­pened in a year now hap­pen in a week, so so­cial re­la­tions are ex­tremely ac­cel­er­ated. We’re at a point of the so­cial­i­sa­tion of the sci­en­tific-tech­no­log­i­cal rev­o­lu­tion, in an ex­po­nen­tial con­ver­gence of changes that we won’t be able to con­trol.
This is the feel­ing we have that things are going very fast?
Yes, ex­actly. If we think some­thing is going to go wrong it will end up going wrong. It’s a very cu­ri­ous thing about life. I tell my stu­dents that if you do things well, there’s a good chance they’ll turn out well; do things poorly and they will al­ways turn out badly. It’s some­thing like a law of human evo­lu­tion.
In one ar­ti­cle you dis­cussed the need for a uni­ver­sal pro­to­col for the species.
Glob­al­i­sa­tion is prob­a­bly the biggest mis­take hu­mans, homo sapi­ens, have ever made. And we’ll pay dearly for it. From the evo­lu­tion­ary, so­cial, sci­en­tific and po­lit­i­cal point of view, what glob­al­i­sa­tion has done is ho­mogenise the species. With­out iden­tity there’s no di­ver­sity, and the loss of di­ver­sity will make these is­sues we’re talk­ing about reach a point that will even­tu­ally lead to the de­struc­tion of the sys­tems in which we live.
Are the pan­demic, cli­mate cri­sis, the wars, all op­por­tu­ni­ties to re­flect on where we are?
I think that this mol­e­cule that’s con­t­a­m­i­nated our res­pi­ra­tory sys­tem, that’s killed so many el­derly peo­ple and caused so much stress for fam­i­lies must be seen as a warn­ing about the dif­fi­cult sit­u­a­tion we are in. When things go wrong it’s be­cause you’ve done things wrong. The most im­por­tant thing in life is, as a species, not to make mis­takes. When you have to make a de­ci­sion, you can’t do things that you know aren’t going to work out well or that put a lot of peo­ple at risk. Of course, we all make mis­takes and our abil­ity to gauge what we’re doing is lim­ited, but we do have the abil­ity to re­flect on what we’ve done and that is some­thing we often don’t use. For me, now, think­ing and hav­ing an in­flu­ence is very im­por­tant be­cause I am also part of this species. It’s like a good car­pen­ter who makes a good house. We evo­lu­tion­ists also work in the field of so­ci­ety, in the evo­lu­tion of hu­man­ity, and we can build and con­tribute a lot, we must re­turn our knowl­edge to the species in the form of re­flec­tion.
We’ve heard these types of con­sid­er­a­tions for a long time but they don’t seem to have an im­pact on so­ci­ety.
The issue here is that we are an idiot species, and of course, it’s very dif­fi­cult for an idiot species like us to re­flect. The most im­por­tant thing is to be self-crit­i­cal. We may be homo sapi­ens but were also id­iots. Im­be­cil­ity in the human con­text is very im­por­tant, and since so many of us are id­iots, then it’s a prob­lem for evo­lu­tion it­self. We must break with this se­ries of mis­takes that we have made in our evo­lu­tion so as to be able to gov­ern our fu­ture. But as we still haven’t done that we have no con­trol over what we will face. These new crises will come and our species will dis­ap­pear. All species go ex­tinct, at least until now; tech­nol­ogy may pre­vent that but what needs to be done is to try to make the con­di­tions of life bet­ter, not worse.
Tech­nol­ogy has also played an im­por­tant role in the pan­demic.
The tech­nol­ogy has been very good be­cause it comes up with processes to pro­tect the species. If we hadn’t been able to vac­ci­nate like we did we would prob­a­bly have had many mil­lions more dead. But I think the pan­demic has made us worse. As I said, every­thing is hap­pen­ing as a re­sult of our glob­al­is­ing. The pan­demic has acted as a warn­ing but it has made us more in­ca­pable of un­der­stand­ing that col­lec­tive in­di­vid­u­al­ity is very im­por­tant.
A de­bate is un­der­way on re­new­able en­ergy. Are we mov­ing from a fos­sil fuel to a re­new­able civ­i­liza­tion?
