Self-centred Exploitation Leading to Earth's Peril

Leonard Fong Roka

 

The environment—landforms, climates, plant cover and wildlife— sustain itself. In due course, it shapes the behavior pattern of the man and his life. Thus, men adapt into the environmental dictates of their respective environs.

But this natural process of ‘preservation and benefit’ is taking a shift to the selfish will of modernization. The contemporary man is gobbling the Earth’s resources to make his individualistic consumerist life grow in power and prestige. In the process, he suppresses and exploits the environment and his fellow humans are left stranded to suffer the consequences.

Panguna in Bougainville. A development that suppressed and exploited the Solomon Island people of Bougainville to the benefit of the Papua New Guineans who control the island without any respect of the cultural genocide they execute on the marginalized people. Hope came about in 1988 when locals began a armed resistance that uprooted the Papua New Guineans out of the island. Struggle is still on (Photo: darcey.com).

 

In his rush for resources, he causes an imbalance in the ecological nature’s cycle of sustaining itself by ever soaring consumption rates. He crosses borders with his technologies for more resources thus having the future in peril.

People with insights to modern ways, reap the benefits readily whilst the disadvantage people are lost into poverty and death.

This is because a few can adapt or have the guts to adopt the new ideologies or technologies at the speed of light and not through a step by step approach. That is, leaping from the stone-age to the computer-age as Papua New Guinea is doing living most citizens lost without a plot or concrete foundation to absorb shocks later if resource exploitation is complete and the investor works away proudly.

His advancement brings positive and negative change in humanity but not the environment. One result is, man live longer and produces more. In the process, the more people require more resources to survive. So he reaches out.

He reaches out to the unknown lands and people. He divides the land and people of a common ethnicity or nation up without their consent or awareness and suppresses and exploits them for the good of his country origin.

Within the basket of colonization, the new westernized man, slowly realizes the wrong people he is being called a ‘nation’ with, within a post-colonial climate. So this resentment turns into a conflict of nationalism or genocide of the marginalized by those ethnic groups in power.

War breaks out; people suffer and countries economic or political status drops.