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What a performance!

Telegraaf max-verstappen

Third world title in Formula 1 for Max Verstappen!

Max Verstappen is opnieuw wereldkampioen geworden in de Formule 1. De 26-jarige Nederlander stelde tijdens de sprintrace in Qatar zijn derde mondiale triomf veilig, omdat Sergio Pérez uitviel.

Ook in 2021 en 2022 greep de Nederlander van Red Bull de wereldtitel, maar zo superieur als in 2023 was hij nog nooit. Twee jaar geleden was er nog de even hoogstaande als legendarische strijd met Lewis Hamilton, die in de laatste race de titel aan de Nederlander moest laten. Van echte concurrentie is dit jaar en in 2022 geen sprake geweest in de belangrijkste autosportklasse.

Erik van Haren in de Telegraaf 07-10-23: 
Uniek seizoen Max Verstappen: ‘Makkelijk zeggen dat je met dominante auto eventjes alles wint’.

Je hoeft Max Verstappen in het hete Doha niet eens goed in het vizier te hebben, om te kunnen zien waar hij zich na de sprintrace op het Losail International Circuit heen begeeft. Fotografen en cameramannen duikelen over elkaar heen om het best mogelijke shot van de wereldkampioen te maken. Na een persconferentie, televisie-interviews en een onderhoud met de Nederlandse media wordt Verstappen in de garage van Red Bull Racing onthaald als de grote ster. De opgetrommelde dj start dan, uiteraard, het We Are The Champions in.

Aan de Thaise Red Bull-eigenaar Chalerm Yoovidhya de eer om Verstappen een speciale kampioenshelm te overhandigen, nu voorzien van drie sterren. Door zijn dolblije monteurs en engineers wordt Verstappen vervolgens op de schouders genomen. Het zijn de taferelen die passen bij het binnenhalen van een titel, nadat het constructeurskampioenschap twee weken eerder in Japan al is veiliggesteld.

Afvinken
,,Het is weer een heel speciaal seizoen geweest”, aldus Verstappen, die tijdens de sprintrace al kampioen werd, omdat teamgenoot Sergio Pérez uitviel. ,,Als het nu niet gebeurde, dan was het wel zondag zover of anders de race erna. Het voelt een beetje als iets afvinken. Ik ben nu drie keer wereldkampioen, ik had nooit gedacht dat ik dat kon bereiken.”

Nog zes races te gaan, inclusief de Grand Prix van zondag in Doha, maar natuurlijk hoort een beetje terugblikken er nu ook bij. Verstappen vindt het moeilijk om er één race in het bijzonder uit te halen. Dat is inderdaad ook geen sinecure, als je zoveel hebt gewonnen. ,,Meerdere weekenden waren bijzonder. Thuis winnen in Zandvoort is altijd top, maar Spa-Francorchamps was ook een hoogtepunt. En Japan met het winnen van de constructeurstitel. De winst in Miami komt ook naar boven, dat was op dat moment in het seizoen een belangrijke zege.”

Superseizoen
Sindsdien is Verstappen eigenlijk ook niet meer te stoppen geweest en heeft hij teamgenoot Pérez zoek gereden. Groter kan het contrast tijdens het feestgedruis voor de garage zaterdag ook niet zijn, want bij enkele monteurs van Pérez staat het gezicht op onweer als ze in een heftruck langsrijden. Zij gaan nog een lange avond tegemoet, omdat de auto van de Mexicaan gerepareerd dient te worden.

Juist gezien het grote verschil met Pérez, toch ook geen koekenbakker, laat de laatste maanden zien dat Verstappen nóg meer uit zijn RB19 weet te halen. ,,Het is makkelijk zeggen dat je met een dominante auto eventjes alles wint, maar er waren genoeg races dat het ons niet makkelijk werd gemaakt. En dan konden we vaak toch winnen. Het is een superseizoen geweest en dit zal niet makkelijk te evenaren zijn.”

Is nature there for us, or are we nature?

Intelligence

We have placed our intelligence and thinking on such a pedestal that we consider ourselves above other species in this world. As a result, we have forgotten that we are actually very similar to other animals and also plants.

'People have put themselves at the top of the pyramid'

We consider ourselves intelligent because we have brains, but plants can do things that we cannot.
They know exactly which nutrients they need and how to get them.

