Lost World

Amidst the barrage of doomsday stories carried in documentaries, newspaper, journals and TV on environmental woes like deforestation, global warming, endangered species, etc, it is refreshing and uplifting to finally read good news like the discovery of a "lost world" in Indonesia.

Apparently, scientists have stumbled upon a certain part of the rainforest in Indonesia that has been untouched by men and even better appears to be home to plants and animals that no one has seen before, even by the natives who live in the neighbouring areas. I even saw in the papers the picture of a scientist, all grins holding this golden-mantled tree kangaroo that was previously believed to be very near extinction and a new species of frog the size of a thumbnail.

It just feels good to know that somewhere out there, there are places uncorrupted by the touch of mankind, though now that this has been discovered, it might not be long before it faces the same man-made problems as other natural habitats.

I vividly recalled this scene in The Matrix where Agent Smith compared mankind to viruses. Such a comparison cannot be closer to the truth. It appears that all other species live in harmony with their environment (excluding cases of "alien invasion" which has been one of the top 5 reasons for extinction). The predators check the population of their prey, usually the herbivores and prevent them from depleting the resources of the ecosystem and the population of the predators are in turn constrained by what a given population of prey can support. Predators also obey the natural rule of hunting the prey only when they need to eat rather than for "sports", "wealth" or "power". Only humans depletes and waste resources of nature with no checks... much like viruses which hijack the machinery of cells to keep producing multiple copies of itself until the cell burst and die and until the whole sick organism is filled with viruses. So humans are viruses to the earth just as H5N1 is the virus to the human body.