Oldal 10 [10]
OCR
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 peoplegroups 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 The wild has been replaced by agricultural monocultures unsustainable without continuous human intervention.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
