Astro-physicists have told us that our Erath is a middle-aged planet with a limited life span of a few billion years. Some time into the distant future, the Sun will burn out and probably collapse into a black hole, swallowing all the planets in the Solar System. All life forms on Earth will have disappeared long before then.

Scientists pioneering in various experiments in long-haul space travel and exploration of new hospitable planets are probably contemplating the indistinct probability of mass migration of the Earth's population before that final cataclysmic event.

But it would appear that time is not on our side. Long before the demise of the Sun, the new species of Homo Sapiens on Earth would face the very real possibility of destroying the natural conditions that engender and nurture life in the fist place.

By now, the litany of sins committed by man against his natural environment has been well documented and studied. Every year, there are new reports of tell-tale signs that the Earth is seeking reprisal.

The ice caps at the North Pole are melting. Only the Eskimos are concerned because their livelihood has been affected. If the world's sea level rises by just a wee bit, many large and small islands of the world would have been flooded and submerged under water. So far, only a few small islands in the Pacific have been affected, but when would it overwhelm Singapore?

Powerful nations not keen

The world's atmosphere has been warming up relentlessly of course. Global warming is caused entirely by the green house gases produced by man. These gases are the waste products emitted by our technological civilisation. As long as the human race equates advance in technology in industrial production with progress towards the ideal good life, global warming is an inevitable destiny.

There are attempts at the government level to arrest this trend of heating up the earth. First, we had the Montreal Protocol, followed by the Kyoto Agreement. There are even enlightened politicians like Al Gore who made the environment the centre-piece of his political campaign.

But powerful nations like the US and China have yet to sign those international agreements. To cut back on the production of green house gases means reduction of industrial output. That would mean loss of jobs, slower growth, or higher cost of production because of environmentally friendly adjustment. These are anathema to any politician's ambition to power.

The bedrock of industrial production and economic growth is energy. We are heavily dependent on fossil fuel, and so far governments merely pay lip service to research into alternative energy source.

Already, Malaysians are reeling under the financial burden of having to pay more for their petrol and gas.

You can blame it on China and India, the world's two fastest growing economies that have an insatiable appetite for the Black Gold that propels their growth. Others who are addicted to conspiracy theories will cast aspersion on market manipulation by the oil companies and the cartel of oil producing nations.

The fact remains that natural energy sources are non-renewable, and their stock under the ground, no matter how massive, will be depleted one day at the current rate of exploitation. The same goes for nuclear energy. Even radio-active minerals are non-renewable.

Was it Ghandi who said that there is enough in the world to meet out need, but never enough to satisfy our greed? Indeed, greed is limitless, and a limited Earth cannot sustain our limitless greed for consumption of raw materials and manufactured goods.

I can envisage the scenario of a doomsday some time in the future. The world will darken at night. We will have to go back to using the bicycle and lighting our candle. There will be problems lighting the stove, because all the trees will be gone by then, and young children will see the odd trunks with the odd prigs and leaves only in museums.

A water war in the future?

I have seen the obscene after-effects of massive and unscrupulous deforestation in Sarawak. Of all the evils of unbridled logging, the worst long term harm done to life on Earth is still global warming. Trees are not merely a natural resource that can bring great wealth. It is also a natural heat-pump, recycling carbon dioxide into oxygen.

Deforestation has made deserts out of formerly fertile land in sub-Sahara Africa and northern China.

Deforestation disrupts the water cycle in any region, and changes the course of any major river. Water is the source of all life forms. At the current rate of water pollution and dwindling resource, a war in the future is just as likely to be fought over water as fossil fuel.

I can go on and on, but it gets boring. This is an environmental old wife's tale. Many environmental old wives like my life-long friends Gurmit Singh and Wong Meng Chuok can tell this tale much better than I can. Unfortunately, the world does not take their nagging to heart much. For the average Joe, they are mere prophets of doom, and the world is too obsessed with the pursuit of personal hedonistic happiness to care about the doomsday at some point in the future, by which time they will have passed on anyway.

For the average Joe, science, technology and economics are the core elements of a new religion. The first prophet of this new evangelism was Francis Bacon, who laid down the philosophical foundation for the validity and legitimacy of scientific knowledge.

He was the one who made famous the dictum that "Knowledge is power!" With the power of our new scientific knowledge, mankind can "enslave" and "exploit" nature for the benefits of mankind.

Bacon was obviously the product of the European Enlightenment that inherited the values of the Western humanism that had its source in the Renaissance. The major premise of Western humanism is that man, especially the individual with the immortal soul, possesses some inherent innate ultimate value. Therefore, all things in the universe, all resources of the good Earth, must serve as means towards this ultimate end. Nature is but a slave to be conquered for the pleasure and satisfaction of man's gratification. You can easily quote a relevant passage from the Christian Bible to support this view.

That is how our man of modernity looks at himself and the world. This can be described as an anthropocentric worldview, in which man is located at the centre of the universe, and Truth and God are but projections of man's imagination. The Earth is a gold mine of natural resources which must be plundered for man's utilitarian and pragmatic aspirations. The Europeans and the North Americans have taken the lead, and now the whole world has followed suit.

This "modern' and scientific view of the universe is also a materialist "Veitangsung". The world is neatly divided into life and matter, and the material world is the material non-life, that poses as a threat that must be mastered, exploited and enslaved for man's "survival".

Nature very much alive

The problem is that man is also part of nature, as we all have our bio-physical natural mode of existence. You enslave and exploit nature, and inevitably you enslave and exploit your fellow human beings. Personal happiness is achieved inevitably at the expense of the unhappiness of your fellow human beings.

Then, is Nature the world of dead things out there, for us to take as we wish?

As the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead pointed out, nature is very much alive, with its own organic rhythm of the ebb and flow that can restore an eco-balance in healing itself. Despite the Earth's sometimes very violent history, somehow nature can always regenerate itself, by restoring harmony from the conflict of opposing forces.

Man's destructiveness manifests itself by initiating irreversible processes that intervene into this ability of nature to heal itself. The tons of non-biodegradable plastics are one example. A nuclear winter, if and when it comes about by the launch of a thermonuclear war, is another.

As I have observed often, we the human race is a strange and flawed species.

It has taken a few million years for us to evolve from primitive hominids on the plans of Africa. In the life time of the Earth, our appearance is like the last minute on the last day in a single year. Within that short time though, we have bred more successfully than rats and rabbits, and have populated the whole Earth. In some mega-cities, and in far flung corners of the world, human beings live in conditions that even rats and rabbits would reject out of disgust.

Within that short time also, we have developed enough technological knowledge to destroy ourselves and our Mother Earth. We have done this in the name of all the noble causes that are supposed to make us better human beings.

As Alexander Pope noted once, '"he proper study of mankind is man." We are both an enigma and a paradox, harbouring both the divinity of godhead and the devil within us.

It is hard to say for certain whether the good Earth is not better off without us around.