AR-News: (CA) Homo sapiens: hurtling toward suicide

[Animalara2003 at aol.com]

GLOBEANDMAIL.com


Saturday, April 17, 2004 - Page D10 

By ANDREW NIKIFORUK
Dancing at the Dead Sea:
Tracking the World's 
Environmental Hotspots
By Alanna Mitchell
Key Porter, 239 pages, $26.95
You know our messy living space of a planet isn't in great shape when Alanna 
Mitchell, a sharp-eyed Globe and Mail journalist raised by an equally 
sharp-eyed field biologist, travels toward the world's most abused landscapes with one 
big awful question on her mind: "Are humans a suicidal species?"
Fortunately, no weary ecologist or shell-shocked biologist actually answers 
with a "yes." Most reply that life is an uncertain business at best. And one or 
two add that our species is not immune to extinctions or wholesale ignorance.
But the good news in Dancing at the Dead Sea, a riveting tale of land and 
water abuse, is that there doesn't appear to be anything hard-wired about the 
species that makes us playful death-seekers or Sylvia Plath wannabes. Although we 
can be as lethal as smallpox, we do have the ability to think in the long 
term. The bad news is that thinking hurts a lot and hasn't become a visible 
evolutionary habit yet.
But the consequences of its absence can be frightful to behold. And that's 
what Mitchell starkly underscores in this beautifully written collection of 
essays about some of the world's most degraded real estate. Whether describing the 
wholesale looting of Madagascar's hardwood forests (another Haiti) or the 
calculated theft of groundwater in Jordan, Mitchell makes it pretty plain that 
not a lot of thinking of any kind is going on these days.
In fact, Mitchell compares our emotional coolness toward climate change (and 
other unglad tidings) to the frigid reception that greeted Charles Darwin's 
theory of evolution. The Victorians just couldn't accept the earth-shattering 
idea of successful and not so successful creatures because it challenged their 
central belief that everything had been fixed in its place.
Mitchell now argues that we've essentially entered Darwin round two. "Homo 
sapiens, too, has a shelf life," she warns. "And rather than trying to prolong 
it, our actions as a species are aimed at shortening it." Although the world's 
fisheries, primates, tropical forests and ice caps appear to be headed for 
hell in a handbasket, our happy species remains economically fixed on the idea of 
easy wealth and endless rows of SUVs.

full story:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20040417/BKDEAD
17/TPEntertainment/Books 

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