Raftworld
Created | Updated Jan 28, 2002
I picture the Earth as a raft, afloat in a great black sea. For too long we have hacked and torn away at the timbers of our raft to fuel our insatiable appetite for 'things'. The superstructure is breaking up. Holes are appearing. Our raft is beginning to leak. Water is coming in. We clearly need to change our pattern of living. We have to start conserving the essential timbers that form the very body of our world. That world is not infinitely exploitable. We cannot carry on destroying the fabric of our own life-support system. Now, it happens that the solution is quite straightforward, and really not that painful. We just have to accept the need to lead a simpler, more creative, less consumptive way of life. And a more committed way of life. We each need to spend just a little of our time each day baling the water out from our raft. This is our global responsibility.
But we are not yet taking this responsibility upon ourselves. We are continuing to strip the superstructure of our raft to fuel our material progress, and at an ever faster rate. And very few people are bothering to help bale. We somehow persuade ourselves that our individual effort will make so little difference as to be worthless. There is so much water, and our individual buckets are so small. Baling would be a waste of time. Wouldn't it? We decide that we have more important things to do with our time. Like watching television. And so our raft carries on letting in ever more water, through ever more holes.
The analogy is terrifyingly close to the reality. The seas are rising on us. Our great cities are threatened with a submarinal future. Does this bring us to our senses? No. We are too inured to apathy. Too entrenched in our traditional ways. Too snugly embraced in the comfort of our boredom. Too much in love with our material vanities. With the water around our feet, and rising, we are still to be found hacking and tearing away at the timbers of our raft. The very real fear is that we will awake from our insanity too late. We will open our eyes to find the water around our necks. Our raft will be sinking. Or perhaps the water will only be around our knees. The holes would still be irreparable, but we might have a chance of survival. If we wanted to survive that is. Survival on these terms wouldn't amount to a whole lot of fun. We would be required to spend the best part of each day just baling to keep the raft afloat, and you can imagine all the squabbles that would break out over that. It's a wretched prospect.
Yet, as things stand today, this is just the kind of dystopian future that we are going to be leaving for our children. I can hear their voices. Angry voices. Resentful voices. "They were insane," I hear them cry. "They knew so much; how come they understood so little, how come they had so little vision?" I hear voices of despair. "How could they have sat by and let this happen?" I hear voices of hatred. "How could they have raped their own mother?"
:-(
But we are not yet taking this responsibility upon ourselves. We are continuing to strip the superstructure of our raft to fuel our material progress, and at an ever faster rate. And very few people are bothering to help bale. We somehow persuade ourselves that our individual effort will make so little difference as to be worthless. There is so much water, and our individual buckets are so small. Baling would be a waste of time. Wouldn't it? We decide that we have more important things to do with our time. Like watching television. And so our raft carries on letting in ever more water, through ever more holes.
The analogy is terrifyingly close to the reality. The seas are rising on us. Our great cities are threatened with a submarinal future. Does this bring us to our senses? No. We are too inured to apathy. Too entrenched in our traditional ways. Too snugly embraced in the comfort of our boredom. Too much in love with our material vanities. With the water around our feet, and rising, we are still to be found hacking and tearing away at the timbers of our raft. The very real fear is that we will awake from our insanity too late. We will open our eyes to find the water around our necks. Our raft will be sinking. Or perhaps the water will only be around our knees. The holes would still be irreparable, but we might have a chance of survival. If we wanted to survive that is. Survival on these terms wouldn't amount to a whole lot of fun. We would be required to spend the best part of each day just baling to keep the raft afloat, and you can imagine all the squabbles that would break out over that. It's a wretched prospect.
Yet, as things stand today, this is just the kind of dystopian future that we are going to be leaving for our children. I can hear their voices. Angry voices. Resentful voices. "They were insane," I hear them cry. "They knew so much; how come they understood so little, how come they had so little vision?" I hear voices of despair. "How could they have sat by and let this happen?" I hear voices of hatred. "How could they have raped their own mother?"
:-(
