Wednesday, September 19, 2007 Osmeña: Human impact on the environment By Antonio V. Osmeña Estatements
UNTIL about 10,000 years ago people either lived by hunting, fishing and gathering edible plants, tubers and roots, or they perished. Today, fewer than one percent of the earth’s inhabitants live by hunting and gathering.
The J-shaped curves (which depicts exponential or geometric growth, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32..) of increasing population, resource use and pollution are merely symptoms of this fundamental cultural change from humans as hunter-gatherers to humans as shepherds and tillers to humans in industrial society.
Our early hunter-gatherer ancestors cooperated by living in small bands or tribes — clusters of several families, typically consisting of no more than 50 persons. The size of each band was limited by the availability of food. If a group got too large it split up. Sometimes, these widely scattered bands had no permanent base, traveling around their territory to find plants and animals they needed to exist.
Many people tend to believe that hunter-gatherers spent most of their time in a “tooth and claw” struggle to stay alive.
But research among hunter-gatherer societies in remote parts of the world casts doubt on this idea. These “primitive” people may hunt for a week and then spend a month on vacation. They have no bosses, suffer from less stress and anxiety than post “modern” people, and have a diet richer and more diverse than that of almost everyone else in the world today, rich and poor alike.
Life in early hunter-gatherer societies, however, was harsh. About 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, there began one of the most significant changes in human history. People learned how to herd game instead of hunting it, and they invented agriculture to grow selected wild plants close to home instead of having to go out and gather them from a large area.
Over several thousand years, the importance of hunting and gathering declined as more and more people became shepherds and farmers. The development of agriculture brought about a fundamental modification in the humans’ relationship with the environment, as more and more people began shifting from hunter-gatherers (one in nature) to shepherds, farmers and urban dwellers (who are against nature).
Humans have learned how to find and use more and more energy in their attempts to change and control the environment.
The gradual rise of industrial societies, fueled by energy from fossil fuels, has allowed the creation of many useful products and has raised the standard of living of many people throughout the world. At the same time, it has intensified many existing environmental problems and created a series of new ones.
By learning to put some of the earth’s chemical resources together in new ways, industries have produced metal alloys, plastics, agricultural pesticides and fertilizers and medicines. But pollution from DDT, lead, mercury, PCBs, solid wastes, radioactive wastes and a host of other chemicals has also increased.
The increase in mining activities to provide industries with raw materials has disrupted more and more of the earth’s surface and has threatened plant and animal species.
By decreasing the need for most people to engage in agriculture, industrial society has caused massive shifts of population from rural to urban areas — creating a new array of social, political, economic and environmental problems.
The benefits of the industrial revolution are great. Very few people would propose that we abandon the technological achievements of the past few hundred years. Increasingly, however, our time, energy, money and new forms of technology must be used to correct the ill effects of earlier technological advances.
We are learning that in many cases the more we try to control nature, the less control we have.
There are now exciting and important indications that we may be ready to move into a new phase of cultural evolution — the transition, from an agricultural-industrial society based on humans against nature to a sustainable earth society based on humans learning to cooperate with nature rather than blindly attempting to control it.
A growing number of people are beginning to see themselves as belonging to a global tribe whose cooperative efforts are necessary for the survival of everyone in an age threatened with destruction.
