As information technology makes the world smaller, we will need to change the definition of the word "wilderness". There may be vast open spaces still left in the middle of Siberia or up on the Tibetan plateau, on Antarctica, or the islands in the eastern Pacific. But they are not truly wild anymore in the way the world was wild even 100 years ago. An Iridium satellite races across the sky at sunset, a yurt has a dish antenna poking out of its side, vapour trails of high-flying jets crisscross above Greenland. And from the top of Mt Everest dying climbers call home to say farewell to their dear ones.
In Punta Arenas, the southernmost city in the world, shades, hats and long sleeves have become a part of the school uniform to protect children from harmful ultraviolet rays passing unfiltered through the ozone hole. The atolls in the Maldives have lost 70 percent of their coral reefs in the past three years because of a warm plume of ocean current, and the archipelago may have only 50 years before it is submerged forever by sea level rise. In the middle of the Amazon, the sky suddenly goes dark at noon because of blazing rainforests upwind. Trekking northeast of Kathmandu you come upon Tsho Rolpa, a lake that is nearly bursting because global warming has caused the Rolwaling Glacier to melt and recede. And who will forget that apocalyptic sight of Machhapuchhare this April-a black pyramid almost devoid of snow. Nature, and wilderness probably remains pristine and intact today only on National Geographic or Discovery channels.
Economic globalisation has another, less promising by-product: the ecological globalisation of its impact. Today, scientists, economists, futurologists and sociologists are trying to find out how the earth can live in ecological equilibrium. This shift to a new earth ethic is no longer some hippie dream, it has sound economic basis. The goal is to make human societies less wasteful, more frugal with resources, more equal. As Gandhi said, there is enough for everyone's need but not for everyone's greed.
This is the real world-wide web, a web of life intricately linked to natural processes and human factors. In the thin film of life on the planet's surface, nature is threatened as in no time in history by human activity that exploited resources as if there was no tomorrow. An exponential growth in the world's population, the wasteful extravagance of some countries, the worldwide bonfire of fossil fuels are bringing irreversible changes that threaten livelihoods and the lives of those to come. But there is now hope: economics is making a paradigm shift from the industrial-information age to a biological age that recognises the limits of what ecosystems can sustain. It is moving away from an anthropocentric worldview that treats nature as a honey-pot for the apex species. As long as the human demand for food, energy and other needs are within nature's capacity for regeneration the biosphere will survive intact.
The message from this week's meeting of the World Wide Fund for Nature was clear: let's learn to live and thrive without threatening the planet's biodiversity and the natural resource base. It is more than symbolic that WWF chose Nepal as its venue: one of the world's ecologically richest countries is also its economically poorest. But Nepal's achievements at preserving nature while ensuring better living conditions for its people is also a model for the rest of the world.
