Sick Earth

I am reading Small is Beautiful by EM Schumacher. Apparently, people were highly optimistic back in the early 1970s, believing that the "problem of production" had been solved and that rich countries had only to be concerned with "education for leisure" while their poorer counterparts busyed themselves with "technology transfer". Indeed, those were the good old days.

The positive vibes have long gone and few people need convincing these days that planet earth is on the brink of major disaster. The Western economies are imploding, global warming is inducing global dread and people are no longer just mouthing off about sustainability but actually ACTING on it!

We're way past the point of no return, if you ask me.

Jonas Salk: If all the insects on earth disappeared, within 50 years all life on earth would disappear. If all humans disappeared, within 50 years all species would flourish as never before.

Not very flattering to our inflated egos, is it?

Schumacher: Nature always, so to speak, knows where and when to stop. Greater even than the mystery of natural growth is the mystery of the natural cessation of growth. There is measure in all natural things - in their size, speed or violence. As a result, the system of nature, of which man is a part, tends to be self-balancing, self-adjusting, self-cleansing.

So allow impertinent me to ask this rude question:

Why is Evolution (supposedly unguided by intelligence) able to strike this wondrous ecological balance when man (equipped with the most complex computer in the universe - the human brain) has only been good at F**KING THE PLACE UP?