Environmental Protection - We are at a crisis point !

Environmental Protection

With regard to environmental protection, I feel that it is the top priority because at present we are all walking down the path of self-destruction at a progressively increasing and alarming rate. In the prologue, I mentioned my own weakness in mathematics. Now I have come to understand that knowledge in this discipline is indispensable in life. As regards the environment, the damages we have already done to date are growing according to an exponential function just like the over-population problem. As the famous physicist, Albert A. Bartlett wrote ;- “ The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function. “ There was this legend about the inventor of the game of chess in ancient times who pleased the king so much with her interesting and challenging game that she was granted a wish for anything by his majesty. She only asked for two grains of wheat to be placed on the first square of the chess board and that the number be doubled progressively on each and everyone of all the remaining 63 squares. The king was tricked into granting this apparently insignificant wish. It turned out that 2 to the power of 63 represented more than all the wheat produced by human beings in the entire history of the world. The reader may recall that the total number of atoms in the whole universe is 10 to the power of 78. Applying the exponential amplification to environmental problems such as waste matters produced by a exponentially increasing population, it can easily be seen that there is no such thing as sustainable growth or sustainable exploitation of resources. There is a very interesting analogy between our brain and population growth. According to his book, The Mind, Anthony Smith noticed that the human brain has 15 billion nerve cells which is about three times the total world population. The brain cells also multiply by exponential amplification. It takes only 33 doubling of the first nerve cell to reach 15 billion. To attain half that number, it takes 32.

The lesson to be learned here is that all the previous doublings up to 32 seem insignificant. The problem of over-population and man-made waste is the same. When the problem really appears to be overwhelming such as when the world is half-full of people, it only takes one more doubling which will only require the same time cycle as each and everyone of the previous doubling up to the half-way mark ( much more quickly than you can imagine ) in terms of physical capacity to make a full house on our planet. Our minds work on a linear scale. Thus, we treat 33 as only 1 additional number from 32. We cannot visualize the exponential effect until we actually see the imminent result of the second last doubling which would be too late. Therefore, I consider environmental problems which very often work on exponential amplification as the most urgent of all human problems.

The second reason why I have, apart from mathematical reason, ranked environmental protection as the biggest of all human problems is the fact that it does not kill us immediately but will definitely do so in time and not in the too far distant future at the present rate of destruction. Damaging our precious environment is like taking slow poison. You would not feel the pain until it is too late. As the accumulated effect reaches the critical limit ( in the same sense as that used in the Theory of Chaos and Complexity ), one extra push no matter how insignificant it may seem will spell instant destruction of our Big Blue Marble and all living things in it. The worse part of it all is the frightening prospect that we might all perish out of ignorance and in the comfortably dead calm before the storm. In our ignorance and complacency, we have acquired very bad habits of carrying on ecologically unfriendly practices that cannot be easily changed ( such as the excessive and indiscriminate use of plastic bags ) due to the adverse conditioning of our brain. As such, we will inevitably pass on our bad habits to succeeding generations thus hastening the deterioration of the environment. We must wake up before it is too late. It is now the eleventh hour already. Let us all heed nature's warning signs such as abnornmal weather conditions and disastrous meteological phenomenon like the El Nino Efffects to muster a global effort in concert to stop and hopefully to reverse the damages while we still can.

The deforestation of the Amazon equatorial rain forest is a case in point. Out of greed, commercial enterprises in collusion with ill-advised governments have carried out indiscriminately, so-called sustainable exploitations of lumber and other minerals in this largest of all ecological systems in the world that can regulate the oxygen and carbon dioxide levels in our atmosphere. Wholesale destruction of the forest in the size of a whole city is a daily routine in this region of precious natural resources. A conservative estimate put the extinction rates of scarce animal species including many rare insects at the hundreds and rarer still plants including many with disease healing potentials ( for killer disease such as AIDS ) at the thousands. Many of such rare species of animals and plants have not yet been studied or discovered by scientists but already they are lost to us forever. All these tragic events happened because of the lowest of all motives which is greed. All these wholesale exterminations of life for a few lousy bucks not a single cent of which we can take away when we leave this world. Such stupidity is compounded by the limited human capacity to enjoy earthly goods as explained in chapter (x) – What I believe – Of Money and Men. Furthrmore, it is very often just a number game for the greedy entrepreneurs who may be earning money for its own sake without even bordering to find the time to enjoy it notwithstanding their already limited capacity to enjoy earthly goods. It has frequently been argued by eloquent corporate custodians that their duty is to maximize the the investment return of their shareholders and this fact constitutes their sacred mandate to turn on their greed engine to maximum capacity in the senseless pursuit of profits no matter what. Their sacred duty is to make profit for their shareholders ? My foot ! It is all a matter of personal greed on the part of some corrupt corporate custodians to line up their own money belts and to fatten their piggy banks just as in the imfamous Eron case in USA. Why should the whole human race and all living organisms suffer such a miserable fate because of just a handful of these greedy and heartless crooks ?

All in all, the profit motive which is so very often glorified in the capitalistic system is nothiing but a senseless pursuit based on ignorance and selfishness that has led to this great catastrophy for the whole human race. Enough is enough. Let us put a stop to such madness here and now ! Just to give you a more graphic example of the deadly nature of our environmental problem. It can be compared to the deadly disease of liver cancer. This type of cancer is so deadly because it silently creeps upon the victim. Like all forms of cancer the definite cause has not been confirmed. However, it is most likely to be the result of faulty genes and it has a very high correlation ( not causation ) with hepatitis B and heavy alcohol abuse that will adversely affect our liver function. As hepatitis B is very common among the Southern Chinese population ( about one tenth of the population are carriers of the virus ), about one-third of the carriers of the virus have the chance of developing liver cancer at their old age. The most dreadful part of this kind of cancer is that it will not noticeably affect the liver functions and the organ can continue to work normally until about one-third of the liver cells have been contaminated by the cancerous cells so that there are no conspicuous warning signs unless under observation by ultrasound or CT scanning. Therefore, by the time the victim notices his or her own liver malfunction, the condition is likely to be terminal. It is the same with environmental pollution. When the noticeable signs are detected it may be too late to reverse the damages which multiply by exponential amplification.

The appropriate measures that should be taken in order to solve our progressing environmental disaster should be three fold. For the long-term, education is the appropriate tool to cultivate a new generation of environmentally conscious citizens. In the medium term, there must be effective enforcement of environmentally friendly laws and regulations to prevent and apprehend the greedy culprits who damage the environment to achieve their own selfish ends. In the short term, the more urgent problems such as green house gas emissions, deforestation and pollution of the oceans must be dealt with through immediate international co-operation and joint global efforts to stop the on going irreversible damages to the environment. Most importantly, all countries must put aside their political differences and selfish economic agenda to make a genuine effort towards the vital goal of environmental protection before it is too late. Admittedly, there have been international conferences such as the Kyoto Protocol to limit green house gas emissions but countries like the USA and Australia have refused to sign the treaty on the ground that it does not take into account their particular economic objectives and so-called special circumstances. Such excuses are untenable and must be done away with immediately to comply with the paramount global objective of environmental preservation which surpasses all other national goals. TOEL ( Theory of Everything in Life ) can be useful with regard to environmental protection because the principles of intergeneration education, a genuine sense of social responsibility and respect for all life and things are an integral part of TOEL as will be seen in greater detail in the final chapter of this book. ( Link to my book from which this note is extracted - " The Universe - A Personal View " -https://docs.google.com/fileview?id=F.a019e174-7abb-427e-b264-ecc7bdcc5fc3&hl=en  )

Joseph K.H. Cheng