Question6.com: The gist of our life
We got it all wrong.
Planet earth is more than a stack of raw materials.
From the comments of the media, you would think that the climate of the earth is in the hands of the Homo sapiens. They assume that we are surrounded by matter. Planet earth is a machine, and we are on the driver’s seat. We have at our disposal a mountain of raw materials. We use the law of cause and effect to decide the future. We are the owners of planet earth, and we can use it as we please. The governments of the world are going to implement their own “human” solution!
That could be all wrong. We are not surrounded by ‘matter’. We are surrounded by ‘life’. Every week we are told of floods, earthquakes, forests fires, volcanos in eruption, tsunami, pandemic… How can we pretend that the climate of the earth is under the control of the Homo sapiens?
17 - Global warming
Let’s try an approach of global warming based on life instead of matter:
The evolution of the Homo sapiens was very slow. Nothing much happened for 300 000 years. In the past 200 years the human population has greatly increased. Many people moved to big cities and our life was completely transformed.
This is more than a coincidence. Nothing happens when the individuals are spread apart on the surface of the earth, but everything starts moving when many of them get together. This is like the animals getting close together to fight the cold in the wild. A group can succeed where individuals would perish.
Nothing happened before the human brains reached their critical mass. The problem is that we cannot unite the brains without uniting the bodies and produce a lot of pollution.
How is Nature going to react?
In the year1800 the world population was below 1 billion. Today it is more than 8 billion.
- One birth every 8 seconds
- One death every 11 seconds
- We have a net gain of one person every 35 seconds.
You don’t have to be an expert to see that this is not a normal “evolution” of mankind. It is a disruption. Many scientists agree that if everyone becomes vegetarian, the present 1.4 billion hectares of arable land (3.5 billion acres) would support about 10 billion people. It would be much less for meat eaters.
When there are too many preys, Nature increases the number of predators until some predators die of starvation and everybody gets back in line.
Our problem is: How is Nature going to handle the human extravaganza? She has many options.
- Mother Nature could reduce our use of machines: She could deplete the sources of energy that our machines are using. The main one is oil.
- Mother Nature could reduce the food available. Your skeleton must be replaced four times a year. That requires a lot of calcium in our food and our food comes from the plants. We could find that our soil can be depleted and run out of minerals, like the oil fields running out of oil.
- Nature could also use the animal kingdom. It is alive and very efficient. It has a reserve of viruses, microbes, bacteria, and many little creatures ready to be transferred to humans. We need bees to pollinate 80% of our food. We are already killing them by the millions with our pesticides. Nature has more ways to keep us in line than we can imagine.
Humans are to the planet earth what our cells are to our body. Nothing less but nothing more.
You will notice that Nature does not differentiate between countries, races, religions, or political ideologies. She does not solve a problem by creating a new one. She goes to the source of the problem and removes its cause.
We are already seeing a noticeable decrease of the population in Germany, China, Japan, South Korea. That could be a sign that Nature opted for the gentle solution. She is not going to change the place of the poles! She has done it before. She could do it again.
Nothing is sure. Many things can happen in the next two centuries. Most of us could move to another planet. So far, the sun is growing plants and we eat the plants. We may find a way to bypass the plants and get our nutrition directly from the sun. Some vitamins can only be produced by the effect of the sun on our skin. We can feel the heat of the sun on our skin. There could be something there that future generations want to investigate.
We must learn to think as a species instead of thinking as separate individuals.