Planet Earth, Paradise Lost          [1987]

[Desmond Greaves was a pioneer of ecology before ecology and the Green movement became fashionable. The item below from the May 1987  issue of the monthly “Irish Democrat” is typical of the many short items and comments that he carried on environmental issues during his forty year’ editorship of that paper. “Balance is what is needed, not growth”, he remarks in his Table-Talk.]

Planet Earth is 4,600,000,000 years old. If we condense this inconceivable time-span into an understandable concept, we can liken Earth to a person of 46 years of age. Nothing is known about the first seven years of this person’s life, and whilst only scattered information exists about the middle span, we know that only at the age of 42 does the Earth begin to flower. Dinosaurs and the great reptiles did  not appear until one year ago, when the planet was 45. Mammals arrived only eight months ago and in the middle of last week, man-like apes evolved into ape-like men and at the weekend, the last ice age enveloped the Earth.

Modern man has been around for 4 hours. During the last hour man discovered agriculture. The Industrial Revolution began a minute ago. During those 60 seconds of biological time modern Man has made a rubbish tip of a paradise. He has multiplied his numbers to plague proportions, caused the extinction of 500 species of animals, ransacked the planet for fuels, and now stands, like a brutish infant, gloating over his meteoric rise to ascendency, on the brink of a war  to end all wars and of effectively destroying this oasis of life in the solar system.