Two books that attracted my
attention in last few months are Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life by
Edward Wilson and Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future by Elizabeth
Kolbert. These two books, and I am quite sure there many more, elaborates on
seriousness of crisis we are in and significant efforts being undertaken to
understand the situation, to ameliorate and adapt. The solutions that are being
explored is what makes these books important particularly for policy makers and
younger generations. People like me read these to increase awareness and
improve my understandings of issues that impacts, as also pass the awareness as
consolidated thoughts through medium like these. Access to international publications
through internet and online purchase has opened minds to amazing thoughts and
experiences from across the world. We are no longer stuck to putrefying pits of
self-obsessed mediocrities, though must add these are always in the periphery conniving
to trap into sh*tholes and then gain for their miserable lives.
Edward Wilson was iconic figure
and a charming man (there are many videos available on Youtube) -who died last
year, a myrmecologist he extended further into ecology and conservation. He
made crucial contributions to our understanding of biodiversity. Collective
intelligence of social insects was a significant step of evolution, and has
much for human learning. There are exciting fields of study like swarm
intelligence and algorithms from deep understanding of nature and scalable
patterns. Almost three thousand years back human brain shrank with rise of
collective intelligence. Collective have been repository of knowledge that
individual lacks. In recent times these have refined and consolidated through
researches, insights and applications. We maybe trapped in our individual
aspirations or drudgeries but the collective mind is expected to warn us of the
suicidal path that humanity is on. Wilson
writes “The central idea is to view the entire planet as an ecosystem, to see
Earth as it is and not as we wish it to be”. Here he brings in his thoughts,
surely accumulated through close association of a long and meaningful life,
that could help us work out solution “Given that stability in the economy and
in the environment are closely linked, they both require striving for quality
of life through self-understanding as opposed to the conventional accumulation
of material wealth, based on the assumption that the wealth can eventually be traded
for quality of life”. Technology and awareness will help us move from quantity
to quality hence consumptions that are meaningful and add value to life. Half-Earth
proposes half of planet’s surface to nature. A global network of inviolable reserves.
Many examples are given in the book wherein rich people are investing their money
in improving ecosystem. The parks and reserves are to help biodiversity thrive
but are also centers of research and education (needs to be pointed out biodiversity
rich India still appoints Forest officials on the basis of archaic exams -encouraging
manipulating mindset to score in the exam than passion for the job -specifically nature,
as job-oriented hierarchy driven mediocre bureaucrats of the mold of colonial
needs thriving on transactive and extractive value systems. I have met these, with rare exceptions are mostly wastrels. Primitive society’s
valuation of education, intelligence and fate).
It is becoming amply clear that
consolidated intelligence of religions and that of market is of least help and
is indeed anti-thesis to crisis that humanity face. It is science that
confronts reality with human faculties and enlightened thoughts and reason. Then
there are rare humans like Edward Wilson who contribute their understanding to
add to the collective thinking. He argues “Despite all our pretenses and fantasies,
we always have been and will remain a biological species tied to this
biological world. Millions of years of evolution are indelibly encoded in our
genes…wildland is our birthplace”. He proposes “Only a major shift in moral reasoning,
with greater commitment given to rest of life, can meet this greatest challenge
of the century.”
“If humanity continues its suicidal
ways to change the global climate, eliminate ecosystem, and exhaust Earth’s
natural resources, our species will very soon find itself forced into making a
choice, this time engaging the conscious part of our brain. It is as follows:
Shall we be existential conservatives, keeping our genetically based human
nature while tapering off the activities inimical to ourselves and the rest of
the biosphere? Or shall we use our technology to accommodate the changes
important solely to our own species, while letting the rest of life slip away? We
have only short time to decide.” The book ends with these perceptive lines “We
have come a very long way through the barbaric period in which we still live,
and now I believe we’ve learned enough to adopt a transcendent moral percept concerning
the rest of life. It is simple and easy to say : Do no further harm to the
biosphere."
The problem seems to be the hope filled assumption that we have come a long way from barbaric period.
