We have difficulty making even the most obvious connections between human activities and their environmental consequences. Reports of the flooding on Monday were immediately followed by the news that lorry drivers are threatening a new blockade to support their demand for cheaper fuel. Yet none of the bulletins I heard connected the two stories. Our attempts to cheat life have progressed to an attempt to cheat death. Human beings, we are told, will live for 150, even 200 years, by the end of the century.
Some people are now convinced that they can evade death altogether.
Yet, even as we defy mortality, the horrors associated with old age are multiplying. The cause, it appears, is the ever-increasing burden of toxic chemicals to which we are exposed. In the era of eternal youth, we shut our ever more ancient old people away, perhaps because they remind us of the inexorable biological processes that will lead to our own demise. We are, as a result of our attempts to avoid the constraints of nature, in danger of exchanging a life that was nasty, brutish and short for one that is nasty, brutish and long. Yet it seems clear to me that, although we might do our best to deny that the natural world governs our lives, we are also deeply reluctant to leave it behind.