After my last blog, I'm just itching to broach this topic! Well are we? Our own evolution is a very slow
process and our current strengths, according to natural selection, are based on the demands of Earth's
environment many thousands of years ago. So natural selection evolution isn't going to help us much
with the present demands of our environment and even less into the future - is it?
Well I don't think its that simple because we can no longer consider ourselves and our environment
as being independent. We now live in an environment, that makes demands on us, that are increasingly
created by ourselves. So maybe the question is "Can we keep up with the demands of the future
environment that we are creating?" or even more fundamentally "Are we considering whether the future
environment that we are busy creating is going to be compatible with us?".
I believe we are not considering the second question above because our strengths have evolved by,
natural selection, based on an environment that was largely independent of ourselves. We had to keep
up with the demands of the environment or perish. Now we are largely creating our environment but we
still apply the same survival instinct of considering it as something that we have no control over.
Hopefully our brains will kick and take over from our natural selection survival instinct, before its too late.
If we have this wonderful power to determine our own environment then we had better make sure that we
don't make it so that we become slaves to it, or worse still, completely redundant.
Being the eternal optimist that I am, I believe that our brains will kick in and take over. Environmental
protection activism is the first step in the awareness of our ability to shape our own destiny. We need
to 'stop and smell the roses' and instead of focussing on keeping up with technology we need to focus
on developing technology to enhance our lives and make our environment a better place for us.
A 'curve ball' that I believe causes quite a bit of collective human anxiety is, after conquering the environment
'surface of planet Earth', how much control will we have over the environment 'Our planetary solar system',
'Milky Way galaxy'... ? 2012 is 'just around the corner'!