A Planet Inflicted by Cancer

Some people treat our planet as a living organism — the Greeks named her Gaia, and many of us fondly call her Mother Nature. Then, the Mother is suffering from a grave and painful disease. The disease is a cancer. The cancer agent is none other than one of her children among the countless species she has nurtured and sustained. The species is Homo sapiens, us, the wise man and the human race, one of her latest children and the most intelligent of all living organisms. There have been many far more powerful species and organisms during the planet's three-billion-year-plus history, none — not even among the most powerful or the mightiest, including the dinosaurs and the African elephants — have caused so much hurt and damage to her. It makes us wonder what kind of animal humans are to be able to do what the powerful and the mighty can't do.

Our species began about seven to eight million years ago from a greatly disadvantaged position, from a common chimp that somehow was forced to walk on two feet. It was certainly one of nature's weirdest creations. The creature was so ill-fitted to survive that it should be destined to join many weaker species that has ended up in nature's recycle bin. Our ancestor was supposed to die within several sunrises and sunsets, or several seasons at the very most. But he did not; he miraculously managed to survive and gave rise to a number of children. They also survived, continued to evolve, made it through several transitional species, and eventually gave rise to us, the modern human.

For the most parts of our lineage's relatively short existence, our species did not show any sign of malignance. Like all Mother Nature's children, our species has lived in compliance to her rules and has been obedient still. Then, things began to change. The cancer began to develop. There are three distinct stages, starting from a seemingly harmless period, to increasingly alarming, and then extremely dangerous.

Stage I: After the Discovery of Farming

If Mother Nature had been more observant, she could have noticed that our species, from the very beginning, the first chimp that began — or more correctly was forced — to walk on two feet, was bound to be a troublemaker. But she was too busy, and she had seen stranger things among the creatures she looked after. It took almost the entire 8 million years of our species' evolution to develop any symptoms. The event that has started it all was the discovery of farming by us. After farming had been fully established, our species began to grow in greater numbers. As our population grew, we needed more lands to grow food and to build houses. We began to take more and more acreage of land from indigenous species, either chasing them away or eliminating them altogether.

The lives of humans also became more complex; not everyone needed to be directly involved in producing food. Many people began to make their living by trading items. As a result, many more items besides food and shelter became necessary and were created accordingly. Farming could support far more people than hunting/gathering, a lifestyle that was gradually replaced. As always, more humans create more waste and garbage. The landscape began to deteriorate and symptoms surfaced, though hardly noticeable or any cause for concern.

Stage II: After the Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution began in the eighteenth century. Like the discovery of farming, it has forever changed the way our species conducts business and lives our daily lives. We have since increasingly employed machines to do our work. With machines, we can produce much more food, clothing, and everything that we need for daily life, and in much shorter time and with much less cost and human labor. Like the discovery of farming, it appeared to be a blessing and had no ill side effects. As a result, the planet could support many more millions of people. And as a result, we needed more land to build houses, schools, factories, recreational facilities, networks of roads, and many, many more items. At this stage, our species has, without the slightest shred of doubt, become, pound for pound, the most polluting, as well as the most destructive, species that has ever lived.

Exponential number of acreages was appropriated from more and more indigenous species that were unfortunate enough to share the planet with us or lived too close. Environmental deterioration and pollution became increasingly worrisome among the highly industrialized countries. Global mass extinctions became a constant scene as we grew and expanded. If that was not bad enough, war in higher frequency and bigger scales became the norm. War not only kills us, both soldiers and innocent people, it destroys habitats and the lives that dwell in them. Within several decades after the beginning of the twentieth century, Mother Nature has seen two world wars. The symptoms of the cancer have then become full blown. Many caring people feel we need to do something to stop the cancer, yet nothing has been done or can be done because we did not know the root of the problem. And the cancer continued to develop unchecked.

