Do you feel what I feel?
Martin Doyle
COME into my Wellington laboratory for minute.
I just want to raise a few short, brutish questions that have been bugging me lately. And let’s face it, the moment when something starts bugging you is often the moment when you make important discoveries.
The most significant thing I can remember from my schooldays science was that Sir Isaac Newtown, the finest mind ever to have lived, was sitting under a tree one day minding his own business and no doubt mulling over very cerebral matters, when a big fat apple [it must have been a Granny Smith] fell from one of the upper branches and smashed into his skull. If it happened to someone today, they’d probably sue the owner for culpable negligence or go get a front-end loader and tear the tree out by its roots. If it were me, I’d probably check to see if there was someone I knew hiding in the tree, and if there wasn’t, then I’d ask the obvious: ‘Why me?’ However, good ol’ Newton, being a thinker, absorbed the shock to his skull and asked simple questions like (but don’t quote me on this): ‘Why did the apple fall?’ ‘If it didn’t make a conscious decision to fall, what other force might be at work here?’ Anyway, the upshot (or should that be downshot?) of all this was he came up with his Theory of Gravitation. And even though this nasty, bruising incident [and let’s not forget, the apple was also bruised] took place nearly 300 years ago, we still have his gravitation ideas. And the same apple tree [or an offshoot] that did the damage to Newton is still alive and well in the Cambridge University Botanic Garden.
But something of the nature of a large pumpkin fell from an upper window and landed on my little head last week. [No, it wasn’t a bit of the NASA satellite.] It’s the news that the world population is right now about to reach seven billion. That is what I call heavy news. The world wasn’t designed to take that many. The world is like a tiny, blue Ark journeying through space and all of its inhabitants (animals, birds, fish, insects) individually and collectively depend on its special, incubatorish environment for survival.
So I believe the environmentalists are partly right i.e. we’re destroying the environment. But I think too much weight has gone into ‘preserving the environment’ and not enough into the what’s actually behind the magnitude of the damage i.e. the sheer number of energy-consuming humans. If we had just a small population (or even the fewer-than-one-billion at the time of Newton) climate change would not even be an issue. But if the numbers keep rising, then it won’t matter how many poncy ‘environmentally friendly’ things we do because the medical certificate for the human race is bound to state: ‘Hit on head by lead balloon while daydreaming under tree. Never felt a thing’.
I just want to raise a few short, brutish questions that have been bugging me lately. And let’s face it, the moment when something starts bugging you is often the moment when you make important discoveries.
The most significant thing I can remember from my schooldays science was that Sir Isaac Newtown, the finest mind ever to have lived, was sitting under a tree one day minding his own business and no doubt mulling over very cerebral matters, when a big fat apple [it must have been a Granny Smith] fell from one of the upper branches and smashed into his skull. If it happened to someone today, they’d probably sue the owner for culpable negligence or go get a front-end loader and tear the tree out by its roots. If it were me, I’d probably check to see if there was someone I knew hiding in the tree, and if there wasn’t, then I’d ask the obvious: ‘Why me?’ However, good ol’ Newton, being a thinker, absorbed the shock to his skull and asked simple questions like (but don’t quote me on this): ‘Why did the apple fall?’ ‘If it didn’t make a conscious decision to fall, what other force might be at work here?’ Anyway, the upshot (or should that be downshot?) of all this was he came up with his Theory of Gravitation. And even though this nasty, bruising incident [and let’s not forget, the apple was also bruised] took place nearly 300 years ago, we still have his gravitation ideas. And the same apple tree [or an offshoot] that did the damage to Newton is still alive and well in the Cambridge University Botanic Garden.
But something of the nature of a large pumpkin fell from an upper window and landed on my little head last week. [No, it wasn’t a bit of the NASA satellite.] It’s the news that the world population is right now about to reach seven billion. That is what I call heavy news. The world wasn’t designed to take that many. The world is like a tiny, blue Ark journeying through space and all of its inhabitants (animals, birds, fish, insects) individually and collectively depend on its special, incubatorish environment for survival.
So I believe the environmentalists are partly right i.e. we’re destroying the environment. But I think too much weight has gone into ‘preserving the environment’ and not enough into the what’s actually behind the magnitude of the damage i.e. the sheer number of energy-consuming humans. If we had just a small population (or even the fewer-than-one-billion at the time of Newton) climate change would not even be an issue. But if the numbers keep rising, then it won’t matter how many poncy ‘environmentally friendly’ things we do because the medical certificate for the human race is bound to state: ‘Hit on head by lead balloon while daydreaming under tree. Never felt a thing’.
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