Tech­nol­ogy al­lows us to ac­cel­er­ate these changes and de­velop these sub­sti­tutes. I have quoted many times the great econ­o­mist Nicholas Georgescu-Roe­gen, who raised the ques­tion about the ex­pense of burn­ing a kilo of coal given how long it takes for logs to turn into a kilo of coal and the ef­fort to ex­tract it from the ground. In that sense, burn­ing coal is mon­strous. There are a lot of peo­ple who are happy to de­vour every­thing we pro­duce, and that too is mon­strous. With re­new­ables we’re talk­ing about types of en­ergy that are in the Earth’s sys­tem, which need to be in­te­grated with the human sys­tem. Is it bad to burn coal? As with any­thing, not as long as you do not ex­ceed the lim­its. You can use coal, or any en­ergy source, as long as you use it ra­tio­nally. Every­thing has this pro­duc­tion cost.
What do you mean?
Solar pan­els may make less en­ergy than the en­ergy it took to pro­duce them. There’s al­ways a loss of en­ergy, a bal­ance of en­ergy. We know that methane takes decades to dis­ap­pear from the at­mos­phere and that CO2 has a bru­tal green­house ef­fect and this can af­fect the change in tem­per­a­ture, ther­mo­ha­line cur­rents, warm­ing... We must un­der­stand that if we con­tinue to ac­cel­er­ate these ef­fects, we will bring glacia­tion upon us in next to no time. Peo­ple know that warm­ing is hap­pen­ing but after that the cold will come. We are ac­cel­er­at­ing the ar­rival of a glacial pe­riod. We haven’t had one in 10,000 years. Hu­mans can­not change the cli­mate of the planet but we can ac­cel­er­ate cli­mate change and that’s what we’re doing.
Do we shield our­selves from some is­sues to keep our con­sciences clear?
We shouldn’t have a clear con­science be­cause it is the dri­ver of so­cial con­scious­ness. If our con­science is clear we won’t get any­thing done. There are two con­cepts that I’ve been de­vel­op­ing in my books: re­spon­si­ble evo­lu­tion and con­scious progress. Am I against wind tur­bines at sea? No, what I’m against is not doing them well. You can’t be against progress, and progress must be con­scious.
How do you see things turn­ing out in the fu­ture?
They can even­tu­ally turn out well. After the col­lapse, once we’ve made all the mis­takes we need to make, human be­ings can then emerge with an un­der­stand­ing that there are mis­takes that can­not be re­peated. Peo­ple say that those who will have the worst time of it are our chil­dren, our grand­chil­dren, but that’s not right, those who will have the worst of it are us here now. Peo­ple see what’s going on in dis­tant ex­otic places and think it can’t hap­pen here.

in­ter­view so­cial sci­ence

A life studying humans

Eudald Carbonell (Ribes de Freser, 1953) explains that our species is distributed in such a way that from the age of 60 you are an old man and from 70, ancient, and so as a result since he turned 60 he has been giving up positions and responsibilities. For example, he is the former director of the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES), and also of the Atapuerca Foundation. He continues as co-director of the Atapuerca Project, although he says that in 2024 he will retire and “somehow” find a way to leave it. And he still teaches at Rovira and Virgili University for three months a year. Reviewing his career, he recalls his first contact with fossils was as a child, when visiting his grandparents in the summers in Santa Maria de Besora. He also mentions his link to the PSUC communist party. At the age of 23 he became a member of the party’s central committee and stood as a back-up candidate for Girona behind Paco Frutos in the 1979 general election. “I come from a revolutionary background and also a scientific and historical background. I think they are linked. For example, we studied history to understand our social functioning as people, but the scientific side was what attracted me most,” he says.

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