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          Even as a boy I recognised that motor transport and aeroplanes must increasingly shrink the world and irrevocably destroy its fascinating diversity."
--Wilfred Thesiger (My Life and Travels, an Anthology)

So said the last of the unyielding traditionalists, Wilfred Thesiger (1910-2003), who despised 'civilisation' as we understand it till his last days. He lived a 93-year long adventurous life. With his earliest memories comprising "indistinct recollections of camels and of tents, of a river and a man with spears, and one vivid picture of my father shooting an Oryx when I was three"(Ibid.), in Addis Ababa, where he was born in 1910, Thesiger fell in love with the traditional ways of life since his childhood. The great twentieth century explorer-adventurer in the tradition of the past remained a barbarian at heart even though he had all the reasons to be a run-of-the-mill modern-day man, given the socio-cultural as well as the familial background he had inherited by dint of his birth. His father was a British minister in Ethiopia when Africa was yet to lose its innocence and old charms. Thesiger's early years moulded his attitudes toward life so much so that he refused to follow the dictates of his time. During his exploration of the endless sand dunes of Rub-al-Khali (the Empty Quarter) of Saudi Arabia, once he had to remain trapped in the desert for three days at a stretch, without food and water, and waiting for his Bedu friends to come to his rescue. However, such sufferings in the desert heat notwithstanding, he preferred the challenges of a life amidst the uncivilised and, of course, in the lap of pristine Nature. He would rather suffer and starve there in the sand and under the hot desert sun than travel in comfort in a car, replete with food and listen to the wireless. The car, the plane and the wireless were all to him the tyranny of civilisation and modernity.
But was Thesiger right? Was it an instance of mere idiosyncrasy for this great modern-day English explorer or that there was, after all, some substance in what he religiously stuck to till his last? Was he basically anti-science? How can a full-blooded explorer be against the very spirit of discovery and invention that also brought about the revolution in science and technology?
What the great explorer was really afraid of is the invasive nature of the science and technology that man has been cultivating so passionately. He could never accept and ultimately turned against the way the western civilisation went on bulldozing through the ancient world of variety and tradition. In a similar fashion the new missionaries of trade and technology destroyed the diversity of nature.
The traditionalist adventurer may like to preserve the world in all its mystery and then set sail for the unknown. One may like to characterise Thesiger as a freak, an anachronism, as one not belonging to his time. But what about modern thinkers like Martin Heidegger, who is staunchly against the science's aim to dominate nature? To him using nature to serve man is something intrinsically repulsive. Comparing with how the ancients treated nature, he deplores how modern science tries to enslave and use it. Which is why levelling harsh criticism at the hydroelectric project to harness the waterpower of Rhine, he writes,
"The hydroelectric plant is set into the current of the Rhine. It sets the Rhine to supplying its hydraulic pressure, which then turns its turbine turning… The hydroelectric plant is not built into the Rhine river, as was the old bridge that joined bank with bank for hundreds of years. Rather the river is damned up into the power plant. What the river is now, namely, a water supplier, derives from out of the essence of power station." (M. Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology)
However, Heidegger was concerned about Rhine hydel project because he abhorred the use and enslavement of the river. But that is more a concern for a river than for the animal life, including that of humans, who depend for their sustenance on the river. Enslavement of rivers can also destroy the ecosystem that evolved over tens of thousands of years along its course. The Farakka project is the glaring example of a dam that is not only destroying the entire ecosystem surrounding the river Ganges (which has become Padma in the downstream region), it has also been causing untold sufferings to millions of people who depend on this river for their survival. Why has the dam been built in the first place? This is, in fact, another instance of how vain can man become, a vanity that is often demonstrated by politicians in the name of serving one section of humanity at the expense of the other. The politicians, who were behind the construction of Farakka and thus harnessing of the mighty Ganges, are now again active and out to commit another monumental folly by changing the courses of a large number of rivers flowing southwards from the Himalayas criss-crossing the Ganges delta called Bangladesh. If the river-linking project so conceived by the political powers behind it is successful, it will spell doom not just for the downstream people who depend for their survival on those rivers, it will in the long run destroy the entire river system that originate from the Himalayas. Environmentalists in India have already begun to express their deep concern about the river-linking project. Medha Patekar, leader of the Save Narmada movement in India, has said that the river linking project would bring flood, not water. An environmental expert, Kalyan Rudra, wrote in a prestigious Kolkata-based Bangla biweekly that if implemented, the project would destroy 80 thousand hectares of forestland and displace about 450,000 from their homes. So far, these mega projects of damming and redirecting rivers worth billions of dollars, however, have not suffered from any funding problem even though poverty alleviation projects are perennially running short of money. Only in South Asia, more particularly in India, where the absolute poor cannot earn even a dollar a day, there was never any dearth of funds for big dams. The World Bank has traditionally been a major financier of dams world wide. In 1988 alone, some 473 dam projects were under construction in India, 45 of which were being funded by the World Bank. In 1997, there were some 39000 large dams in the world and of those 5,500 were in the USA and 618 in Canada. But wherever have those big dams, and with them their big water-reservoirs, been built, the end result has invariably been disastrous for the surrounding ecology including human settlements. The impact has been long-term with even its political ramifications. As for example, much of the present-day political unrest and armed violence in the Chittagong Hill Tracts can be traced back to the time when the Kaptai hydroelectric project had begun. The local people, who lost their homes and lands, never forgave the project and its builders. Such widespread anger and resentment caused by such mega projects can spill well over national borders and into the international arena.
Such mega projects, though politically inspired and guided by the selfish end of serving one part of humanity by depriving another of its due, they are in the ultimate analysis self-defeating schemes. For the long-term impact of these ego-serving activities to enslave nature in a grand scale is self-destructive.
But we were talking about Thesiger, the last of the pure-blooded classical explorers, whose love of the unspoilt nature and abhorrence of the technology-dominated modernity has by now become a legend. But Thesiger being an unmitigated adventurer at heart, he could not be inherently against science. Was it then a paradox that one of the greatest adventurers of modern history remained a kind of recluse, a fugitive from the so-called 'modernity-encapsulated-in-technology' throughout his life? But then is not our modernity and civilisation, of which we are so proud, itself a paradox of the most bizarre kind? Were it not so, then how is it that, science, which is knowledge, pure and simple, and of which technology is a product, could turn against the very bearer of that knowledge and destroy his life support system? It is, as it were, a case of human knowledge gone haywire!
The vanity of man that goes with his achievement has nothing to do with science. Science could not liberate man fully because the politics of power has always come in its way. Technology has no bias, but it is man who use it has. People like Thesiger, in their own characteristic way, have pointed to the pointlessness of practising a scientific culture that aims to control and use nature and with it man himself. And in the process, he destroys himself.