Stage III: The Information Age (also known as the Computer Age, Digital Age, or New Media Age)

Even after the invention of cars and airplanes, thereby making traveling much faster for us, the planet has remained a vast place. It usually took days or weeks to get from the shore of one continent to the other. It led us to happily believe that the planet had an infinite capacity to absorb our garbage and to fully regenerate itself despite the abuses. Any biologist would tell you that our planet has an enviable system to self-cleanse, in which the wastes and pollutants from one group of organisms are happily recycled by another. So we continue to happily consume and create tons and tons of every kind of garbage in the process.

Then, the computer made its appearance. Human ingenuity allows computer technology to pick up speed in development exponentially, making the price of information dirt cheap. Computers and the Internet combined have greatly shrunk our planet. Though it still takes many hours to fly to the other side of the globe, it takes virtually no time for information to cover even the farthest apart places. The planet is still divided by borders. However, leaders in the business or political world seldom think in scope of country anymore; they now consider matters in a global context, a single entity.

Politics is also evolving quickly and is becoming far more complex. The line between an enemy and a friend has increasingly been blurred by other considerations. Business takes priority to politics, and profit routinely trumps idealism. The United States has become the biggest trading partner of Communist China. Globalization has thus hugely impacted business and trade.

One of the important consequences is it allows both goods and people to move around the planet more freely. As a result, more goods are available for consumption by people separated by a vast distance. Japanese melons, for example, can readily be shipped, still very fresh, to Hong Kong the next day after having been harvested. California produce can be flown to any corner of the globe for consumption, provided the price is right.

To accommodate the huge tonnage of goods, you need longer and bigger trucks and railroad cars. To hold more and more containers, the ships are built bigger and bigger. So are the planes for delivering the astronomical number of packages, parcels, and goods. All the transport vehicles require energy, mostly power by fossil fuel. Which, in turn, produce tons and tons of carbon dioxide, which end up in air, seas, or oceans.

People also become much, much more mobile. For families in many countries, owning vehicles powered by gas becomes indispensable. Air travel becomes more affordable, fashionable, and highly desirable. Large number of managers and executives also need to regularly fly to distant destinations for meetings. Traffic, whether on land, by sea, or in air, has quickly multiplied. And we have not taken into account the energy required and the waste created in producing all the goods and merchandize to satisfy our insatiable appetites.

Cheap information and making of ever bigger vessels and vehicles have made distributing goods much easier, and have thus greatly increased the amount of food available to people who either don't or cannot grow food in places around the world. The populations in those places grow as a result. Many of the food items shipped can hardly be categorized as necessity. Lobsters caught in Canada's east coast can quickly be delivered live to Europe or rich cities in Asia for picky diners. To support such luxury requires burning an astronomical number of fossil fuel, which leads to further taxing of the planet.

Symptoms of a Planet Ravaged by Cancer

Suddenly, the planet no longer appears to be vast or inexhaustible; Mother Nature has finally been stretched to her limits. The ravage on her body is visible almost everywhere if one cares to look. There is hardly a cubic meter of air, a drop of water, or a square centimeter of land in her that is free from pollutants. Her wounds are everywhere and ubiquitous. She has been very sick. Her body temperature has risen noticeably; we can no longer, with good conscience, deny the serious hurt we have inflicted upon her.

There is no question that the planet is very sick. Like a sick person often does, the temperature of Mother Earth is rising. The rising temperature, global warming, is caused by the raised level of carbon dioxide we have produced, which has far exceeded Mother Nature's capacity to recycle it. As a result, it stays in the air and helps to retain heat in the atmosphere and thus raising its temperature. As a result, the weather is getting more extreme because the molecules in our atmosphere, on the average, have more energy in them. Long drawn-out droughts become more frequent — in places where it normally rarely happens. It spawns forest or bush fires besides making the land sterile. Rainfall is getting more extreme, often creating deadly floods. Tornados and hurricanes not only are more common, they are also more powerful and thus destructive.

