langkawi magazine
Nature SECTION
An Ocean Liner Called Earth
Imagine if you will, a very large ocean liner, carrying a large number of passengers and cargo, and proceeding on a long voyage. Imagine also, that the voyage has been well underway for a considerable period of time, without serious mishap, and a certain nonchalance has lulled all on board into a false sense of security. Everyone is having far too good of a time to notice certain little signs. Water is leaking through hair line cracks in the hull; tiny wisp of smoke are beginning to come through the vents, and some of the cargo has begun to shift dangerously to starboard. Upstairs on the bridge there is the soporific quite of inattentions, while elsewhere many of the officers have joined the passengers in whatever pleasures and distractions might be on offer.
Soon whoever, one or two passengers begin to notice that all is not going very well, and try to raise alarm, but find theirs efforts ignored by those , who by virtue of their training and profession, are appointed to look after the welfare of the vessel and all those on board. When these dangerous signs are brought to the attention of those qualified to deal with them, the plaintiffs encounter an astonishing spectacle. They find those whom they expect to rely upon for help, engaged not in effort to save the ship but in deep and speculative discussion about the history and origin of ships There they sit, locked away in the wardroom of the vessel, surrounded by the most scholarly collection of documents, books and instruments, expressing themselves in learned and abstruse fashion, and all beaming grandly at each other in an orgy of mutual admiration and self-congratulation. This grand gathering of a self-appointed and self seeking elite, show irritation at the pleas of the plaintiffs, and only redouble their efforts to pursue their obsessive speculations about events that have absolutely no bearing on the perilous state in which they will soon find themselves. They are so obsessed (for reasons well known to themselves), with unprovable theories of a long gone past, that their present now reveals them as being unwilling to deal with the catastrophic future that must surely come.
Common sense demand that they immediately stop pursuing phantoms and turn their several efforts to conserving what they have in their present, in order that they might save what is left for their future.
So it is with this vessel ‘Earth`, as we proceed on our voyage through the ocean that is our solar system. However, unlike those on board our imaginary ship, we, the inhabitants of our real vessel, ‘Earth`, are actually contributing to our own destruction by follow chaotic and unconscionable programmes of industrial, economic and social pollution and disorder. And what, pray tell, do our `experts` do in this situation? Why, they fill the universities and the scientific institutions after their own kind, and relentlessly pursue useless theories about the pass origins of species, which have no bearing whatsoever on the systematic extinction of species in their present, and which must surely result in a future devoid of living creatures of any quantity or quality.
2004
