According to a recent report by the United Nations, over half of the world’s population – 3.3 billion people – will be living in cities by next year.

When I read that statistic, I thought of “The Purse Seine” – a haunting poem that poet and early environmentalist Robinson Jeffers wrote some 70 years ago. In the poem, Jeffers speaks of looking out over the lights of a modern city from a great height. To him, the spectacle below seems like a school of fish caught in a net.

He writes:

How could I help but recall the seine-net
Gathering the luminous fish? I cannot tell you how beautiful the city appeared, and a little terrible.
I thought, We have geared the machines and locked all together into interdependence; we have built the great cities; now
There is no escape. We have gathered vast populations
Incapable of free survival, insulated
From the strong earth, each person in himself helpless, on all
dependent. The circle is closed, and the net
Is being hauled in …

Jeffers could see no future for the human race trapped in such a predicament, except “inevitable mass-disasters.”

Jeffers himself lived in a stone house in Carmel, California, built of boulders he had dragged up from the beach and mortared with his own hands. The house was remarkably earth-friendly for its day. For example, the ceilings are seven feet rather than eight feet high, so the rooms require less fuel to heat them in cooler weather.

Jeffers thought that human beings should remain close to nature, and economical in their use of natural resources. Otherwise, in his view, they courted environmental catastrophe.

Perhaps this century – with its increasing levels of urbanization and carbon emissions – will prove him right. But I’d like to think that human beings are wise enough and tough enough and adaptable enough to ensure their survival.

William Faulkner, who died the same year as Jeffers, 1962, took a considerably more optimistic view of the future of humanity. In his Nobel banquet address in 1949, he said this:

I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

Only time will tell which of these two literary giants was the true prophet. Is man one of evolution’s mistakes who will resolve the problem of his existence by making himself extinct? Or does he have a spark of divinity within him that will help him save himself from his own follies and excesses before it is too late?