But the extreme weather is just the tip of the iceberg. What we cannot see but is far more damaging and sinister comes from the carbon dioxide, which dissolves in water — the seas and oceans, especially. According to one estimate, we have "disposed of" 530 billion tons of carbon dioxide in the world's waters so far and we are adding one million tons of the molecules to our waters every hour. The dissolved gas raises the acidity of the water, which in turn increases the solubility of calcium carbonate, thus making it hard to form protective shells for many marine lives. There has been massive bleaching in the Great Barrier Reef from the death of many of its coral species. The once abundantly rich environment has become barren. Life must be increasingly difficult for aquatic animals, if not impossible.

Shell-forming animals and plants form the foundation of our food chain. We have yet to know the impact and consequences of this impediment. If it causes mass extinction — it is almost a certainty, just a matter of which species first, when and where — it will unquestionably wipe out the many fish species that we depend on for food. And there are over three billion people, rich and poor, who eat fish to supply 20 percent of their protein intakes in 2013. The collapse of fish species will spell famine for many and will be a calamity beyond calculating.

There is no question that Mother Nature is very sick this day. In fact, she is dying. Many mammals are disappearing; birds are vanishing in great numbers. Many reptiles, frogs, fish, and beneficial insects that were once so abundant not so long ago are difficult to find. When I lived in my native village in the southern part of China, the streams and rivers teemed with many aquatic lives, not just fish. I used to catch little frogs just for fun. Butterflies were abundant. And one could hear birds singing all year long.

I made the mistake of returning to the village sixty years after I left, hoping to relive my childhood once more. My heart was shattered when I saw my dream had become a nightmare; I almost cried. The little river in which I had spent so many hours playing, catching shrimps and fish had dried up. The bed was littered with plastic bags of all colors and sizes. Streams had become open sewage — black in color and bubbling foul gas.

But that is only one of the many parts of China that suffered this unfortunate fate. There are many places in many more countries where people live that are like that. Mother Nature is slowly dying, choking to death by the pollutants we humans have produced. We must change and we must stop this mindless crime against her. Can we stop polluting? And from killing our planet? We must change, not just for Mother Nature's sake. For ourselves, for our children and their children, and for our species' survival and for selfish reasons, we need to change.

It is not just pollution that has made lives miserable. Our love affair with war must also be stopped. War always kills lots of people; they are the lucky ones for they are spared from the many sufferings of those who continue living after. War destroys properties, land for growing food, and the people we love. To survive a war often means having to live with less food and thus constant hunger, besides the sorrow and sadness of living with families broken.

War used to be between two countries. Now, we have a government turning against its own people, killing many by chemicals. On top of that, there are groups within the country fighting and killing each other trying to gain power. The ongoing Syrian civil war has killed or wounded about half a million of its citizens, which is more than one-tenth of the country's population. It has also turned many millions into refugees, many of whom are women and children. Besides wrecking the country, the Syrian civil war, by creating millions of refugees, also spills its problems over to European countries, creating giant headaches for their politicians. Even faraway countries like Australia, United States, and Canada are not immune. We truly are living in a globalized world. How do we put an end to war in our world?

And there is widespread poverty — not just in the third-world countries like Haiti, African countries, and nations in Asia, but in very affluent countries like the United States, Canada, Australia, Germany, etc. as well. Unlike war, which usually kills a great number of people quickly, poverty kills slowly. People continue to live in drawn-out suffering, often until every drop of life has been sneezed out of them. And it will not be the end either. Children of the poor are often born into the same vicious cycle that few can escape from.

Poverty is a form of cruelty very different from war. Very few can see its true ugliness. So it is allowed to perpetuate. Though it seems to only affect some less unfortunate, it is false; in the end, everyone is hurt by it — the rich and the poor. It is the main source of social unrest and many crimes. The polarization of rich and poor often spawns riots, unrest, and crimes. That is why so many rich Africans seek to immigrate to Canada, Australia, or New Zealand. How do we end this ugliness? Is there a way to end this ugliness?

We shall continue to explore in the coming chapters. The whole book is aimed at solving the three big problems: war, pollution, and poverty.