The Last Banana

To stand in a high place, with nothing but sky between me and the surface of Crater Lake, is to feel like I can fly. The remains of a 12,000 foot high volcano that erupted and fell in on itself, Crater Lake is the deepest lake in the United States. Sitting over 6,000 feet above sea level and fed by rainfall and snowmelt, it is an intense blue, clear and crystalline, sitting in a bowl of volcanic rock covered in pine trees and pink elephant's head and yellow fawn lilly and blue monkshood and white oceanspray. We drove the rim, the lake disappearing behind forest or rock only to reappear again, its face anew. We hiked the trails, stirring chipmunks and pika from their hiding spots. We slid into the sharp and the cold of the lake, unable to catch our breath from the shock, managing strangled yelps of joy.

Not all is well, though. The alpine landscape is marred by blight. The warm green of the pine forest suddenly breaks into patches of dead trees, white as bone, thin branches scrabbling at the sky. Up close, the hard dry surfaces of the tree carcasses were pockmarked with holes.

The western bark beetle has long been a problem in the forests of the western United States. The most prominent pine tree in Crater Lake is the lodgepole pine. The lodgepole is fast growing, hardy, and quickly adapts to its surroundings. The lodgepole is also a favorite of the bark beetle.

In a 26-year study, 1.5 million hectares of lodgepole pine were killed. Drought has made trees more susceptible to bark beetles. Warming temperatures have allowed more beetles to survive the winter when normally the cold weather would reset the population. Fire suppression and targeted logging practices have resulted in trees being geographically concentrated, making infestation spread easier.

My wife and I discussed the fate of the lodgepole with our kids. They wondered why we couldn't just call a tree doctor to make these sick trees better. We stumbled over our explanation, not sure where to start. The complexities of some problems are hard to explain to children. They inhabit a world where there are good guys and there are bad guys, and the good guys win.

We want a world of black and white. We live in a world of grey. Shades of grey, really, that swirl and fold in on themselves like early morning fog. Black and white feel clean - right and wrong, facing one another across a clear divide. And so we grasp at the grey around us, gathering what we can and squirreling it into two piles, one good and one bad. When piled together they soften and ooze over time. And so we gather them up again, putting them back into piles. We strive for structure, for certainty.

Certainty feels solid - made of concrete and iron with hard edges and flat surfaces. Anchored to certainty in a world that swells and flows around us, we can begin to figure out our place in it. From one certainty, we can reach another. From the second, we can reach a third. We can construct an island of certainties, snugged together, solid, and then we can stand on the edge of it, peering out into the muck, ready to defend what we've built.

Donna Webster and Arie Kruglanski published a study in the 90s on "need for closure" (NFC). Closure here is defined as "an answer on a given topic, any answer ... compared to confusion and ambiguity". For our purposes, we will call it need for certainty. People fall onto a spectrum, from those comfortable with ambiguity on one end to those who require certainty on the other. For those who need certainty, the study found that they lowered the requirements to get there: less information was needed, less time was needed, and their confidence in the resulting certainty was higher. We latch on to the first thing that rings true, and then we construct our identities around what we know.

Claude Steele introduced the idea of self-affirmation in the late 1980s: we strive for self-integrity, to feel that we are good people, that we are competent, and that we are in control of our lives. When we are faced with information that threatens that sense of integrity, we feel discomfort and respond by attacking that new information. We stand on that edge of the island we've created for ourselves, and we protect it at all costs.

Geoffrey Cohen and David Sherman expanded on Steele's original research by understanding how people accept new information. They challenged participants on their values, and found that when they were asked to consider an unrelated value they were more likely to consider the initial challenge. In other words, when they rerouted their identity to other unchallenged beliefs, they were less threatened and could allow themselves to consider new information. Like scaffolding and temporary support structures used in building, these folks take the "weight off" of the threatened belief, but this only worked when the other "load bearing" beliefs were unrelated to the belief under attack. For example, if new information challenges your core belief around your professional identity, you can instead rely on beliefs about your identity as a parent or an athlete or a craftsperson to provide resilience. Patricia Linville found similar results in her research at Yale: self-complexity has a direct relationship with the emotional response to challenges. It wasn't the number of certainties (or self-aspects in Linville's words), it was their independence from one another that enabled resilience.

We want our islands to be sufficiently large to support a variety of terrain. When you stand on an island built from a multitude of core beliefs across a broad range of categories, you can survive more attacks than if you are standing on one or two core beliefs. This is why when we are ideologically concentrated in sports or politics or faith we are so vehement - we are literally backed into a corner, our identity dependent on the few remaining beliefs we have clutched to our chest, grouped like too many pine trees in one place.

In Rich Cohen's The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America's Banana King , he mentions the rise and fall of the Gros Michel banana. Larger, sweeter, with a thicker peel, the Gros Michel was the king of bananas. Growers optimized around the best versions of this banana, and cloned it until it became the dominant fruit in the market. But in 1940, a fungus came aboard a ship from Australia. The dominant version of Gros Michel had no natural defense. And because of cloning, there were no independent genomes, no natural variability. The weakness in one Gros Michel was the weakness in all Gros Michel. In twelve years, 40,000 hectares of the fruit were wiped out. There wasn't enough genetic variability left to make growing the Gros Michel commercially viable. The bananas that we get today are the Cavendish - smaller, less sweet, more prone to bruising. The Gros Michel lives on artificially - in the banana flavoring used in candy and medicine.

This is a repeating pattern in nature. Over a century before the demise of the Gros Michel, the over-cloned "lumper" potato found throughout Ireland succumbed to a single disease. In the seventies, a corn monoculture led to $1 billion in losses. The Florida panther suffers from a too-small population that leads to heart defects and sterility. Purebred dogs suffer from congenital defects, single-stock gamblers go bankrupt, and groupthink kills corporations. Even the Spanish Hapsburg line was undone by its own incessant intermarrying. When we homogenize, we reduce the space between components, and we eliminate the independence between elements.

When we allow one or two ideas to be the primary foundation on which we build our identity, we subject ourselves to dependency risk. When temperatures, and tempers, rise, we are all more vulnerable to infestation. When wave after wave comes without break, we lose the freeze that cools us down and kills off the bad ideas or unwarranted beliefs. When algorithms prune variety of thought, we begin to clone the same ideas like so many bananas and potatoes. The isolation in a life lived online leads to feeling estranged, so we huddle together, trying to fit in. In our fear of being alone, we fail to find the bravery to open ourselves up to new, independent ideas, and to burn the trees that need burning. Our need for certainty in a world where nothing is certain means quicker adoption of less rigorous ideas. It means a heartier defense against the good ideas that do come along. It means an ever-dwindling population of independent thoughts for us to build our islands from.

Why do we do this to ourselves?