Oldal 10 [10]
8 ] THE Puttosopuy or Eco-Pozrrics
When I was born — nigh on 74 years ago — two and a half billion
people lived on Earth. Today there are more than seven and a half
billion of us. At that time, in the mid-twentieth century, there was at
least this comfort in the fight to the death being engaged in by people¬
groups and worldviews: that whatever we humans do to each other is
only irreparable in a moral sense. It is not irreversible, because since the
resources of the planet are inexhaustible, how we manage them depends
upon our ingenuity alone. Thus, the damning consequences of our
actions may yet be reversed by a wiser generation. After the horrors of
two world wars, the survivors still had ground to believe that if the
nations were not striving to subjugate and pillage one another, but
instead were to compete in mining the resources of nature, then they
could create a more peaceful and happier world for themselves. The
breath-taking development of technology fuelled this hope and the
disappearance of the rich variety of lifeforms, even if perceived, seemed
for a long time an acceptable price in the eyes of the millions who shared
the spoils of the total war on nature. As for those who were left out of
the spoils, whose pre-existing way of life, livelihood, health and integrity
of environment crossed the path of triumphant progress and suddenly
vanished, they demanded for themselves the right to turn from victims
into perpetrators all the more (let us admit that they did not have much
choice left).
Thus could it happen that humanity did not attempt to leave the path
leading to foreseeable destruction even when more than scientific
predictions testified to its unviability. Climate change, soil degradation,
the scarcity of drinking water, new types of diseases and new types of war
(for the remaining resources) have become part of our everyday
experience, as has the new migration: the mass arrival on the wealthier
continents of the victims of overpopulation, desertification and spreading
violence. The number of our species has tripled during the lifespan of a
single generation and the vegetation has suddenly disappeared from the
greater part of the surface of the planet. The wild has been replaced by
agricultural monocultures unsustainable without continuous human
intervention. Today man and his livestock make up 95% of the total body
weight of all terrestrial vertebrates. This means that the sixth great mass
extinction in the life of our planet has effectively come to a close. This
one differs from its predecessors in that it is happening as the consequence
of the population explosion of one single invasive species, homo sapiens,
with unprecedented speed and on a planetary scale in the blink of an eye.
It could also be put by saying that the time of history has just met the