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Is humanity’s restlessness a threat to the planet?
Bibi van der Zee, Guardian
Humanity’s history is marked by constant movement, mass migration from continent to continent in search of a better way of life. Is this restless addiction to travel – and our desperate demand for more fuel to feed it – our fatal flaw as a species?
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… The history of mankind is one of motion, and that motion has speeded up in recent years. The human migratory tendency was an adaptive advantage: we could and can move to wherever things might be better. But as moving has become easier – you no longer have to walk to your new home, you can just drive or fly there – our compulsion to move and keep moving seems to be utterly unstoppable.
… It struck me yet again how many of our problems are caused by our constant need for motion and change. Just around this little node alone, you can count deforestation, species extinction, food price catastrophe, and climate change, all because we need this fuel, because we’re completely addicted to moving. It’s embedded deeply in our society.
… Another Thomas, Hobbes this time, a political philosopher who observed the English civil war, believed that man was “eternally in motion”. Our perpetual restlessness is the force that allowed us to encircle the world, and then the moon and the stars. But I am beginning to suspect that that restlessness will turn out to be our tragic flaw, and will lead to our eventual extinction, like any Shakespearean tragedy.
I am now going to practice sitting still for a couple of hours.
(24 April 2008)
With First Car, a New Life in China
Keith Bradsher, New York Times
… Western attention to China’s growing appetite for automobiles usually focuses on its link to mounting dependence on foreign oil, escalating demand on natural resources like iron ore, and increasing emissions of global warming gases.
But millions of Chinese families, like millions of American families, do not make those connections. For them, a car is something both simpler and more complicated.
J. D. Power & Associates calculates that four-fifths of all new cars sold in China are bought by people who have never bought a car before – not even a used car. That number has remained at that level for each of the last four years. By contrast, less than a tenth of new cars in the United States are purchased by people who have never bought a new car before, and fewer than 1 percent of all new cars are sold to people who have never bought a new or used car before.
China’s explosive growth in first-time buyers is the driving force behind the country’s record car sales, up more than eightfold since 2000. It is the reason China just passed Japan to become the world’s second-largest car market, behind the United States.
(24 April 2008)
