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| Let Us Preserve Paradise |
| March 30, 2003. |
 In
1813, American ornithologist J. J. Audubon observed
flocks of carrier pigeons (Ectopistis migratorius) soaring
through the skies of the United States. Those flocks
were so great in numbers that they obscured the light
of day, as if it were an eclipse. The birds observed
by Audubon were flying directly overhead at a rate of
some 300 million per hour on some days. He estimated
that the entire flock consisted of around 20 billion
birds distributed throughout 1,000 km of Wisconsin prairie
lands.
Faced with the awesome number of
existing individuals, one could think that this resource
would exist forever, despite using it without a clear
understanding and respect for the history of its life.
Nonetheless, just one century later, there was only
one carrier pigeon left alive in all of North America.
Indiscriminate hunting had extinguished the entire population.
The last carrier pigeon died at the Cincinnati City
zoo in 1914.
Fortunately, some 100 years have
gone by since its extinction and this does not seem
to have had any negative effect on the life of man and
other species in nature. So why should we care what
happened to this insignificant bird?
The aforementioned expression is
one that we human beings undoubtedly assume at some
moment or other of our lives, when faced with the deterioration
and wear our planet faces every day. We pretend, under
the protection of the blessed dilution of responsibility
that is generated within any group of humans, that nothing
will happen, thus justifying, in the name of humanity
or of our own life, every aggressive act that may be
committed against nature.
This behavior makes me think of the
airplane metaphor developed by the famous scientist,
Edward O. Wilson. Wilson proposed that we are passengers
on a modern transcontinental airplane, and upon taking
off, we see that one individual is busying himself at
removing little screws, pieces of airplane covering,
and wires, among other things. “What are you doing?”
we ask him. “You’ll destroy the airplane!”
“There’s no danger,” he answers us,
“I’ve done this on many flights and nothing
has ever happened. The plane is so big and it is made
up of thousands of pieces like this which I don’t
believe are important.” “But what if they
are important?” we ask. The individual gets upset:
“Listen, I earn my living by selling these little
pieces. What? You want me to be left without work? Besides,
I will travel in the plane with you, so have faith in
what I’m doing.”
The plane in the metaphor is earth
and we are both the passengers and the little looters
at the same time. Despite the ever increasing body of
proof that every little piece has a role to play, we
devote ourselves to ripping them off without any thought
to a future beyond 5 or 10 years from now. This is what
is happening in the region of Puerto Vallarta and Nuevo
Vallarta where, in the name of tourism (and all the
productive activities that are generated around it)
and economic development, river beds are modified, the
last existing mangroves are destroyed, the estuaries
are filled and dried, entire communities of native flora
and fauna are displaced by the introduction of exotic
species, the coastline is modified and the earth is
covered with hundreds of tons of asphalt or cement.
But it is not only tourist activities
that have modified the landscape of the bay, agriculture,
ranches, fisheries and forestry have done so as well.
For example, the burning of forests and jungle to make
way for cultivation land could have been favorable at
first for the economic development of farmers. Today,
it has become a recourse for clearing spectacular natural
mountain areas to acquire that space as added-value
zones for human settlements.
However we’re not trying to
say what or who is responsible for the deterioration
of our natural environment. Rather, what is more serious,
is that no one is doing anything to invest economic
resources to assess the impact our actions are having
on this environment. No one cares to invest the profit
he has earned from the exploitation of the environment
and its resources to compensate for this deterioration
which he has caused by his use of such resources. In
short, no one seems to care about the future, we think
that although we are removing parts of the “airplane”,
it will keep on flying without problems.
Nor are we saying that we should
eliminate all development, because that can continue
as long as it is environmentally-friendly, as long as
strategies are implemented where the growth of society
can be in harmony with its environment. We should remember
that the conservation of our natural resources is not
done just because it is ethically correct, but rather
because we are thus contributing to ensuring our success
as a species - to avoid our own extinction.
We still have time to allot economic
resources and human effort to avoid the deterioration
of our paradise - even though we may not yet feel the
loss of an insignificant butterfly, an unhealthy estuary
or a passing dove, as the information we have nowadays
does not seem to indicate any shortages on our planet.
We know that the mineral resources
on which modern industry is dependant have not been
used up yet. For example, using today’s rate of
consumption, the oil industry could remain quite healthy
for another 92 years. For its part, agricultural production
has more than doubled since 1961, and more than tripled
in developing countries, with a reduction of 55% in
food prices since 1970. Consequently, the real number
of people dying of hunger in the Third World has gone
down from nearly 920 million in 1971 to less than 792
million in 1997. Also, animal and plant species appear
to be more resistant than usually thought, according
to a United Nations study that has calculated an extinction
rate of between 0.1% and 1% in the next 50 years.
The foregoing is not a shout of victory
that means we should sit back with our arms crossed,
on the contrary, we should be concerned with continuing
this way and even improving matters. It is of prime
importance that we look for a balance between the protection
of the environment and economic growth for without protection
of the environment growth will be affected, but without
growth, it is impossible to support protective measures
and repair the deterioration of the environment.
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