The Price of Progress

Especially when I go diving I find myself longing for a time machine to go back a couple of centuries till before the industrial revolution to what by today’s standards would seem like a complete utopia. The human population at the time did not have enough of an impact on the animal populations of the world to create any significant changes. The oceans would have been teeming with sharks, dolphins, turtles and everything else. Evolution and the anthropic principle would have led to healthy perfectly adapted ecosystems that encouraged life in all forms. I remember realizing this during my divemaster course in Sydney. We did most of our diving in Botany Bay, the same bay where James Cook little over 200 years earlier made his first landfall in Australia. Visiting the Cook monument one day I read about the biologist who came with Cook on the Endeavour and his tales of all the amazing and abundant species they discovered in this almost untouched land. Having dived extensively in the bay, it gave me my first sense of perspective on how much in decline the natural world had been since the industrial revolution. Yes, this of course made me sad. 

Spending lots of time in the jungles of Borneo later on, seeing the extent that palm oil plantations have taken over what used to be primary forest, habitat for iconic species such as our closest living relative, the orangutan, but also clouded leopards, sunbears and countless others, obviously concerns and troubles me as well. On a micro-scale. But as soon as I put on my transcender hat it suddenly has less of an impact. This epiphany began in the waiting room of the director of the State Archive of Sabah, in the city of Kota Kinabalu where I resided at the time. Here I was looking at pictures of the city in the early 20^th century. This tiny village surrounded by jungle and then I thought further on and imagined how undeveloped all of Borneo was back then. Extending that notion to a similar discovery I made a Te Papa National Museum in Wellington, New Zealand. Those islands were completely covered in forest before Cook arrived there and the museum had maps showing how much and how fast this forest had been cut down since the arrival of additional settlers. Going back even further, Europe back in ancient times like the Stone Age, was covered almost completely with forests. Humans slowly took care of that though, and turned it into a more livable habitat for their frail bodies and cleared the land to give way to agriculture to feed the growing populations. All this information dawned on me and I suddenly realized that our progress as a species necessitated all this development. Without it, we would have a healthy natural world yes, but we would also still be living in isolated groups with no modern technology. In other words, to arrive at our current position as the apex species of this planet, and now its best hope for the future, it would have been impossible to leave the natural world intact. Some eggs had to be broken to make the omelet of modern society. And although there are some people who would consider that price too high, to convince everyone else to regress to a more primitive society now is an uphill battle, and in my opinion creates a paradox which I will explain further later. 

Essentially some conservation today is clashing with human development which should maybe take precedence if we look at our species in a macro-perspective. In an extreme macro-perspective, most contemporary conservation efforts do not really matter at all, rather it’s like polishing the brass on the Titanic, to use one of my favorite analogies. In other words, conservation today is primarily focusing on micro-solutions which in the long run will never make any massive difference. The brass on the Titanic might look flawless, but that doesn’t matter if the whole ship is going down. On a long enough timeline, a macro-timeline, conservation is a losing battle because our planet itself will eventually be destroyed, by the Universal Clockwork or maybe even by our own hand before its time. Taking that into consideration, our focus should maybe lie elsewhere by looking inwards at our own species and focus on furthering our own evolution before we try and save others, and with a little luck everyone can have a happy ending and we can salvage our natural world, or at least what’s left of it, for the time being and perhaps even further on. But to do so requires progress. Bear with me and allow me to elaborate in the coming posts.