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Monkeying around in the family tree

By Colin Samundsett - posted Wednesday, 9 November 2005


While technology to the benefit of societies’ health made great advances prior to 1950, microbiology and pharmacology came to the fore since then in minimising disease. And rates of premature death plummeted.

In concert with the capacity to foster the availability of human necessities and minimisation of premature death, our numbers escalated. The average annual increase of human numbers, from 10,000BC to 1800, at 1800, 1950, and 2005, were respectively, just 800, then five million, 25 million, and 75 million.

Now our family tree is rented out to six and a half billion people. It is a nice piece of real estate for about 20 per cent, just so-so for many, and damned miserable for the rest of them. There are changes on the horizon, but not because of the cerebral aptitude implied by our species’ name.

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After two centuries of unfettered access, we will see the end of cheap fossil fuel. There are no cheap and convenient alternatives to underpin our society to the same extent. Agriculture, transport, housing and everything associated with them - the whole economic system - will be severely disaffected. It will be a sliding scale of unhappy adjustment. Starting, gently, from - yesterday? There is every reason to expect that it will be bad - and it will be unnecessarily so.

Neither has the waste produced from two centuries of industrial mayhem improved prospects for our descendants. We can’t yet accurately quantify the extent of damage visited upon the climate to which we have become so finely adjusted. But there is certainty that human activities have not been beneficial, and that they could cause catastrophe. Sadly, if disaster does come, it could have been avoided.

There exists every indication that we are wrecking the planet sustaining us - even though only 20 per cent of present humans are living the life of Riley. That 20 per cent could cut down on consumption of resources. But even so, there are only so many places available at the table for nature’s mighty feast. And yet, the human world works hard to ensure that the queue for places gets extended.

What bitter-sweet irony, should monumental success be achieved in ridding the world of scourges such as dysentery, malnutrition, malaria, AIDS, warfare - those steady brakes on the rate of population increase, currently standing at 1.3 per cent in spite of them.

Of course we want those horrors gone. But, if there is an “intelligent” design, we are in danger of losing our licence to tinker with it. We have altered just one side of a system designed to balance by minimising premature death while promoting excess births.

In quick time we will have stripped the family tree bare. Its lifeless branches will be untended. Maybe the last out of it will hang up a sign “Homo sapiens sapiens was here”. Maybe our closest cousin, the bonobo, will stretch over from the family tree adjoining ours to make an appropriate adjustment: “Homo bloody stupidus was here”.

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If it is allied to the use of intelligence, civilised behaviour is still in short supply today as we strive to outdo the fecundity of the rabbit. 

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About the Author

Colin Samundsett has particular interests in social and environmental interaction, the spirituality of being part of a landscape upon which we depend – as so intuitively described by Dr Alan Newsome in Ecomythology of the Red Kangaroo.

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All articles by Colin Samundsett

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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