In the midst of political rancor with our national leadership operating much like an organized crime family, we have an article in The New Yorker about termites.
Early on, it tells us that the total weight of termites on this planet is 10 times the total weight of human beings. That right there breaks through the unsavory crust of current events.
We’re told that only 28 of the 2,600 or so known species of termites actually do damage, but estimates of that damage range from $1.5 to $20 billion a year in the United States alone.
There are stories of people in India going on a three-week vacation who return to see their house reduced to a pile of rubble by voracious termites. Little wonder that most of the research about termites deals with how to get rid of them.
Termites are much more than wood eaters, however. From classical times until now, termites have been studied as models of cooperative communities. Like ants and bees, termites band together to labor on behalf of the common good.
The king and queen termite, who are the agents of reproduction in a termite colony, live underground for decades, making them the world’s longest living insect. During this time, the queen will lay millions of eggs, and the whole colony operates to keep the gene pool vibrant.
“Termites may be hard to love, but they should be easy to admire,” the article says. They build mounds up to 30 feet high. If humans built structures of proportionate height, they would be twice as tall as Burj Khalifa in Dubai, which at 2,722 feet, is twice as tall as the Empire State Building.
To do this, a colony of termites will move 364 pounds of dirt and 3,300 pounds of water in a year, making mud balls that result in a mound filled with tunnels, passage ways, chambers and spiral staircases. With a million termites living in the ground beneath them, these structures regulate the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide between the colony and the outside world.
In this, termites may have found a way to survive the degradations we humans are wreaking upon the Earth.
Among the several theories about the nature of termite colonies, one has to do with altruism, with putting other termites first. What matters, it seems, is that the colony thrives as a whole. There is even a “communal pooling of digestive capacity” which termites received from cockroaches, their evolutionary forebears.
The U.S. Department of Energy says that if the secrets of termite digestion could be uncovered, we would have an agricultural source for the production of 100 billion gallons of “grassoline” a year, lowering auto emissions by 86 percent.
Researches have worked on this, but, so far, termites have held on to their secrets. Some researchers even say that the termite digestive tract is too complex for humans to understand.
If religion needs gaps in human knowledge to justify itself, it can take comfort in the mysterious workings in the guts of termites.
But, it seems to me, religions and spiritualties of all stripes do better to get a firm hold on what has been known about termites for a long time — they have developed a way of being in the world by which “all for one and one for all” is at the heart of their ongoing life.
If we want to survive, our staunchly competitive and conflict-torn species would benefit from incorporating a human form of this termite spirit into our worldly ways, it seems to me. Actually, most of the religions I’m familiar with advocate just that. May it be so.
Bob Jones is the former minister of the Guerneville and Monte Rio Community Church.
