The idea of order

"Heavy rains disrupt life in Andhra & Tamil Nadu..." reads the headline in a newspaper. 

How easily we declare the aberration in 'natural' pattern of life due to a natural event! Little do we realize that it is we who have become unnatural through our lifestyles. Never has nature been regular - that is the property of machines, & even they need repair. Our understanding of nature is limited to the last 200 years or so of data collection that has started with the industrial age. It is defined as highly erratic, with broad order manifested in the cycle of seasons, sunrise-sunset, moon phases - all connected to the rotation of heavenly bodies. The apparently disorderly event that the newspaper has described is actually micro-scale aberration for the earth, too small to even register. Such aberration could be found in any machine or mechanism. To present an analogy, we are like ants on the back of the blue whale - any change in its surface due to changes in breathing cycle, or manouvring in the oceans brings our lives to a halt.

We do know now that a small solar flare can bring down all of our communications and satellites,a small meteor can destroy areas as large as Siberia, a small cyclone can hold the whole East Indian seaboard to ransom, a tremor in the earth's bed lead to earthquakes or tsunamis. And there is nothing on earth that we - the great human race - 6 billion strong, can do about it other than run for our lives.

Yet, we are arrogant to to point of obvious self-destruction - mining deeper & deeper without understanding its long term / large scale impacts, stopping the mighty rivers without knowing when they will avenge themselves, changing the atmospheric balance without thinking of the changes in temperature, pressure, global wind cycle it will bring about. Our arrogance and greed blinds us from the simple understanding that the whole earth is one interconnected system - clip the nose and the mouth will open. The already waterfall effect of our destructive greed is apparent in the large scale (for us) changes around the globe. 

What's in it for the earth? Like i said, its just a case of lice infestation for the earth - the lice being us. First there will be light brushing, if that doesn't work, some vigorous shaking and finally a strong medicine to counter the mischief mongers. We may go back to stone age - or even cease to exist, but life shall go on in some other form, in some other way - maybe after a few million years again - a time that is just a moment's pause for the earth.

We pride ourselves in being great thinkers - the greatest of all among all living organisms. Yet how oblivious we are to the long term impacts of our momentary greed to accumulate. These theories of capitalism, democracy, economics - none provide a view beyond one human lifetime. In our 1,00,000 year history, this is the amount of foresight we have - conscious or unconscious ONE HUNDRED YEARS! That is why all economics fails to explain the true value of natural resources - its computations fail beyond this limit of foresight - its calculations of inflation, scarcity, demand and supply cannot last beyond a lifetime. We speculate in oil, metals, stocks. But we are forgetting the fast reducing supply of water, biomass, land - can we even gear ourselves to speculate for that?

Any local municipality in India charges about Rs. 7 - 20 ($ 0.15 - 0.5) per kilo liter (1000 liters), while a bottle of packaged drinking water sells for Rs. 12 per liter (Rs. 12,000 per kilo liter). However, put in perspective of human population increase and demand with respect to availability of water, its easy to see that very soon we'll be paying Rs. 12 per liter for municipal supply and packaged drinking water will sell at the cost of a permium bottle of wine! But that will happen before the actual scarcity hits us - capitalists will start speculating soon enough and inflate the prices!

Looking at the history of oil prices, we have learnt that any amount of increase does not lead to a decrease in demand. We can however, start looking at alternative fuels and supplement / replace oil with these over the next century. But can we find a replacement for drinking water? 

The point - natural resources are sustained only in a sense of balance controlled by the earth. Any activity - human or otherwise that disturbs this balance leads to disastrous results - the scale or timeline of which we have no way for forseeing or forecasting. Its better to prevent than to cure - but as far as our natural gifts are concerned - we haven't learnt our lessons yet.This is the idea of order that we need to understand - the natural order - where we are just one of the gears in the system, we don't dominate it, we cannot control it - we can only follow. This order will soon turn into disorder and the only rusty bolt responsible is us!

Posted via email from sandylief