The Success of Man

The Economist had a few stimulating and interesting articles this week. They discussed whether organic food was really helping the poor as it takes more land, stops us importing from poor countries and perhaps doesn't really reduce poverty. All valid points and worth discussing.

I also went to a zoo this weekend and sat for about 30 minutes looking at a giant gorilla but not in the face, as apparently they view this as aggressive. They are truly incredible creatures, vast, lumbering and eerily human like. If you believe in evolution then there was a point in time when we had the same ancestor, I guess we have the same ancestor with any life but it was much more recent with gorillas. All relative I guess.

I also read another theory about when neandthals and man occupied the same space and why we survived and they didn’t. The new theory says it is because we specialized with women hunting small game and gathering berries whilst the men hunted large game. Neandthals, though, just hunted large game so they had a lower calorific potential than our human ancestors. We ultimately out ate them and therefore out bred them, so they were eventually wiped out. I do wonder who was the last Neanderthal. A man struggling to hunt large game whilst humans bred and reproduced at a greater rate. I imagine him stood looking at the landscape perhaps starving and fleeing the early humans, perhaps even crying.

As I looked at the gorilla I thought about this and thought about how all the animals in the zoo are seeing their habitats disappear. Our potential to exploit the planet, out compete everything else has led to our success but now as the economist rightly points out it means that we are dependent on artificially produced foods. It means that we are slowly eating the planet. Competition for scarce resources our capacity to eat the planet is our danger.

We have to find a way to naturally control our population and our consumption of resources, global warming is a problem, our carbon foot print is a problem but population increase coupled with consumption is THE problem. That gorilla sitting in the zoo knows it. Life is so majestic in its diversity; I just hope we will allow enough of it to survive.