'Every organism does everything it can to survive until its last breath, including humans'

A portion of humility is therefore appropriate: we are not above nature, but we are part of it, and we seem to have forgotten that.

Anthropocentrism

The belief that man is the center of the universe has negative consequences for the earth. People with this idea believe that everything around us is nothing more than a 'raw material' for humans to use. That increases the chance that you will exploit those resources. Freedom is not unbridled consumption. It seems as if we humans have to give up our lifestyle if we want to take the interests of nature seriously. But our survival as a species and our freedom are precisely linked to the world we share.”
Nature is shaped by the way we (humans) organize matters such as legislation, taxation, land use and economy. We must recognize our place in the natural order instead of fleeing into romantic thoughts.

'While we think we are gaining more and more control over nature, we are increasingly losing control over the planetary systems. Natural laws cannot be tampered with (but human laws can)'

Technology

We think we invented technology with our smart brains and that we are 'in charge' of it, but technology was around before humans appeared on earth. An egg is a perfect piece of technology, just like aerodynamic bird wings, air-conditioned termite mounds and indestructible hexagonal bee combs. Nature's internal memory is in its DNA. Through humans, nature is also evolving into a technological life form with an external memory (AI: we are feeding that memory).

Man as a 'special animal'.
The opposition of humans versus nature and animals has a long history within the Western philosophical tradition of thought. Even the ancient Greek philosophers placed man on a pedestal as a 'special animal' above nature and other animals. Man became a political being capable of reason and cooperation. In addition, man was assigned qualities such as 'instinct' and 'intelligence' through the influence of Christianity.
This perspective regarding the priority position of man continued into Enlightenment thinking, in which the concept of freedom became central. 

“Freedom is an important value, it was also linked to critical thinking and a kind of ideal of equality, but there is also a downside. If you see people as exceptional, you will put yourself first in this world. But this has now created problems in which we take the earth for granted.”

Man acts as if nature is a separate entity.

In almost everything published about nature, it is presented as a separate entity. Like something that starts and ends at a fence. Humans share 40 percent of their DNA with a banana, 50 percent with a fruit fly, 97 percent with an orangutan. He is part of nature; is completely dependent on it before birth, during life and even after death.

Yet another report that concludes that nature is doing badly also says everything about ourselves. As long as we do not act on the understanding of the inseparable reciprocity that exists between humans and their living environment, biodiversity loss and climate change as well as human problems will only increase.

Human and nature

Our view of nature has changed considerably over the centuries. But contrary to what some think, there has never been a time of "true harmony" between humans and nature.
Man has always influenced nature. What has changed is the way in which humans view themselves and their place in nature.

Paradise
The Judeo-Christian Bible, which has had (and still has) such a great influence on Western thought, opens with the paradise story with Adam and Eve as the first people on earth, in complete harmony with nature. It is a harmony with our natural environment that many people in the 21st century long for, as they watch with horror how modern humans are guilty of deforestation, loss of biodiversity, pollution, animal suffering and climate change and overpopulation.

But anyone who zooms in on that word 'paradise' will see that man has never lived completely in harmony with nature. The word originally did not refer to a dreamed-up natural environment that was still unspoiled by man, but to the pre-Christian custom of the Persian nobility to create a 'paridaida': an enclosed area that was to serve as a pleasure garden, game park or hunting area. .

There has never been a time when humans had no influence on nature. What has changed over the centuries is the way in which humans view themselves and their place in nature.

Fall

There is a tendency to point to a 'fall'; a moment when things went wrong. Take, for example, the Neolithic Revolution that took place about 12,000 years ago in what is now the Middle East. The hunter-gatherers, who were used to gathering their food by traveling, settled in one place and started farming. This meant that for the first time they began to manipulate nature on a large scale, by breeding plants and animals.

Christianity is also to blame. According to this belief, nature is a valuable gift from God to man, over which man should rule as a steward. That sounds good in itself, but it did mean a turnaround: with Christianity we said goodbye to the idea that nature itself could be divine.

