How Climate Change Might Wipe Out the Human Population –

The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

For all the bromides and self-help scams flooding the market these days for gullible people seeking the secret to living longer or at least living more healthy lives, I’ve long suspected that the number one killer is stress itself.

Recent studies show life expectancy in the U.S. in a downward spiral. Some of this is due to Covid, of course. But along with increasing stress from climate change, economic crises in some cases caused by it, and even the threat of even more pandemics, the 21st century could be a killer for human life on planet Earth.

Deaths and Mortality

Pandemic Disrupted Historical Mortality Patterns, Caused Largest Jump in Deaths in 100 Years

But our life expectancy was already going down. The Baby Boom generation and subsequent generations are not living as long as the World War II Generation, in spite of the fact that they lived through the Great Depression and the second world war.

The theory is that the stressful nature of more modern life is most likely the big cause.

At the time of America’s founding in 1776, the average newly-minted American citizen could expect to live to the ripe old age of 35, giving them a few months to run for the presidency before they keeled over. By 1880, it went up to 40. For men in 1920 it was around 53.6 years. For women 54.6. The life expectancy of the World War II Generation was 78.9 years, mainly due to the creation of the middle class economy and advances in medical science.

The Baby Boomers were expected to outpace that and make it to an average of 79, but that number has now fallen to 73 for men, and it could get worse for generations X and Z.

Aha Moment

When I was wrapping up my recent research into the speckled brook trout, one line kept haunting me. The future of the Appalachian trout could turn on not just rising water temperatures and an increase in stream flooding. Rising stress hormones in the fish themselves may be what kills them off.

“Temperature is something people tend to focus on, and for good reason. If these streams get over 68 degrees Fahrenheit (20 degrees Celsius) then fish become stressed,” Dr. Nathaniel Hitt, a researcher with the U.S. Geological Survey, told me for that story.

“We know that because they start producing stress hormones in the blood. We can observe that. A little is not going to be lethal,” he said. “But a lot of that IS lethal.”

The Story of Wild, Native Brook Trout and Why They Are So Ecologically Important Like the Canary in the Coal Mine for Climate Change

Over night, this got me to thinking about how my dad died at the age of 47 from a massive heart attack. He was a fisherman, you see. People in my family thought it was the Winston’s that killed him. It could have been a genetically flawed heart, or it could have been something else: Stress.

In 1973, he worked very hard for the old Southern Bell Telephone company, and along with raising a family on a working man’s salary of the time, he had few outlets for relieving stress. He did not have much occasion for physical exercise in sports, and he didn’t consume alcohol to relax, being from a teetotaling Baptist background. That’s not even considering the average American diet at that time, when fried chicken was regularly on the menu.

And unlike my mother, church held no appeal for my dad, a man more interested in science who spent Sunday mornings on the “parking committee” as a deacon, standing in the parking lot smoking Winstons. About the only thing that seemed to make him relaxed and happy was going fishing on weekends and holidays.

There wasn’t much research about this in those days. But in recent years, the declining mortality rate among working class people in the U.S. has become a big issue worthy of best selling books.

Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism

You can check out all that research for yourself. After looking into it there is something there related to what I’m talking about here. But there’s no need to go much further than talking about stress itself.

Here’s one fairly simplistic study, readily available online, in which Dr. Carolyn Aldwin, lead author and a professor of human development and family sciences at Oregon State University, came to conclude this:

“Being a teetotaler and a smoker were risk factors for mortality,” she said in a statement. “So perhaps trying to keep your major stress events to a minimum, being married, and having a glass of wine every night is the secret to a long life.”

But correlational studies showing married people living longer than unmarried people, or people who consume moderate levels of alcohol living longer than people who don’t, are hardly causal proof. The factor that runs throughout this research, once again, is stress.

I suspect if it were possible to conduct a longitudinal study over the past 50 years on thousands of people, complete with an exhaustive list of stress factors, the data would show that stress is the number one killer of them all. It’s certainly a factor in causing heart disease, and probably cancer and other ailments too.

So the real secret to a long, happy life might just be finding ways to avoid and alleviate stress. Of course Thoreau’s necessities in life are also required, food, shelter, clothing and fuel, along with a few modern conveniences, like air conditioning and entertainment.

An Update on Thoreau’s Necessities of Life

One way to reduce stress is to turn off the radio and television, and disconnect from the internet, or at least social media apps.

Back to Hormones

Since that long term study has not been done, it might be worth it to look into stress hormones in humans and extrapolate a hypothesis.

According to some fairly reliable medical research, there are four main stress hormones in humans.

