Value
I was out someplace to check out a small piece of land in the Western Ghats worth protecting (am trying to stitch together a bunch of individuals who’d like to buy out small pockets to just leave alone, except for maybe a common cabin/campground).
When the jeep stopped, I saw this on our right.
A grand old tree — now gone and split into 2 parts (one lay across the path on the left). That’s a full size coffee plant next to it — this would have been a 100+ years easily. Trees that old are hard to come by even in the Western Ghats — we’ve managed to “fit” nature into human timescales, more or less.
Got me thinking about value.
We live in, and with the forest. It provided all we needed. Perpetually. Overall, with more robustness and health each passing year.
Then someone likely saw seeds germinate, and planted more of those in parts of the forest for more and predictable food. We created differential value between the “wild” and our “need” with that itsef.
The cycle kept continuing — someone plucked out some grass they got nutrition from, cleared out a stretch and planted lots of of it. Someone figured the other plants took some of the nutrition, and the idea of weeds which reduced the value of what we needed was born. We then cleared out landscapes at scale for fruit orchards, coffee, cashew, grains, veggies, and what not.
Some smart folks were extracting metals and creating tools. The crafts refined — for both utility as well as for aesthetics. One more, and the next one, more convenience, more utility, and higher sense and idea of value, and the relative devaluing of everything wild and unnecessary.
Even our earlier orchards and farms were far, far, far less value than the new and shiny toys we kept churning out at an ever more furious pace, and the mines we needed to keep doing that.
Computing, the internet, bitcoins, NFTs — ever increasing value for ever increasing abstraction and mythical, human interpreted value.
Eventually, there’s no value and no space for the wild, by and large. We dislike tree roots near our homes and pools and walls, we dislike undergrowth because of the wild unpredictability they create in our heads and lack of value from them.
We value what we like. We value what we understand, and are not scared of. Our understand of the fundamental and deep value of the natural world is only recent, and not yet widespread or mainstream.
A little knowledge has been very, very dangerous knowledge indeed, for the overall trajectory of the human civilization and its relationship with the planet’s living systems.
Our idea of value has to shift massively, if we have to recover from this. Else those grand old trees will continue to be felled to make space for those coffee plants, at scale and routinely.