A third main suspect for the Fall is the Enlightenment, the movement of the 17th and 18th centuries that focused on human reason and perception. New ideas were shared all over Europe: the German astronomer Johannes Kepler described the universe as a clock, the British physicist Isaac Newton discovered the mechanical laws of nature and the French thinker René Descartes saw animals as automata: organisms that experience neither happiness nor pain .

All these changes in our actions and thoughts have played a role in our interaction with nature over the centuries. Yet there is more of a wave movement in the relationship between man and nature than of a hard separation between before and after the Fall. Take Antiquity: the Greek Stoics looked at the world as something that existed for the salvation of people and the gods. The Roman author Lucretius (in the 1st century BC) saw nature as something that had to be 'finished' by man. The word nature comes from the Latin word nascere, which means 'to be born'. Nature is always in a state of development and humans have an important role in this.

The big difference

The most important difference between the past and present has arisen from the growth of our technical capabilities and the growth of the world population. In the 18th century, the Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain. Coal-powered steam engines were introduced. Thanks to fossil fuels and new scientific thinking, humans gained more control over nature, more prosperity and better health.

Let's look at the Netherlands at the beginning of the 19th century. The French occupiers had left our country destitute and King I was fully committed to the economic development of the country. The Dutch landscape, which still largely consisted of swamps and wastelands (sand drifts and heathlands), had to be made 'useful'. Thinking about nature conservation was a luxury.

At the time, the Netherlands was nothing more than a patchwork of individual regions. To integrate those areas economically, canals, paved roads and railways were built. Crucial to this were new inventions: artificial fertilizer made it possible to turn poorer soils into agricultural areas; barbed wire ensured that bushes and hedgerows were no longer necessary to keep livestock together; thanks to steam pumping stations, enormous areas could be drained.

The same drive to design the Dutch landscape down to the last centimeter according to our economic wishes also became visible after the Second World War, when our country was left destitute for the second time by a foreign occupier. Even then, the Dutch government was fully committed to intensifying agriculture and industrialization.

Countermovements.

Counter-movements arose both in the 19th century and after the Second World War. First, these were the thinkers of Romanticism, who drew attention to the intrinsic value of nature from a spiritual perspective. Then there were people like Jac P. Thijsse, who founded Natuurmonumenten in 1905 to preserve some of Dutch nature in its original state.

Our view of animals also changed. They are not unilaterally determined by their rationality, but animals - just like humans - have an inner capacity to experience feelings such as pain. That idea was partly fueled by Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, which described the relationship between humans and animals. A new concept that emerged at that time was 'ecology': the doctrine that revealed that there is an interaction between people, animals and plants and that they are mutually dependent on each other. From the idea that nature is not as far removed from humans as previously thought, the conviction arose that she too deserves rights.

In the 1960s, the major environmental movements emerged in the United States, born from concerns about the population explosion, air and water pollution, agricultural poisons, nuclear fallout, acid rain and the depletion of raw materials. The nature movements have also been prominent in the Netherlands since then. Environmental legislation was introduced and a lot of pollution has stopped.
In terms of attention to the protection of habitats and animals, an enormous amount has improved.

Biodiversity
Nowadays we often talk about 'biodiversity', a term coined in the United States in 1986.
States under conservationists emerged. The concept emphasizes the importance of preserving a wide variety of species, but it is also a catch-all concept. This can obscure the fact that reality is layered: where one species struggles, another flourishes. In the book The Discovery of Nature (2021), Dutch ecologists emphasize that it is not possible to provide a clear picture of what has happened to Dutch biodiversity since 2000. For example, insects are not doing well, but some large mammals are flourishing.

Apocalypse

A development that has become more visible in recent years is the 'globalization' of our thinking about nature. We increasingly discuss nature problems in a global context. This is partly due to the formation of international organizations such as the United Nations after the Second World War. But also due to the arrival of satellites that have been orbiting our earth since then. These satellites take photos and make measurements that cover the entire world. The advantages of this are great, but there is also a disadvantage. As the realization has grown that we as humanity share one small globe, an old religious fear has been awakened. Just as paradise in the Bible only returns after the End of Time, an apocalyptic image of the future has also emerged in thinking about nature. Out of fear of a global catastrophe, we long for the harmony of paradise.

“But just as paradise never existed, neither does the apocalypse.”

[origanal text: Jurgen Tiekstra, De Lichtkogel.nl]