"What man calls civilization always results in deserts. Man is never on the square -- He uses up the fat and greenery of the earth. Each generation wastes a little more of the future with greed and lust for riches." -- Don Marquis. With our modern awareness of ecology are we likely to make sufficient progress in conservation, or are we still in danger of damaging the earth beyond repair?

"Each generation wastes a little more of the future..............." -- Don Marquis.
A time will come when the existing generation will have nothing to waste. Will machines take over the earth and annihilate the humans? No. Will the exhaustion of resources result in mutation of a virus that turns humans to zombies? No. Will the world return to stone age and humans separate into tribes fighting against new and savage beats? No. We imagine for the worst out of fear. We fear because we know we are inflicting too much pain on nature. Nature isn't hurting us in return. But she will, eventually, buckle down on her knees and crumble. This dread has crept into our minds and is building its nest at the back of our minds. Nobody, however, can imagine what the future will look like.

People can't imagine that which is unknown to them. People fear to venture into the realm of the unknown. People are afraid that of they go on the way they are, one day the world would change beyond recognition. Alter it will; and for the worse. People are making efforts to hold fast to the world of today. They want to keep the picture hanging on the wall. It is true that change can be brought in the lifestyle of the people if they try hard enough and the world can be made a better place with those changes. But will everybody try hard enough? Even if everyone can be awakened, how long will it take?

It took us so many years to just realise that we are ruining the world. It may take just so many years more to find out what the right thing to do is. The world will not wait that long. Everybody knows what the problem is but many are not ready to take even the first steps. Unless it becomes the will of all to change the world, things cannot take a better turn. This is not one man's fight. The fight cannot be won without the greedy and apathetic on the morals' side.

The greedy, selfish and apathetic need to change first. But, they are hardwired into hundreds of centuries of civilization. A recent excavation revealing the 4000 year old skeletal framework of a man with a rare congenital disease, the Klippel-Feil syndrome, where the bones weaken and the spinal vertebrae fuse together, show that care and empathy were intrinsic human character. The man contracted the disease as an infant and though dependent on others, through his adolescence into his twenties(by which time he was completely dependent).

The ability to be compassionate is a thing of the past. Whether its disappearance was before or after people developed their love for money can be disputed. Man's material desires and need to display their possessions, the hunger for status, the ever-widening gap between those who have too much and those who have too little, have all led to a dying moral system in the society. The lust for these very things is grooming a selfish man who has learnt only to take and not to give. He will use but not replenish.

In using those resources which cannot be replenished once depleted gives him more money, there he will invest. Replacing a depleted resource with another merely leads to the over-consumption of the other. For those few who are trying to make the world a better place, it is a long struggle -- maybe too long. The world is critical and our characters are not equipped with adequately efficient technology to help it.