Time is up! All humans, men and women, are guilty as charged! Guilty of abusing other species and the natural world we depend on; guilty, either by greed or ignorance, of abusing other species that sustain our own and driving them to expedient extinction. Wild life, big and small, is briskly moving towards a vanishing point. From the seas to the land and the skies, the global species disappearing act has reached a catastrophic and probably unstoppable momentum. Mammals are dying, fish are dying, birds and insects are dying. Imagine a world as quiet as Nevada’s Death Valley in the summer. A world without trees, insects, and birds, where the heat can reach an unbearable 45 degree Celsius. Imagine a silent world of death.
“Progress would be wondcrful if only it would stop”, Robert Musil (Asian Development Bank archive)
The Austrian author, Robert Musil, wrote, almost prophetically, in his grand philosophical novel opus, The Man Without Quality, started in 1921, but published incomplete posthumously in 1943, that “mathematics is the source of a wicked intellect that, while making man the Lord of the Earth, also makes him slave of the machine.” Musil was referring to his book’s main character, the rather cynical Ulrich. Musil’s own cynicism and melancholia had originated from the trauma and darkness of World War I. This gave him an acute sense, just like George Orwell a decade later, of the human propensity for barbaric behavior and collective madness. Musil and…