WHAT A PIECE OF WORK IS MAN
How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty!
In form, in moving, how express and admirable!
In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god!
The beauty of the world!
William Shakespeare. Hamlet
Oh dear, William, you really got it wrong. I know you wrote it 400 years ago, but really ! The Elizabethan England you lived in wasn’t exactly a paradise. Heads rolled pretty frequently, not to mention public disembowelments and the odd spate of burning at the stake.
Look at today, this ‘godlike….piece of work’ isn’t doing too well is he. Africa is starving, Europe has food mountains, China is building a new power station every 10 seconds and America is ruled by George Bush !! Finland is ok, but its dark most of the time.
Still we are all terribly concerned about global warming, and we are running lots of conferences to save the planet. Have I got news for you ! This planet started about 4.5 billion years ago, it’s warmed, cooled, warmed and cooled again a few times since, not to mention the occasional giant meteorite zapping into it . But it’s still around thanks… and will be for few more billion years.
We won’t.
We’ve been here about 100,000 years, ( bit less if you believe Irish bishop James Ussher who in 1650 worked out that the bible made it about 6000 years ago - on oct 26th, day before my birthday) – ‘how noble in reason ??.
The simple fact is that we aren’t damaging the planet, but we are damaging our ability to live on it. Or our great grandchildren’s. But lets face it given the mess we make of simple things like not over populating it, or just feeding everyone, perhaps we don’t deserve to last that long.
The dinosaurs did a better job, I bet they probably farted out more global warming gasses than we ever produce, but they didn’t have conferences about it. They might not have had the ability to reason but they lasted about 150 million years , and it was an unforeseen event, a large piece of rock, that did for them. Flatulence didn’t come into it.
Granted we have produced the music of Mozart, the prose of Shakespeare and the art of Michelangelo, which the dinosaurs probably didn’t manage, but we have also invented an infinite variety of ways and reasons for killing ourselves and other species, from the spear to the neutron bomb, and we are still doing it.
The good thing of course is that though we may mourn here in our beautiful environment in Dalyan delta, the destruction of the ditches , the levelling of hedge rows, the surging swell of hundreds of river boats, the effect we have, in global terms , won’t last that long. The arrogance that makes us think we are top of the evolutionary tree, and believe in an everlasting human soul, also overestimates the impact of what we do.What a piece of work is man ? Sorry Will - great prose, but we aren’t the beauty of the world . Not yet any way.