Luke
On Thu, 26 Oct 2000, Jay DeLong wrote:
> > Jeffers' observation is contrary to most people's assessment of the
> > relationship of the human race to the rest of the planet. Does/should
> > everything revolve around us as the crown of creation on the
> > planet, or are we more of an accident who now consume half of the
> > photosynthetic product on the planet? Since I'm not running for
> > election I'll support the latter.
> > Thanks, Sajjad!
> >
> > --Bruce Stallsmith
>
> Well, Bruce, you're going to get some people to nod their heads, and at the
> same time piss lots of others off :-) Personally I look forward to the day
> when ideas like these provide us with a common focus-- a sign of
> intellectual maturity-- or morality-- rather than some philosophical
> viewpoint. But it won't happen in our lifetimes and like I said before,
> we're going to go backwards before we go forward. Species and their
> ecosystems will continue to disappear forever, and though we may become smug
> and think ourselves prosperous if we judge prosperity by human development
> and resource use and the Dow Jones Index, our quality of life and that of
> our descendants will decline until we realize we need to take steps now to
> conserve what we have. Here's another quote along the same lines of
> Jeffers':
>
> "The oldest, easiest-to-swallow idea was that the
> earth was man's personal property, a combination of
> garden, zoo, bank vault, and energy source, placed
> at our disposal to be consumed, ornamented, or pulled
> apart as we wished. The betterment of mankind was, as
> we understood it, the whole point of the thing. Mastery
> over nature, mystery and all, was a moral duty and
> social obligation.
>
> In the last few years we were wrenched from this way
> of looking at it, and arrived at a general understanding
> that we had it wrong. We still argue the details, but
> it is conceded almost everywhere that we are not the
> masters of nature that we thought ourselves; we are as
> dependent on the rest of the system as are the leaves or
> midges or fish. We are part of the system. One way to
> put it is that the earth is a loosely formed, spherical
> organism, with all its working parts linked in symbiosis."
>
> --Lewis Thomas (1974),
> from "The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher"
>
> --
> Jay DeLong
> Olympia, WA
>
>
>
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/ For more information about NANFA, visit our web page, http://www.nanfa.org