The origin of dividing av circle in 360 degrees is a subject of debate amongst historians. Some say it is of ancient origin and had do to with the number of days in a year, others that it wasconnected to the opportunity to divide 360 into even numbers.
In the practice of navigation other sums have been tried, but 360 degrees has prevailed. In the European exploration of the globe, this figure became one basis for the work of navigators.
There is today little consensus on whether the European exploration of the world from the 15th century and on worth should be viewed as something positive. In any case the negative impact it had on other cultures and nature is well known. Still, even if the views that allowed our forefathers to sail across oceans and conquer, enslave and exploit may today be deemed as something belonging to the past, we continue to navigate with 360 degrees. This is a common factor that might help us better understand how it was to search for new worlds,and for us to find better ways to take care of world we live in today. Our forefathers could look down over valleys of lookup at mountains, and they would climb the sailing rigs of ships. Still the horizontal perspective of the world was what dominated when exploring it, and this perspective was divided into 360 degrees.
The explorers of the past sailed off from Europe where certain trees and places had for centuries been sacred. They arrived amongst indigenous people who also considered certain areas and species as holy. The fact that both that those who had come to conquer and those deemed to be conquered both shared beliefs that certain parts of nature should be left alone, has seldom been acknowledged. It might also seem unnecessary to acknowledge, since as we know it very seldomled to mutual understanding. At least not until the end of the 20th century.
Yellowstone in the USA was in 1872 the first area in the world to became a national park, and it spurred a trend of creating national parks around the globe that continues to this this day. In the wake of national parks followed an ever-growing number of other official ways of legally protecting pieces of nature from the onslaught of man.
In the third decade of the 21th century there is little use to write another book describing the state the biosphere is in. It is alsoat this time a well-established fact that protecting small fragments of nature surrounded by endless fields of wheat, infrastructure and urban sprawl is not a long-term solution to protect biodiversity. At the best, we are prolonging the extinction of species we wish to save. Isolating “islands” of plants, frogs, bees and mammals in fragments of greenery, from which they have no possibility to reach conspecifics, make them vulnerable to disease, interbreeding and obesity.Still, the prevailing focus of politicians, officials, biologist and the general public in the western world interested in conservation efforts continues to be the creation of replicas to Yellowstone. Or perhaps some kind of modern analogies to holy places that proceeded national parks.
When referring to holy places as something the proceeded modern ways of protecting biodiversity it should of course be acknowledged that numerous indigenous people still protect places that are considered sacred. This fact is interesting not only because of the importance it might have for the preserving areas that otherwise might have been deemed to destruction. It is also of importance due to indigenous people both in the northern and southern hemisphere having come into conflict with the idea of protecting nature as national parks. There is a sad list of people being driven away from their homes or prohibited to live in traditional ways with the argument that people are bad for nature. Parallel to this is thetragic practice of placing indigenous people in “reservations”. It is well known what this practice has led to. Even so, the idea of certain cultures having to prevail in squared of areas remains statuesque on a global scale.
Science and technological development have during the last century made it possible to once again explore the world and to extend the human will to explore into space. With aircrafts, satellites and drills extending miles below our feet we have come to discover and confirm aspects of our home that were unthinkable or merely theoretical in the past. One sum of the new era of exploration has amongst many other conclusions been the worry of climate change.
The ironical fact that it was the global military industrial complex that made it possible to take the iconic distant picture of what Carl Sagan called the “pale blue dot’ in space, a picture held close by environmentalist, has been pointed out by several authors. Pictures like this have brought us to the conflicting situation where the belief that new technology will save us has been put up against opinions that new ways of thinking, acting and living is what is most urgently needed: Driving less or sharing a car with others could reduce pollution, but cars still require rare metals and an industrial complex with environmental impact extending across the globe. The decision to buy organic food means you can reduce the amount of pesticide residues in your daily meal. But is this choice enough to make the changes needed in agriculture to protect biodiversity if organic farms have turned an entire valley into an intensely cultivated landscape?
Is it so that only the change of deeper personal values can lead to real change? Indeed, it can be hard to say that technological advance or values should prevail over the other. One possible outcome of this situation it the risk of being left with the emptiness of not knowing what to do, and the question of where to find hope for the future.
There have been numerous ideas that humanity might some day have to venture out into space in order for us to survive as a specie. However, the day that this might become possible constantly seems constantly to move farther into the future. At the same time the limits of our not round but slightly oval little planet and the ecosystems on which we are dependent become more and more obvious. We can fly around it in 45 hours. Air pollution from one side of the globe takes less than two weeks to reach the other side. It is not bigger than that.
From our aircrafts or spacecraft, we can look down over small squares of greenery such as Yellowstone in the USA, ChapadaDiamantina in Brazil or Björnlandet in Sweden and ask what we have done to the planet. Is a continued squaring off of certain areas and surrounding fragments of nature with cattle ranches, tree plantations and infrastructure the way we want to continue protecting Earth? Our should we instead turn the perspective and start protecting ecosystems in 360 degrees surrounding farmland, towns and factories?