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As a child my dreams were of faraway places. One of my earliest memories is of an old atlas. I would look at it frequently and in time it dawned on me that there was a road from Edinburgh, where I lived, to London and another from London to the coast where a boat could take me to France. I looked at Europe again and again, began to recognise first Italy, then its neighbour Greece. To the right of Greece was Turkey and further down Palestine, still coloured Empire pink. I wanted to know what came next and tried to follow the map onto the next page but was confused by the differences of scale. Eventually I made out Persia and the red triangle of India. Lands that had once been as fictitious as Wonderland and Narnia leapt into life, complete with fezzes and loincloths, elephants and rope-tricks, endless deserts and blazing sun.* It was a revelation, and for a year or two, when I was eight or nine, I had every intention of leaving home on my eighteenth birthday, on a bicycle with panniers holding what little I needed, to ride off to explore the world, perhaps never to come back. And while I did not yet have an adult's bike, I had the oilskin cloak that my grandfather had worn as a soldier in the First World War and which would protect me from rain during the day and be my groundsheet in the fields that I would inevitably sleep in at night. I never fulfilled that dream, and now I fear it is too late. Not because I am too old to cycle thousands of miles - although that date is fast approaching - but because the world I wanted to see no longer exists. Indeed, even then it existed more in my imagination than in reality. Certainly, by the time I reached adulthood, the last deserted beach had been discovered, there was no civilisation where English, neckties and Coca-Cola were unknown and no distant jungle where a white man could disappear, a hero or Conrad failure with only his integrity or conscience as companion. The world I discovered as a young adult still entranced. I could sleep on Greek beaches and be woken by the sound of goatbells. High in the mountains of Bolivia, shivering under layers of clothing, I could drink an unidentified soup and realise I had last spoken to my family six months before. I learnt languages because no-one spoke my own, spent three days on a bus churning through the mud in the depths of Brazil. Even that world has disappeared. The mud road has long been replaced by tarmac, Greek beaches are out of bounds and the telephone and internet allow daily communication from the other side of the world. MTV is everywhere and Manchester United is the world's favourite football team. And in place of many cultures, we have but three or four: American and Islam, Han and Hindu all demanding their place in the sun. But the change that concerns me most is physical, not cultural. The Global Environment Outlook, published last week points out that by 2032, up to 70% of the earth's surface will be suffering the severe impact of man's activities, through the building of roads and cities and mining and deforestation. One in four of the world's mammal species will have disappeared. We have already lost a third of the world's potential fishing stock. Climactic change - the results of increasing amounts of human-made carbon dioxide in the atmosphere - is getting worse. And these are only the changes to the natural environment. The human condition is deteriorating rapidly too. Yes, increasing numbers of us live in comfortable houses, eat and dress well and spend our leisure time surfing the internet or watching the latest Holly- or Bollywood film, but there are more people in absolute poverty today than were alive a hundred years ago. Billions have no access to fresh water. Millions die of malnutrition and easily preventable diseases, such as diarrhoea - yes, diarrhoea - and malaria. And the situation is rapidly getting worse. Those of us in the rich countries - that is almost certainly you, dear reader - will continue to drive or ride cars, fly abroad on business or on vacation, eat imported food, drink from plastic bottles and throw away plastic bags. We will admit sheepishly that some of our actions are harmful and argue that others give much needed employment to some poor person somewhere - a specious argument, because while we all should have the ability to feed, clothe and shelter ourselves, what we mean is that our lifestyle will help others to become as profligate as we are. Despite our denials, despite our tortuous arguments, we know, you and I, that our lifestyles are destructive, that every day we dig up the planet and cover it with our detritus, that our legacy is desolation and destruction. But we are too comfortable, too lazy, too afraid, to change our lifestyles as radically as we must if we are to maintain the world in its current parlous state, far less return it to an earlier state. So those of us who are rich will continue to destroy our environment, while those of us who are poor - Indians, Chinese and their smaller cousins and siblings - not surprisingly insist on our right to do the same, to build the air-conditioned buildings, drive the gadget-laden cars and buy and throw away the latest computers and gameboys as eagerly as the rest of us. And we will do so, not because we are evil, or even because we are stupid, but because we are made that way. It is in our genes, our psyche, our soul or whatever word you want to use to describe the human condition. We are intelligent beings, but our intelligence is never able to fully flex its muscles. It held back by myopia, the inability to understand fully the consequences of our own actions. And so the decisions each of us make are usually based on what is best for me now, occasionally based on what is best for me in the long-term, but are never based on what is best for all of us in the long-term. Perhaps it does not matter if in the next one hundred years the entire world is concreted over and our food and air are produced in giant undersea factories. Perhaps the next stage of evolution is into some abstract existence where stimulation of the mind takes precedence of stimulation of the senses. I doubt that is our future, but even if it were, it is a future we are stumbling blindly into, not an alternative that have chosen as the best possible path. So George Bush refuses to ratify the Kyoto environment treaty, because it damages American economic interests; he is either unable to see that failure to ratify damages the interests of all Americans in the future, or if he does see it (to grant him a perspicacity I doubt he has) he does not care. And Joe Bloggs can buy a Macdonald's meal because he's hungry now and it tastes good and it's available, and he is either unaware of the damage it creates to the physical and cultural environment or his own health, or if he is aware, he does not care. I know I am as guilty as the rest. I buy clothes, books, CDs, food, furniture I do not need and send sackfills of rubbish to landfill sites every week. I fly frequently, risking my own health and damaging the environment through the fuel consumed and the airports that increasingly need to be built or extended. I do not own a car, but hire one regularly. I take plastic bags from supermarkets, drink water from plastic bottles. I do these things because I am lazy, because they make me feel good, they gratify my immediate desires. I will not be here a hundred years from now, so what do I care about the future? I can pretend to salve my conscience in a handwringing essay but the gesture is meaningless. In my last column I described world's nations as children, and the United States as overgrown and retarded . In fact we are everyone of us children, unsupervised, still subject to impulse, still incapable of adapting our behaviour to its long-term consequences. Rich children having too much fun and poor children too hungry to realise we are destroying paradise. 27 May 2002 |
| 29 May 2002 |
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© Martin Foreman |