“The real prophets of doom are not the pessimists who see mankind on a course of self-destruction, but the misguided fatalists-falsely called optimists-who see the future merely as more growth and an extrapolation of the present. There is a demon in technology. It was put there by man and man will have to exorcise it before technological civilization can achieve the eighteenth century ideal of humane civilized life.”- Rene Dubos
Since all the habitable parts of the earth are already inhabited by humans, and seeing that we have employed technology while blaring the word “progress” about while we are virtually riding our way to cutting the earth in two halves like an orange with the over-exploitation of its resources that the acceleration of technology provides. The huge mass of humans hardly lose sleep over the direct impact their use of certain technologies from “speed tree felling” which decimates forests and thus consists a danger for irreplaceable flora and fauna; others such as earth moving equipment have only abused the sacred surface of the earth in our cursed endless pursuit of its elements. We do all this without thinking of the poker faced and oxygen starved planet that we will pass on to future generations of our species. As forebears already present on earth, the moral onus is on us to ensure that a planet that is habitable and suitable for pure human life is what we leave behind for them and not an ecosystem that is out of balance with nature’s prime forces.
In our short historical journey on our small planetary home, whenever humans call out their leaders on environmental degradation, make outcries to the damage that our seemingly harmless living activities are responsible for, we are quick to do two things: Firstly, the public anger is quickly doused with false hope which normally states that the damage is not so terrible and the earth will repair itself; secondly, we have picketed many animals within what we call game reserves which are supposed to mimic their natural environments and fight their extinction-in reality, this does nothing as much to help conservation efforts of preserving nature’s flora and fauna in the midst of and against our titanic machines than placating our social conscience. The point is that we see ourselves as apart from nature and so we think we can intervene and conceive ideas that seem great in the short term but serve for nothing as far as the future of humans matters. They will surely live in a different world than ours-the children of tomorrow. What we can do is to make sure that the world they live in, is not worse than the one we live in now which was bequeathed to us from the industrial revolution in a state of near putrefaction.
Just last week, with all the hopes that the numbers of pandas are growing, a pregnant panda was attended to by experienced veterinary doctors in a French zoo with very modern equipment that many pregnant women do not have the luxury to access-yet one of the twin pandas that was born sadly died.
Although I am very happy like the rest of the world, that the mother panda and one of her cubs are doing well, I am also saddened by the loss of the first twin panda cub that was born in the zoo. I think that we need to draw a line on how we interact with nature before we set off a chain reaction that is irreversibly destructive for the future of all of us-our descendants.