BIMBO CABIDOG
According to
science, the earth is not a man’s world. The planet has been existing for 4.5
billion years. Humans have only been here for about 200,000 years.
Earth does not
belong to man. It is the habitat of all life forms, many of which have existed
hundreds of millions of years before humans first appeared. They, including the
Homo sapiens, belong to it.
But since man
began to have control over nature, and manipulate it for his ends, he has been
acting as if the Earth is his possession. He even has foisted on all of its
other habitues, as well as his fellow Homo sapiens, the queer concept of land being
private property.
Studies say
that there are around 3,000 or more species in a soil environment alone. Does
man claim to own them, those that crawl on the surface, the water that slithers
through the terrain, the nutrients that feed every form of life from the
microscopic germ to the water buffalo, and the flows of energies linking each
and every one in an interconnected whole that will probably continue to exist
long after humans have been gone? Amazingly, he acts so.
Common sense
will tell that the land and the natural biophysical elements present in it are
not his, simply because they cannot be bought and could not be made or created by
human hands. Their existence and continuity also do not depend on him. In fact
it is man with purposes alien to theirs that poses danger to them.
“What arrogance
of man to own the land when it is the land that owns man,” Macliing Dulag, a
tribal chieftain in Kalinga Apayaon in northern Philippines, chided. He was killed by the minions of the Marcos
dictatorship for defending the Kalingans’ ancestral domain against its demolition
by the planned Chico River dam project. The kind of arrogance he denounced shed
his blood.
What has made humans
think and act as if they own the earth? The ownership of private property that
society guarantees, especially the acquisition of land as provided by law,
somehow reflects the mindset that the world belongs to them.
Such posture emanated
from the time humans began to observe characteristics of nature and discover how
to manipulate it. The development immensely changed the way they live. They no
longer just abide by what nature provides, but took control of it and used it. Control
fostered and firmed up the concept of ownership.
Since humans learned
how to control and manipulate nature, around 10,000 years ago, the earth would
never be the same again. They harnessed and directed it to achieve what they
want. The sea change made the world one virtually shaped by human hands.
Literature and
history portray in innumerable narratives this power of man to make nature
pliant to its desires. Hereon, he fashions his own reality from the artificial
world he creates. The newfound power gave him not only dominion but domination
(or the appearance of it) over creation. This would be the source of his presumptuous
idea that the earth or any part of it is his.
Subsequently,
man changed himself after the artificial world of his making. He no longer just
watches, wonders at, and enjoys the things around him. He could not rest
content until he does something to them. The drive or spell of restlessness dogs him no end.
With reinvented
man, the world changes not because of its nature or essence to change, but
because of what he thinks it should be. It must be shaped and reshaped after
his likeness and desire. It must be subject to his purpose, not that of the
creator.
The insatiable
impulse to remake the world he lives in necessitated and led to ownership, first
as a thought, later as law. Man must take possession in order to control. Although
it was merely a product of a certain stage of historical social development, over
a long age of practice, ownership of property would become as natural as if it
was ordained right at creation.
With ownership,
man arrogated to himself the power to do to the natural world as he pleases. Now,
the devil is in the thinking that he can do whatever he wants or desires to do with
things that have thrived in their natural course long before he came, because
they are his. It proceeded to destroy the very earth that supports his life, because
he must rebuild it.
No matter how
excellent man already is in his ways, that excellence is only limited to the particular
role he plays: lawyer, doctor, engineer, entrepreneur, chief executive officer,
most of all contributor as well as beneficiary to
the dynamic interactivity of all living and non-living members of the planet. On
the other hand, the knowledge and information beyond these roles that he lacks
is vast and unfathomable.
Man’s limited
capability cannot even produce a chunk of soil with all the biological and
mineral elements present to nurture plant life. Yet, in the single-minded drive
to build real estates that later become concrete jungles he so easily destroys it. The
destructive character of the alienated man stems from the paradigm of ownership.
Does man think
that it is for his own good to own nature, so that he can do with it whatever
he wants to? Well, it is a narrow and
dangerous thinking, because its premises and conclusions are confined to what
he only knows. It does not comprehend the complex interrelationships, intricate
dynamics, and purposes for which each of the myriad components of a natural biophysical
environment is there. For all he knows, his destruction of some of them already
amounts to the destruction of the very means by which he lives.
There has never
been a perfect invention. By experience, everything that man has invented must
yet be modified and remodeled unendingly. The internal combustion engine is one
example. Its first prototype would soon be deemed inadequate, fuel inefficient,
and leave much to be desired. The shortcomings spurred off the crafting of new and
better models.
The diesel-fueled
version emerged. The reinvention settled many of the nagging issues on the
previous models. But every time an upgraded model came up, it would later be
found wanting. And so, the dogged work of improving and perfecting went on and
on with no end in sight.
Today, the ICE
itself is headed for the dump with the invention and eventual mass production of solar and electric powered motors. But long after it has gone,
man will yet reckon with the harm it has done to the environment by polluting
air, land and water, and by despoiling the natural systems that have sustained
life on earth for ages, because of the burning of fossil fuel. The damage done
by the sway of the ICE may already be beyond repair.
Despite the
unprecedented breakthroughs in scientific research and technology development
that make man’s control of nature almost absolute, he still succumbs to fates
he doesn’t chart nor expect. Who knew beforehand that cars, once the craze of humankind
and symbol of enviable progress, would be a principal culprit for the carbon footprints
that are dimming the prospect of human life over the next 100 years?
The pursuit of
an elusive, indeterminate being is a fate that hounds man. No matter what he
does, there is still always something lacking, something wanting, to complete
life. In this instance, he shows not only to lose control, but to be lost
himself. He pretends to own things in the natural world, yet he could not even
own himself.
There are a lot of instances beyond his control that pushes him
to do things against his will, and even against his own good. He presumes to have
nature in his hands, but lies utterly helpless when it lashes back with profoundly
catastrophic effects, like the much powerful typhoons due to climate change that devastate communities.
Alexander the
Great, Agamemnon, Darius the Great, Tamerlane, Julius Caesar, Nero, Genghis
Khan, Napoleon Bonaparte, Ivan the Terrible, Adolf Hitler, etc. have had the power
to crush tens of thousands of people in the way of their conquests. But they could only
stop the conquest of age by a youthful death.
“This is an
evil among all things that are done under the sun, that there is one event unto
all: yea, also the heart of the sons of men is full of evil, and madness is in
their heart while they live, and after that they go to the dead.” The passage is
from Ecclesiastes 9:3. Does that seem to be man being unmistakably in control
of his fate?
Harry Truman
came into possession of the world’s first weapon of mass destruction, the
freshly hatched atomic bomb, in his term as president of the United States. With
it he held power of life and death over millions of people across
the globe. One day, he decided to give the go signal to the dropping of the A
bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The successful mission
instantly vaporized thousands of ordinary folks in the blinding flash of the horrifying
mushroom cloud.
Pity the man
who has that terrific power, and yet must be slave to supposedly rational decisions that
kill people en masse. Where is Truman? The butcher and the butchered have met
the same fate. The most powerful man of the world joined later the hapless citizens
of the two devastated cities, as all men must go there, the kingdom of the
dead.
The atom bomb
has not secured Truman’s generation, and for all times his countrymen, from going
the way of the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki even with such lethal power in their
possession, when it is their turn to face the wretched human lot of ending
up in the grave. “For to him that is joined to all the living there is hope:
for a living dog is better than a dead lion.” Again the Ecclesiastes tells.