Scale of change in our world over just one generation is frightening
THE report last week from the World Wildlife Fund ( WWF), which highlighted that global wildlife populations have fallen by 60pc since 1970 as humans overuse natural resources, drive climate change and pollute the planet, was a bolt out of the blue and another reminder of how fast the world is changing all around us.
Over the last fifty years the world has changed utterly, the pace of change has been astonishing and it is quite obvious that there must be a downside to all the change. After all for every action there is a opposite reaction.
We have technological advances and developments that people living in the 1940s, 50s or 60s could never imagine.
In those decades life was mechanical as opposed to our digital lives today. Washing clothes by hand, drying them in front of a fire, no 1300 spin cycles at low temperatures, with a dryer on hand to dry the damp clothes, no microwave to heat a frozen ready meal for a quick dinner, no dishwasher for the dinner plates afterwards.
Domestic life was much harder. Our working lives similarly, as many occupations where much more manual than we experience in today’s world.
Yet those advances and developments such as mobile phones, digital photography, fitbits, SatNavs, cashless payments, online shopping, TV streaming and so much more are now part and parcel of our everyday life.
We take these advances in technology and gadgetary for granted. Yet for someone from the early or middle part of the 20th century these advances are mind-boggling.
Life cannot have changed so radically and so rapidly at any other time in humanity.
A quick look at a flight radar app on a smartphone and you can see literally hundreds and hundreds if not thousands of airplanes in our skies right across the globe 24 hours a day. Hoping on a €9.99 Ryanair flight 50 years ago was unthinkable. Air travel was only for the well-heeled with deep pockets.
For many of us, certainly those living in the first world we might be healthier than our forefathers and likely to live longer, but all this progress in humanity is coming at a cost.
We already are well aware of the cost to the planet with global warming and plastics in our seas and rivers, but it seems human activity is coming at a cost to all other species on the planet we all share.
It is becoming very clear that we have changed the world in which we live, our planet completely in double quick time.
The industrial revolution of the 19th century started the rapid change to our world, but the changes have accelerated beyond imagination in the lifetime of just one 60-year-old human.
In that time we have splurged on fossil fuels, produced and invented all manner of plastic, brought industrial practices to farming and food production.
But we must ask are the scale and speed of the changes sustainable.
Certainly the WWF report and the recent the annual report of the Climate Change Advisory Council suggest that we are burning through the world’s natural resources at a very worrying rate and damaging our enviornment in the process.
Our planet is millions of years old, human civilisation is thousands of years old, yet at our current rate we are going we could strip our planet bare in a just a few generations.
How humanity slows down this process is something that we must address.