Why humans are masters of the planet but fools of the future

Where we have envied some of their physical abilities – we have simply pinched technology from them; such as in the field of aerodynamics, developing wings for flight. If the natural world is armed with viruses that can take us down wholesale, we have weapons that can do that too – in seconds – and take down every standing structure on the planet too. We are trying to winkle out the way by which creatures such as octopus, cuttlefish and starfish regrow amputated limbs and figuring out how and why naked mole rats seem impervious to cancer.

Imagine a world without Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Dickens, Tagore, Picasso, Husain, Beethoven, Galileo, Newton, Einstein, Hawking, Watson, Crick, Fleming, Curie, Oppenheimer et al. And philosophers like Bertrand Russell, paleoanthropologists like Louis Leakey. Or the discoverers of the atom and periodic table, the explorers who travelled to America and Africa (even if for nefarious reasons). And the thousands whose inventions (sometimes bizarre) are patented every year.

Then there are those towering minds that drew up the laws and rules that govern us and structure our societies so we don’t fall apart, though sadly good sense seems to have deserted those who are meant to implement these and who think that guns and bombs are the only tools they need to use.

We have the intellect to think, figure out, rationalise, experiment, draw and paint, compose music, conjure up magical stories (no animal reads bedtime stories to its children). So it very much seems that we are right on top… Or are we?

We have intellect. Plenty of it, right, but (as the late Jane Goodall also emphasised in her last interview) we don’t have intelligence. And that, I’m afraid, takes us right down to the bottom of the pile. No other living creature deliberately destroys the environment that it depends on for its life.

There’s one simple golden rule — you do not crap on your food, or pee in the water you drink, which we, in spite of our high triple digit IQs, have been doing, while fully knowing the damage it is doing to us and will do to our children and grandchildren. Wholesale, we foul up our water, make the air we breathe toxic with fumes, fell our forests, ravage the earth’s surface with our mines, causing the planet to heat up inexorably and the oceans to malevolently rise — all in the name of ‘economic development’ (yes, a few people do get very developed very quickly indeed). The way we are going, we will soon need a worldwide ration system whereby every person is entitled to so much, and only so much, of food, drink, fuel, energy, goods and services etc. because there is simply not enough to go around, without causing chaos in societies (which is already happening).

Tribes living in forests, who may be oblivious to e=mc2, know this well and take only as much as they need from their environment as do animals. Even a puppy knows better than to pee in its water bowl and here we are, top intellectuals, debouching millions of gallons of toxic sewage into our rivers every second. Who is the more intelligent one here?

And there is zero waste and a recyclable system in place that ensures that forests keep growing. The big boys eat the big portions of kills, smaller scavengers feed on leftovers and vultures and insects clean up carcasses completely. We may have laser-sharp intellects but intelligence? Alas, zero!