The main stress hormone that modifies physical and mental functioning is cortisol. Others include glucagon, prolactin, reproductive hormones such as estrogen, progesterone and testosterone, and hormones related to growth, which are also modified during stressful states.

Stress is defined as a feeling caused by a situation or a thought that results in physical or emotional anxiety, tension, nervousness or frustration. When a person suffers from stress, he or she not only experiences psychological changes, but also undergoes a series of physical alterations.

In medicine stress is referred to as a situation in which circulating levels of glucocorticoids and catecholamines in the blood rise. Stress is an alteration of psychological origin that causes a series of modifications in the physical functioning of the body that interrupts harmony in homeostasis, or the tendency toward a relatively stable equilibrium of physiological processes, including an ideal level of oxygen in the blood along with acidity and body temperature.

While the 20th century certainly had its big stress events — the Great Depression, two world wars and other recessions and wars – just in the past 21 years in the 21st century, think of the escalating number of stress events that are almost incalculable. Think of the trauma so many experienced on Sept. 11, 2001, and then the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Then came the Bush Great Recession, and who knows how many people died from the economic stress that caused?

Then there was the BP Gulf Oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, but the economy gradually came back under the steady leadership of the Obama administration, when social media platforms were relatively new and not so addicting and destructive in the vast majority of peoples’ lives. For a time a sort of balance near equilibrium was achieved for many.

Then came Trump, and the daily Tweet Storm ramped up the stress level of anyone half way paying attention, on both sides of the political isle. Imagine all the cortisol pumping into people for four solid years. Trump’s narcissistic attention seeking did not just stress out liberals and democrats. It fired cortisol into the blood cells of conservatives as well, in some cases prompting them to empty the ammunition shelves of any store that sold bullets to get ready for what they thought was the inevitable “civil war” to come.

Then came the coronavirus pandemic, and the forced stay at home mandates for millions of people, taking away one of the most important stress moderating influences on human health: Meaningful social interaction with others. The economic impacts were also profound, with millions thrown out of work overnight.

Zoom meetings and social media posts and comments were a poor substitute for church or club socials, or meeting friends at a bar and listening to live music.

Suddenly were were all alone.

Tens of thousands of people did discover one of the best ways of relieving stress, however, by getting outdoors in nature and visiting beautiful landscapes, like camping in national or state parks.

Back to Nature

It’s somewhat ironic, but I was already doing just that. Traveling and seeing the country in a camper van, long before the movie Nomadland was conceived and made. In fact, I’ve managed to live most of my life in a relatively stress free environment, never really having to commute in rush hour traffic to a crappy job I hated. Even though I’m still a relatively poor man, I’ve managed to find ways to get by, to get plenty of sleep, and have a lot of fun along the way.

But for many, those who think of themselves as news junkies, if all the crazy bad news on cable television was not bad enough, now there were incendiary Facebook posts coming up every minute on people now equipped with social media apps on so-called smart phones.

Things looked so bad in 2020 that I came to write about events in near Biblical terms.

Hellscape 2020: Year In Review in Words and Pictures

But after we all went through the damn Trump insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, President Joe Biden was sworn in as president and most adults began getting vaccinated in the spring, so the stress level went down for many, and the stress hormones stopped their ravaging impacts on the human brain and body.

How long can we keep it that way as the effects of the Trump years continue to ripple through Congressional investigations and Supreme Court rulings, riling people up again — and pumping all that cortisol into the national bloodstream.

For some greedy people, there is political power to be had from keeping people riled up on cortisol, and for sensationalist media organizations, there’s billions in profit to be had in covering it all as fast as a human reporter can hear a rumor and type a tweet.

If you want my recommendation, and you probably don’t since you all know more than I do by virtue of the fact that you can open a Facebook page and express a thought using someone else’s words in a meme, I say turn off the radio and TV, get outside in nature, maybe a read a column by a wise person on the web.

Not me, of course, since I’m such a cat hating, Queen disrespecting, non-football fan.

Whatever. It’s foggy in the mountains tonight, and I’m managing to find shows to watch on Netflix at night, in between the bard owls hooting and the cricket, grasshopper and frog outdoor symphony concerts.

Reminder: If I make to October 15, I will turn 65 and surpass the age of 64, when many good friends and relatives of mine died. My favorite Uncle Virgil died at 64, as did Birmingham Post-Herald columnist Ted Bryant, Southern writer Willie Morris, and one of my best friends of all time, the famous civil rights photographer Spider Martin.

Take it down a notch. See if you feel better. Libations recommended.