BRITAIN’S Independent newspaper recently published two supplements on two different days, each with the title “100 Things Your Grandchildren May Never See.” Some gloomy predictions but unfortunately some accurate ones. The list included creatures and places that, for whatever reasons, are endangered and might become something future generations know about through reading.
The articles seem to suggest that we only care for things which we ourselves can enjoy — with little thought or care for the future and our children and grandchildren. Species come and go; nature has its ways of changing things but what about the things that humans destroy or cause the loss of: Can those be replaced? Someone observed that most of the creatures and other things that will disappear are unknown to us, and asked if their disappearance would make any difference to us.
Along these lines, the newspaper quoted a biologist at Imperial College, London, as saying, “Most of us will never see tigers in the wild — nor should we because we’d trample India to bits in doing so. Nonetheless, the world is a better, more beautiful and more pleasing place because tigers exist. And there is a moral argument too. It is simply proper for us, as intelligent members in the universe, to try to look after our fellow creatures.”
The loss, argued the Independent writer, is not only to environmental and natural life, it also extends to the social fabric and traditions since they form the larger part of what he calls “unthinking modernization.” He quotes Chekov’s “Uncle Vanya”: “Man has been endowed with reason, with the power to create, so that he can add to what he’s been given. But up to now he hasn’t been a creator, only a destroyer. Forests keep disappearing, rivers dry up, wildlife becomes extinct, the climate is ruined and the land grows poorer and uglier everyday.”
A fair number of things on the list are in Britain but all parts of the world are represented. The list is a mixture of animals, plants, flowers, buildings and even ways of life. Snow, for example, is something that will disappear from Britain as the weather grows warmer. The night sky is on the list as pollution from light will make it difficult or impossible to see the stars. The nightingale, the phone box and working coalmines are also becoming things of the past or, at the very least, are on their way out.
What about the joys of traditional childhoods and unusual ways of life? They too are changing and will soon be little more than memories. Small independent bookstores and restaurants are being swallowed up by chains as the world rushes to globalization.
Speakers’ Corner at Hyde Park is getting less and less attention as people turn to the Internet to present their thoughts and ideas and to learn what others are thinking and doing. Lebanon’s famous cedars, renowned since ancient times, are in danger. Alpine flowers, such as the eidelweiss, may soon recede into nothing more than the fancies of poets and a song from “The Sound of Music.”
There are a number of world heritage sites on the list — the Valley of the Kings and Queens in Egypt where many tombs are filling with rising groundwater. Mount Kilimanjaro with its famous ice cap, will be “ice-free’ in 20 years time. Cities such as Venice and New Orleans and much of Europe’s Mediterranean coastline may also disappear.
On a lighter note, the article ends with a list of things the writer hopes “with any luck, good taste and sound judgment to see gone by 2050.” That list contains envy and intolerance and extends to traffic, pre-sliced cheese, copies of “The Da Vinci Code,” models, paparazzi, shopping centers bigger than neighborhoods and diets.
How about making our own lists and seeing how many things have disappeared during our own lifetimes because of negligence, ignorance and modernization?
In fact we cannot even say that we have been trying to keep anything alive; most things that are here are still here out of pure luck since we so obviously do not care and just take them for granted.
When it comes to the Red Sea’s coral reefs, you find very few people genuinely interested in preserving them. To say nothing of many of Jeddah’s old buildings and streets which have simply vanished. We woke up one day and they were no longer there.
The writers of the supplement had a point about their grandchildren’s being unable to understand what their grandfathers’ worlds were like. Is it too much to say that we lose a bit of our world every day? Never mind what our grandchildren will not see — what about the things that we once knew but which have been lost in our lifetime?
