Verlyn Klinkenborg has a good piece in The New York Times about what's left of the ecosystem and our "role" in caretaking, stewarding, and/or leaving it be. His thoughts on the nature of nature and the nature of our dumb ideas about nature are right on.
Here's an outtake, but I recommend the whole piece:
It is certainly possible to make wiser and wiser decisions about how to live, but what if the world we make our choices in becomes, in natural terms, steadily poorer and less diverse? More and more, we find ourselves choosing only among the consequences of regrettable choices we made before.
Humans are competent to do many things. But I do not think we are competent to run a global ecosystem. Something has been irretrievably lost by the time we begin to believe that we can manage nature for people. The essence of nature is that it is not “for people.”
My lack of faith in humans as global managers isn’t just a philosophical conclusion. It is based on the sorry, sorry evidence. The fact is that we have begun to run the global ecosystem already and are doing a terrible job of it.
To put it mildly....anyway, read the piece. Then go out there and so something about it.
1 comment:
"The essence of nature is that it is not “for people.”"
Exactly, nature does not exist for us. We do not have to tame nature. We are not at war with nature. Yet, all the actions of so-called 'civilized people' since the agricultural revolution have been aimed at taming and warring with nature.
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