The results of a slow-down in the evolution of the mind will be disastrous
According to the report of the World Wildlife Fund’s conservation group, titled Living Planet, human activity had wiped out, between 1970 and 2014, 60 per cent of all animals with backbones — fish, birds, amphibians, reptiles and mammals. Referring to such activity, the WWF International’s director-general, Marco Lambertini, has said that hunting, shrinking habitat, pollution, illegal trade and climate change, had been too much for them to overcome.
The report is alarming but not surprising. The subject of mass extinctions has been causing concern for quite some time. A report by Ian Johnston in The Independent of the United Kingdom in 2017, cited scientists writing in a special edition of the magazine, Nature, that humans were causing the sixth mass extinction of life on earth. Earlier, Elizabeth Kolbert had written in The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (first published in 2014), “Very, very occasionally in the distant past, the planet has undergone change so wrenching that the diversity of life has plummeted. Five of these ancient events were catastrophic enough that they’re put in their own category: The so-called Big Five. In what seems like a fantastic coincidence, but is probably no coincidence at all, the history of these events is recovered just as people come to realize that they are causing another one.”
It has become increasingly clear since the book came out that the Sixth Extinction may be around the corner. The causes are well-known. Seabed mining is destroying unique ecosystems besides taking pollution to the deep sea. Rivers bring toxic industrial waste from hinterlands. Oil spills pollute hundreds of square miles. Increasing carbon emission is making sea water acidic and hence inhospitable to marine life. Global warming has worsened matters. Besides the consumption of plastic bags, container ships are killing a growing number of whales through accidents. Japan’s murderous whaling expeditions, undertaken in defiance of international judicial pronouncements, governmental protests and public condemnation, are killing hundreds of whales.
Concern over the large-scale extermination of species under way has not sent the alarm bells ringing the way these should have been perhaps because it has so far not manifestly affected human beings. It, however, would not be so for long.
The future of humans themselves is at stake. Population increase is an important cause of accelerating human activity. Referring to the soaring increase in global population under way, Desmond Morris predicts in The Naked Ape: A Zoologist’s Study of the Human Animal, that time will come when “the densities we are now experiencing in our major cities would exist in every corner of the globe. The consequences of all this for all forms of wild animals is obvious. The effect it would have on our own species is equally depressing.”
Morris adds shortly thereafter, “Long before our populations reach the levels envisaged above we shall have broken so many of the rules that govern our biological nature, that we shall have collapsed as a dominant species….Many exciting species have become extinct in the past and we are no exception.” Those dismissing Morris’ prediction as alarmist often argue that the human mind, which accounts not only for the survival of the species but its dominance over nature through technology, will find a way of preventing this. Such confidence would be laughable. Technology would remain a formulation on paper if the environment in which it has to be applied disappears.
More important, the devising and application of technologies to cope with the challenges threatening human existence, would require serious application of the mind and prolonged, serious thinking. The most devastating effect of the disappearance of species will be felt on the human mind which, as Paul Shepard writes in Thinking Animals: Animals and the Development of Human Intelligence, is at the centre of humanity’s pride in its independence “from animals and animality.” He further states “that the mind and its organ, the brain, are in reality that part of us most dependent on the survival of animals. We are connected to animals not merely in the convenience of figures of speech — a zoological equivalent of ‘flowery speech’ — but by sinews that link speech to rationality, insight, intuition, and consciousness.” Stating that people everywhere have “a profound, inescapable need for animals” which “are used in the growth and development of the human person, in those most priceless qualities which we lump together as ‘mind.’ It is the role of animal images and forms in the shaping of personality, identity, and social consciousness. Animals are among the first inhabitants of the mind’s eye. They are basic to the development of speech and thought.”
The results of a slow-down in the evolution of the mind will be disastrous. It is the home of reason and consciousness which have enabled us to achieve what we have and will now determine whether we survive.
(The writer is Consultant Editor, The Pioneer, and an author)
