So in an ideal
scenario, what we need to focus our attention towards right now are
technologies that allow us to grow as a population without putting additional
strain on our planet. Here I am talking about cloning, synthetic food, clean
energy, floating cities and all that other sci-fi stuff you see on Discovery Channel
and National Geographic Channel. The thing is that most of this stuff is no
longer sci-fi, the technologies are there, but nobody wants to put money into
it to make it more efficient and streamlined. As long as there are still fossil
fuels left, people can still make money off of it, and nobody is going to care
about alternative energies, even if the dangers of the future when their resources
run out, are being put right in front of their nose. They are making money right
now, why worry about the future? The danger of contentment.
Other times it is
simply a matter of survival rather than greed. The plantation owners in Sabah
want to make money to make a better life for their children, ordinary small
time land owners as well, so they are forced to cut down the rainforest to
produce more palm oil. The fishermen in the Philippines want to catch fish to
feed their children. None of these think about conservation issues long-term, but
after all why should they? Are we any better in the western world? Who are we
to tell third world countries that they can’t harvest their own natural
resources when we have been doing exactly that for the past thousands of years
in the western world? The old forests of Europe are all but gone. The North Sea
is completely overfished. We want to be able to go on holiday and see wild
animals, when in another time we could have done that in our backyard. Ironically,
in poorer countries, eco-tourism is one of the only reasons for preserving the
natural world. This again illustrates the power of contentment, or put more
bluntly: the power of money. Animals can keep existing, as long as they make us
money. If they are not making money, herein lies nature’s greatest threat. Then,
sadly, it will not be missed until it’s gone. And even then, putting my transcender
hat back on, in a couple of generations, given that we are still here, who’s
gonna care? I mean how many alive today care about the Tasmanian tiger, the
dodo? Conservationists, probably. But not many others I fear. The Jurassic Park
of the future will be like the rainforest of our present.
This is not a stupid
idea, in fact I think it could be one of the solutions we are looking for. In Jurassic Park the scientists struggle to
find intact dinosaur DNA to re-create species with modern cloning technology.
This is allegedly happening right now with the mammoth. So why don’t we keep a
record of every living species’ DNA and make a virtual Noah’s Ark to use in a
future when we have the technology to survive without harvesting natural
resources. To my happy surprise I realized recently that this is already being
done, such as for instance in the Global Seed Vault in Svalbard or the Frozen
Zoo in San Diego. To play it safe I think we should do this with as many
species as possible and then when we have the means and the opportunity, we
could gather humans together in super cities and make space for continent sized
national parks. Transnational parks are beginning to spring up in Africa
already. One day, if we become a Type II civilization, we might even have
entire Earth-like planets at our disposal to use solely as animal reserves.
Imagine a whole planet sized national park, with no resident human population
because we would reside on other planets. Then conservationists would be out of
a job, the true utopia of their dreams and of the past, would be reality. This
is an end goal that would be worth fighting for and beneficial for all. I might
be getting lost in the forest of my own optimism now, but this does not change
the facts about the challenges that lie ahead and what needs to be done to
overcome them. There are no quick fixes to these issues even though many leaders
like to convince people that there are. Such leaders will be described further
in the following post.
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