The bigger picture

Introduction

The death of one person on the other side of the world is of no interest to those who have no connection with that person. The death of a spouse or a child is probably the greatest personal tragedy that many of us face in our life times. The death of a human being depends on your viewpoint. I am trying to use vastly differing viewpoints in this page.

Environment

Failure to give our environment the highest priority is due to short-term thinking.

I am intensely concerned about climate change and find the vast majority's apathy about it incredible. But I too must remember to look at the bigger picture: there was bound to be an environmental catastrophe sooner or later due to one thing or another, over-population, loss of soil fertility, unbalanced nitrogen cycle, loss of available phosphorus for fertiliser, deforestation, globalisation (as it has been practiced), pollution, etcetera. Man is destroying his environment with climate change, but while it will lead to the end of the form of Western civilisation that we have become familiar with over the past several hundred years, the world will go on. Since Humanity managed some form of domination over other species Man has always been his own worst enemy.

Global citizenship

How many of us give much, or any, thought to the impact that we are personally having on the planet? We must learn to look at the bigger picture when we make day-to-day decisions. For example, before we buy a new appliance that might consume a large amount of electricity, we should think not only of how much it will increase our power bill, but its contribution to the global climate change problem; look at the bigger picture.

Changing public perception in this way will not be easy, but is probably necessary if we are to solve the greenhouse/climate change problem.

Genocide

About twenty million Russians were killed in the Second World War. The Nazis seem to have hated communists just as much as they hated Jews, but we in the West hear little about this particular genocide.

Another genocide little recognised in the West (and denied in Turkey) was the Armenian Massacre in which something up to a million Armenians were killed due to decisions made by the "Young Turk" government of Turkey from 1915 to 1917.

King Leopold II of Belgium, almost incredibly to people of the twenty-first century, held the Congo Free State (approximately the modern state named the Democratic Republic of the Congo) as his personal property. His rule was cruel in the extreme, and he has been blamed for the deaths of possibly tens of millions of the natives during his reign, which spanned the years from 1865 to 1909. The Congo genocide is discussed on a page of Religious Tolerance; oddly, Wikipedia does not have a page on the Congo genocide as such (2009/03/24).

In 1994 something between 200 000 and 500 000 Rwandans, most of them Tutsis, were murdered.

From 1975 to 1999 some 210 000, by an Amnesty International estimate, East Timorese were killed by Indonesian police and military following an invasion that the world chose to ignore at the time.

Then there were terrible genocides recorded in the Bible. I have quoted a part of the record of one of these below. Moses is talking to the commanders of the army of Israel. You can look up the whole reference at Bible Gateway.

The Bible, Numbers, Chapter 31 15: "Have you allowed all the women to live?" he asked them. 16: "They were the ones who followed Balaam's advice and were the means of turning the Israelites away from the LORD in what happened at Peor, so that a plague struck the LORD's people. 17: Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, 18: but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.

I find this frightening. Nobody could support such treatment of a whole ethnic group in the modern world and consider themselves to be ethical. The Bible is the holy book of a great many people; what Christians call the Old Testament is sacred to Jews and Moslems as well as Christians.

Those who hold the Old Testament/Talmud to be sacred could use this sort of reference as justification for future genocides. Can twenty-first century Man condemn what happened in The Holocaust, but at the same time accept the Biblical slaughter of the Midianites by Moses? Isn't there a contradiction here? If the Nazis are condemned as monsters, shouldn't the Israelites under Moses be equally condemned? Instead, those who hold the Bible sacred also hold Moses as one of the greatest of the prophets!

Look at the bigger picture, consider the actions of Moses from an ethical point of view.

Is the genocide of Moses any more acceptable because it happened about three thousand years ago? Or because it was carried out in the belief that it was God's will? Or are we meant to believe that God has changed in his ideas of what is good and what is bad in those three thousand years? To me this is another reason for eschewing religion, or at least the religions "of the Book".

Had they looked at the bigger picture they would have seen that greenhouse warming/climate change was a far more important matter to their future, the future of their children, and the future of the Earth, than a few more dollars in their pockets in the short-term.

In the next hundred years we can expect a great many species to become extinct, great areas of land to become deserts, many low lying, fertile and highly populated areas to be inundated by the sea due to climate change.

Yet, looking at the bigger picture again, will it matter in a hundred million years?

Does this make any sense? Why do people have so many children when they should be able to see that there are too many people in their country already?

It is a failure to see the bigger picture. People look at the situation from their own, isolated, point of view. They see children who will grow up to look after them in their old age as an asset, not as a burden on their country or the World.

Australia has huge problems with an over-committed water supply, an intention to greatly increase population before fixing the water supply problems is madness. There are also worsening traffic problems in all of the country's largest cities; our cities are all expanding over our best agricultural land; our agriculture is suffering from higher temperatures and a drought that has continued for a decade and may be a perminant state. How could increasing the population make sense under these cercumstances?

Again, the government is failing to look at the bigger picture. If they looked at the bigger picture they would see that, at best, all they are doing is exchanging a problem in the near future with a much larger problem in the slightly more distant future.

Fortunately Dick Smith looked at the bigger picture and in August 2010 released a documentary on the stupidity of fast population growth to national television. Both major political parties had changed their stance to a more sustainable level of population growth before the Federal election of 21st August 2010.

In biology it is the nature of population explosions that they end in population crashes. We think of wars such as WW2, in which some thirty million people died, as being great disasters. They will be insignificant compared to the coming World population crash. It might not come for several decades, but Man will have to behave much more rationally than he has in the past century if it is to be averted all together.

Still they have not learned. In 2005 they are supporting President Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan, who appears to be an up and coming dictator and despot. The USA is considering the oil reserves of the region, and their desire for local allies, not the long-term results of their action.

Index