Greenpeace's protest against Unilever highlighted the death of 1,600 orang-utans on palm oil plantations in 2006. With palm oil increasingly being used for biofuel, is our addiction to constant motion humanity's fatal problem?
I like to look at the map of human migration. I've always been fascinated with the idea of the first person to arrive in the British Isles. They would not have had to cross the Channel because at that time it didn't exist: they would have hiked over from France, perhaps followed by a nagging partner who'd been quite happy where she was, thank you very much, and would miss her old neighbours and didn't like the look of the weather over here. But his restlessness, the search for a better life, would drive him and her on into England, just as it drove humanity around the world entire.
First we moved from the seas to the land. Then we came down from the trees and started walking about on our hind legs. Then we began to wander the continents, migrating from Africa into Asia and Europe and the Far East and then America and South America.
The history of mankind is one of motion, and that motion has speeded up in recent years. The human migratory tendency was an adaptive advantage: we could and can move to wherever things might be better. But as moving has become easier - you no longer have to walk to your new home, you can just drive or fly there - our compulsion to move and keep moving seems to be utterly unstoppable.
I was reading Unilever's statement in response to Greenpeace's accusations that their thirst for palm oil risks the orang-utan species (who are, by the way, believed to be even more intelligent than chimpanzees - there are orang-utan groups who use feeding tools and make roofs for their sleeping nests, and there is an argument that they could be described as 'persons'.
In fact, their name means Person of the Forest. 1,600 orang-utans died on palm oil plantations in 2006 - imagine the outcry if a human tribe was being wiped out at this rate. But that's all by the way). Unilever attribute part of the difficulties with their sourcing of palm oil to - you guessed it - the worldwide demand for biofuels, because palm oil is one of the bases used to make the cursed stuff.
For some reason I had been thinking that palm oil was all about food and face cream, I hadn't entirely realised it was tied up with this biofuel thing too. It struck me yet again how many of our problems are caused by our constant need for motion and change. Just around this little node alone, you can count deforestation, species extinction, food price catastrophe, and climate change, all because we need this fuel, because we're completely addicted to moving. It's embedded deeply in our society.
The inventor Thomas Edison believed that "restlessness is discontent, and discontent is merely the first necessity of progress. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man and I will show you a failure" and that's clearly the idea at the basis of the capitalist economy and its call for eternal growth. If you're not moving (insert "growing"), you're dying.
It wouldn't amaze me if the capitalists have managed to win such swathes of the planet because they have a deep insight into man's nature.
Another Thomas, Hobbes this time, a political philosopher who observed the English civil war, believed that man was "eternally in motion". Our perpetual restlessness is the force that allowed us to encircle the world, and then the moon and the stars. But I am beginning to suspect that that restlessness will turn out to be our tragic flaw, and will lead to our eventual extinction, like any Shakespearean tragedy.
I am now going to practice sitting still for a couple of hours.
