Change of habits and new adoptions

After changing our habits, what is next?

Going by the equation of nature, every living being is self-sufficient in an organic way under each one’s living ecosystem. Lives can thrive where everything is available for sustaining. But now we thrive in an even deprived environment because our business and science help us find many alternative solutions for comfortable living. Hence, we over-tap many inorganic ways to sustain our life, perhaps more comfortably. As science progresses, business flourishes and humans change their habits and living ecosystem. But I am afraid there is an end to everything. There are unbreakable challenges. 

Today, we have so many challenges before us. We meet all the challenges by discarding them downright and switching to other abundantly available alternatives. These alternatives are usually commercially motivated alternate creations. Still, we say we are meeting all the challenges we face with our science and technology. Yet, we do not mind how dangerously we damage our ecology and how quickly we run away from our cherishable legacies. As we damage our ecology, we have a new set of problems, which are silent but extremely dangerous.

We fix our problems of losses not by restoring them through natural solutions but by replacing them with alternative ones. When there was a depletion in feedstock, we began hatcheries in the last 19th century. It is sensible when a desktop or laptop is damaged and becomes irreparable. But when crops of staple foods are damaged, and climate change has made the cultivation of the crops impossible, local habitats gradually adopt other crops.

Commercial intervention induces a significant change in our habits from food to fashion and mindset to cognitive power. We live by it, forsaking everything nature endows us with and resorting to quickly available options. Our economic-oriented approach to the human world gives each soul new solutions. Our needs fuel many businesses. We do not know how rapidly our living ecosystem changes and how we could be adaptive to all the changes which engender business opportunities.

Our world is now at a crossroads as we have two directions for us to choose – either flood or drought. When there is a flood, we miss the benefit of rain. When there is no rain, we meet the disaster of drought. No one knows what science and business can do to save lives. No one knows how well biotechnology succeeds in developing seeds which can grow in drought. However, biotechnology cannot produce drinking water. No embryo science can create humans capable of living without water.

We have good economics over the peril of biodiversity. We switch from one to another, compensating for the losses of something from other new findings. We have never felt the damages caused by the extinction of many tree, animal and marine species. New models of horticulture, aquaculture and pisciculture took care of the losses. That is how we have been sustaining our lives for one and half centuries after finding the terrible reality of fast-impairing biological systems. The over-exploitation of resources without corresponding generation coincided with damage to marine ecology and land lives, making people run for new ways. Ultimately, we built a business on them and expanded our economy. When depleting natural resources has been compelling humans to adopt a new lifestyle for many years, the new phenomena of flood and drought thrust us towards seemingly an inevitable predicament.   

Once we relook at the concern of survival, we will restart the habits from where we abandoned them, perhaps with commercial motivation. The best example is the return of fish farming that the Chinese used to run thousands of years ago, thanks to the staggering business potential and the multi-billion dollar fish farming economy.