The Guardian's eco-scribe, George Monbiot, bemoans the rapidly accelerating disappearance of wildlife and, worse, how we come not to notice.
I have lived long enough to witness the vanishing of wild mammals, butterflies, mayflies, songbirds and fish that I once feared my grandchildren would not experience: it has all happened faster than even the pessimists predicted. Walking in the countryside or snorkelling in the sea is now as painful to me as an art lover would find visits to a gallery, if on every occasion another old master had been cut from its frame.
The cause of this acceleration is no mystery. The United Nations reports that our use of natural resources has tripled in 40 years. The great expansion of mining, logging, meat production and industrial fishing is cleansing the planet of its wild places and natural wonders. What economists proclaim as progress, ecologists recognise as ruin.
This is what has driven the quadrupling of oceanic dead zones since 1950; the “biological annihilation” represented by the astonishing collapse of vertebrate populations; the rush to carve up the last intact forests; the vanishing of coral reefs, glaciers and sea ice; the shrinkage of lakes, the drainage of wetlands. The living world is dying of consumption.
We have a fatal weakness: a failure to perceive incremental change. As natural systems shift from one state to another, we almost immediately forget what we have lost. I have to make a determined effort to remember what I saw in my youth. Could it really be true that every patch of nettles, at this time of year, was reamed with caterpillar holes? That flycatchers were so common I scarcely gave them a second glance? That the rivers, around the autumn equinox, were almost black with eels?
Out of Sight really is Out of Mind.
When our memories are wiped as clean as the land, we fail to demand its restoration. Our forgetting is a gift to industrial lobby groups and the governments that serve them.
... I will not allow myself to forget again: I will work to recover the knowledge I have lost. For I now see that without the power of memory, we cannot hope to defend the world we love.
6 comments:
Marshall McLuhan was right about technology affecting the way we think and behave. The automobile is a cocoon that enables not having to rub shoulders with the great unwashed. The telephone can lead to rudeness as someone breaks a face-to-face conversation to answer theirs or a business puts you on hold. People bury their heads in smart phones and jog with pods in their ears. Television can dominate any room. Selfishness has run amok.
How can a plea to save the environment compete with that?
It probably can't, Toby, although it's important that someone at least make that plea.
It's important that I kick the dead horse in my living room too.
I just can't remember why.
I know your frustration, Deacon. I've been kicking this dead horse for well over a decade on this blog. I get it. I won't stop, not yet anyway.
After a while one succumbs to a state of resignation and grudging acceptance, as one never feels they can do anything about whatever's around the corner.
I hear you, Tal. I feel that way myself so much that I'm embarrassed to admit it. It's just that quitting is not an option. That's laying down in the grave long before your time.
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