Since about 10,000 years ago, our footprint on the environment has become a stomp on our planet. “It’s not something we can be proud of. History will judge us harshly on, at the very least, the way we have treated the biosphere. Just as he will judge us, I believe that he will benevolently even praise us for other conquests that we have achieved in many ways and that have improved the human species. But let’s say that (first) is our biggest sin.
These are the words of the Spanish scientist Juan Luis Arsuaga, Doctor of Biological Sciences and Professor of Paleontology at the Faculty of Geological Sciences of the Complutense University of Madrid, as part of the discussion “The Anthropocene Stomp on the Planet”, held this Tuesday together with the disseminator José Gordon, within the framework of El Aleph. Festival of Art and Science, whose sixth edition takes place in a hybrid way until May 29 under the theme “The borders of the environment”.
The impoverishment of the biosphere and its effects on biodiversity, he estimated, is not a historical process on a scale of centuries or millennia, but the accelerated large-scale destruction of the ecosystems of the species corresponds to us as a generation. “It’s a tsunami because of the speed at which it was produced,” she estimated.
The causes of the destruction of the only thing that guarantees our survival is not a matter of poor countries, although it is only in these where the most atrocious effects are seen, warned the co-director of the team recognized in 1997 with the Prince of Asturias Award for Research Scientific and Technical for the paleontological discovery of Atapuerca, Spain, where the presence of five types of five species of hominids, including Neanderthal and Homo sapiens, was recorded.
“When they give us figures on the number of hectares that are destroyed per day, they are astronomical numbers. The destruction of the tropical forests for the plantation of materials that produce food for the first world is a situation that is measured in enormous extensions on a daily basis. It is something inconceivable, difficult to imagine. It is not necessary to go to the history books, it is enough to go to individual memory”.
The history of humanity, he warns, “is a history of constant growth at the expense of natural resources. Our planet has run out. In other words, the natural consequence of this process, its natural continuity, would be to travel to another planet and do the same thing we have done up to now. First Mesopotamia, then the European forests, then move on to the American resources and exhaust all of America; then Africa and finally the ocean. Well, we have already run out of this planet and we would have to go to the other one, but we don’t have it (…) these stories of constant growth have ended in a collapse and in this case the collapse would be the planetarium.”
The environmental concern for the planet, he lamented, “can be an alibi or an excuse to do nothing, because we are so worried about blue whales that we don’t care if a tree is cut down.”
Finally, José Gordon recovered a phrase from the writer Ignacio Solares when he said: “I know something worse than hate: abstract love” and added that “there is the problem, we love nature in the abstract, but we do not go on to see how organically we are linked with her. I think there are perception problems.”
Watch the broadcast of the conversation: https://
ricardo.quiroga@eleconomista.