Reading for difference

It seems that rats have something to teach us humans at this point in the history of our species, at least that’s what I am hearing. In The End of the Long Summer Dianne Dumanoski tells us that “for most of the human career … we have shared far more with rats: another species of nimble, flexible generalists and remarkable survivors” (Dumanoski 2009, 173). It’s only in the modern era of carboniferous capitalism, since most societies have hitched their fortunes to a fossil-fuel based growth strategy, that our species has become less ratlike— less nimble, less flexible, more specialist and increasingly less likely to survive the changes we have wrought on our Earth system. The irony is stark—as the behavioral distance between rats and humans grows, so the “more evolved” species becomes increasingly vulnerable to the kinds of environmental shocks that rats have successfully weathered. We teeter on the edge of extinction, they are ready to ride out the “end of the long summer.” Indeed, the survivability of rats and the proliferation of different types of rodents over the evolutionary longue durée offers a corrective to popular conceptions of evolutionary development.