The Reconstruction of the Biosphere

We’d all seen it coming for decades – seen what would happen to the world if we’d go on like this. And yet we still did. By the mid-twentieth century, biodiversity was decimated. And yet, this still wasn’t enough. Many scientists endeavoured to diminish or even reverse our impact on environment, of course, but rarely did they receive very much support – at least, rarely did they receive the support they deserved, reckoning the magnitude of what was happening. Because it all came so gradually, it took a while before drastic measures were taken. This happened when the calamity finally became life-threatening not only to other species but also to man himself.

The biosphere is like a body and we are a single tissue dependent on it. If the rest of the body fails, we fail. We are not the disease, but the vector of the disease. Humankind was like a tumor destroying its host and so ultimately destroying itself. And all of the machinery they had by then thought up could not suffice to replace the complex machinery of the biosphere. What nature had created in billions of years, we could not recreate in a matter of years. It was then that the government of the world powers finally flinched and really became aware that what was happening to the biosphere was probably more important than all the futilities they were debating for years and years on end without getting anywhere. By then the global cataclysm that had been wrecking the world for over a century, and they’d known it all that time. But in their selfishness, only when the western world itself was threatened with famine, they took serious measures, rather than treating it as a low-priority matter which could wait for others. Much more could have been done about it. But they just postponed it.

Through the mouth of his famous character Prince Myshkin, “The Idiot,” Dostoevsky famously said that “Beauty will save the world.” Indeed, beauty is the seed of enlightenment, and enlightenment would be the salvation of the world. But now, beauty itself had to be saved. For as nature wasted away, her beauty dwindled. Humanity became so detached from beauty that they no longer knew of its existence. Decadence replaced the value of beauty, for in their consumption society it was all they had, all that could offer them refuge from the emptiness of their lives. The beauty of nature became something distant, something almost legendary. Many of the creatures that had one flourished on the Earth became myths, incredible, almost implausible in their fantasticality – the tiger, for instance, seemed to belong in fairy tales, and some of the most benighted even believe they actually were a mere concoction of human fancy. In truth, the tiger still lived in some reserves, but in such small numbers that almost none were allowed to see them with their own eyes, or even enter the reserves. Unfortunately, these did not last long either because of inbreeding.