| Evolution and Taboo |
Links to chapters on this page
Man against Creation
Man against Biodiversity
The Failure of Religions
Is Only Man Worth Saving?
Forces that Counteract Population Reduction
If we are unable to curb the activities of multinational timber companies in the last remaining patches of natural woods, there may be no rain forest within forty years!
If we insist on doubling the capacity of fishery fleets every ten years, just to satisfy the market and to maintain jobs, there may well be neither fish left to feed the growing population nor jobs in fisheries.
160 million years of evolution are to be stopped within a few years.
If you believe in a creator, then consider this:
God's creation is still going on, even though certain school authorities in the midwest of the allegedly most progressive nation on the planet don't even recognise Darwin's fundamental work.
Apart from our cradle, the ocean, rain forests are the great laboratories of evolution. We are endevouring to destroy both biotopes and have the arrogance to call it development.
The wonderful sites of biological diversity, where there are more species than even science can list, where new life-forms evolve time and again, are to be sacrificed to the short-sightedness of a mammal gone mad. The only animal that ever succeeded to eliminate natural control over its own proliferation.
Each day more species of plants and animals disappear forever, even before they are properly catalogued.
Is the impoverishment of biodiversity desirable?
Certainly not, there is simply not enough room for biodiversity besides the runaway human hordes.
Some politicians seem aware of the dangers entailed by the blind exploitation of resources. Their help, however, is limited to topical measures involving the provision of funds, the delegation of experts in medicine, agriculture or education. These symptomatic treatments may have their effects, but never is the crisis tackled by its roots. Under no circumstances will the one measure be applied, that would bring long-term success, namely a reduction of world population.
May we ever expect our politicians to recognise coherence in nature?
The environment is more than just a beautiful luxury. Our own survival depends directly on natural diversity and its intricate system of cycles.
Having dealt with the role of politicians, how do the religions react to this crisis?
Instead of using their immense influence and power to fight against the destruction of millions of organisms and their environment, they crusade against inconsequential human issues.
Most of them promise us a kind of continued life after death, but what about the continued life of our descendants?
Dating from a time, when man was thought to be made in the image of the creator, the scriptures long advocated the dominion of man over nature.
That was when the universe ended at the boundaries of the solar system.
Today, at least science knows how insignificant is our position in the great theatre of the cosmos.
Still, man hopelessly overestimates his importance.
If voices are raised today to save the environment in general and the rich biotopes in particular, then only because there are people living in it.
Mere rain forest without human forest dwellers is apparently not worthy of protection.
Indians and Penan are part of their forests. They have practised sustainable use long before we coined the term.
Indigenous groups may well be our only hope that at least small pockets of remaining rain forest are saved from the hordes of marauding timber companies, exploiters of ground resources, poachers, farmers and settlers.
Our present system of economy with its short-term philosophy, doesn't give a hoot what we hand down to our descendants.
With our mindless exponential population growth we manage to leave but rocks and desert in our wake.
I propose to extend anthropological terminology with a new subspecies for modern man: "homo petrifax".
Any courageous politician, capable of showing us the mirror of reality, would be quickly silenced by the industrial lobbies, the clerics as well as the majority of the voters.
We all share an unreasonable interest in the growth of population:
If one subscribes to James E. Lovelock's Gaia theory, one could interpret the new sexually transmitted diseases and the increasing so-called natural disasters as a reaction of the Earth to the uncontrolled growth of a single species threatening her destruction.
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