The World Is Shrinking!

Once upon a time, the world was full of volcanoes and ferocious oceans, and it was big enough for them all. Billions of years later, life came on earth, and the world was big enough for life. Soon, psilophytes, the first land plants, grew in and around the water margins of our planet, and the world was big enough for these psilophytes. As time slowly graduated, giant clubmosses and seed-ferns flourished, and for them too, the world was big enough. Insects and amphibians followed the giant clubmosses and seed-ferns, and the world, again, was big enough to hold the insects and amphibians. After the insects, enormous diplodocuses, brontosauruses, tyrannosauruses, allosauruses and much smaller raptors and other dinosaurs appeared. Flying reptiles scoured the skies. Vast areas of land were covered by thick, green conifer forests, and the world was big enough for all of these curious things. Within a short time, plants with beautiful flowers emerged, and the world was big enough. After the mighty dinosaurs died out, deltatheridiums, zalambdalesteses, ptiloduses, meniscotheriums, prodiacodons and other queer-named mammals quickly took over, and the world, once again, was big enough. By this time the ancestors of our oaks, pines and firs began to grow, and the world, amazingly, was big enough.

It was not long before apes appeared, and soon enough they evolved into human beings. And for all these incredible things, the world was big enough. As time flowed by, human beings began to learn to use objects and animals around them, and they built shelters, befriended animals and kept them as pets in those shelters that they built. Tribes were formed, and some men went to live in the valleys, some in the hills, and some in different lands altogether. But all this didn’t matter, because the world was still big enough.

As civilisation took hold of human beings, they built villages, and these villages grew bigger and pretty soon became towns, and towns became cities. They cut forests to make space for more homes and farmland. All these changes in more than a thousand years and the world still remained big enough. From stones, men turned to metal, and from metals to plastic. And still, the world was big enough.

As people multiplied, they cut down more and more trees, for the sake of space. But there were still a lot of forests left, so that didn’t matter much, and the world was big enough. Man invented new things: for transport, communication, comfort and luxury. The more things he built, he was inclined to build more, to make life easier. Shops of different varieties of edible and inedible objects flourished, and the difference between the rich and the poor seemed to deepen.

Mobile phones, television, radios, cars, compact disc players, electrical tin openers, washing machines and other odd inventions became increasingly popular. Whether people really needed them did not matter; they were there, and those who could afford them, bought them. As more and more devices and odd equipments were sold, more and more companies came up and more and more factories were built. The sky became a shade of grey and the forests quickly shrank.

But all this was fine, because, after all, the world was still big enough.
Soon the number of people in the world became 2 billion, and in almost no time 10 billion. And it went on increasing.

One day, in a remote forest somewhere in South America, the head of a small tribe was visited by a few men in impressive tuxedos. They told him that he and his people had to move. Taken by surprise, the head of the tribe asked the reason why. The men shrugged, and said that they’re going to turn the forest into another city.

“What about the animals? What about my people? Where do we go?”

“I’m sorry, but the world is shrinking, and there’s nothing you can do. You have to move.”

The headman sighed, and a tear trickled down his old face. Silently he thought about how in ancient times his gods and goddesses created enormous creatures and how for those creatures, the world was certainly large enough. It was hard for him to understand how the world was not large enough for humans.
The tribe left and eventually ended up as vagabonds in a neighbouring city, and soon they died of starvation and apathy meted out to them by its modern citizens. The animals in the forest were killed when it was cleared away. The clearing was merged with a neighbouring city and factories were built around it. Where the peaceful tribe had once been, there stood a shining, modern, glossy building with a plastic sign on top of the glass door reading “McDonald’s.”