(The Nationalist, 8 December 2000)
It’s a long time now since I saw one of those cartoons of the religious crank wearing sandwich boards bearing the proclamation, The End is Nigh. Doom is at Hand. Maybe it’s because the scientist has stepped into the role.
A scientist who was until recently the director of the Botanic Gardens in Kew, London, put it like this, ‘The world is heading for disaster.’ That’s plain enough for anyone. He pointed out that, this summer, Russian scientists found open water rather than ice at the North Pole. And the recent summit on global warming at The Hague ended without agreement. There wasn’t the political will to make the hard choices. What that means is that the public, namely, you and I, were not ready to make them.
Here’s what Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute, Washington says, ‘From 1950 to 1997, the use of lumber tripled, that of paper increased sixfold, the fish catch increased nearly fivefold, grain consumption nearly tripled, fossil fuel burning nearly quadrupled, and air and water pollutants multiplied several-fold. Forests are shrinking, water tables falling, soils eroding, wetlands disappearing, fisheries collapsing, rangelands deteriorating, rivers running dry, temperatures rising, coral reefs dying, and plant and animal species disappearing.’
‘Growth for the sake of growth’, says environmentalist Edward Abbey, ‘is the ideology of the cancer cell.’ The ideology of growth knows no geographic boundaries. It has permeated every corner of the planet. Political leaders in developing countries often denounce the high levels of consumption in industrial countries, but none has talked about eventual limits on their own consumption as they modernize. No national leader of any country, no matter how affluent, has announced plans to stabilize demands on the Earth’s ecosystem once people’s basic needs for food, shelter and health care are satisfied.”’
Take trees, for example. They produce the oxygen we breathe in and remove the carbon dioxide we breathe out. We need them, they don’t need us. Yet recently the Brazilian Congress passed legislation to allow the felling of half of what remains of the Amazon rain forest, and President Putin in Russia this year gave a Korean company a free hand to exploit a large tract of the Siberian forest. For good measure, he also abolished his country’s Environmental Protection Agency. If we continue like that, there may be only one item on the human agenda before long: survival – with everything else an irrelevance.
What can one person do? This: instead of chopping down a tree for Christmas, why not put the children’s presents beside a crib? And sponsor a tree as a present for someone. Let your Christmas tree be a symbol of life, not death.