![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Survival guilt, part 2
Dec. 24th, 2005 11:16 amLink to part 1
E. O. Wilson, author of Biodiversity, recently put out a new book ambitiously titled The Future of Life. In Chapter 2, he states that far from being a "special-interest lobby" whose proponents are always "exaggerat[ing] their case . . . [e]nvironmentalism is something more central and vastly more important. . . . [Earth's] soil, water, and atmosphere . . . have evolved over hundreds of millions of years to their present condition by the activity of the biosphere, a stupendously complex layer of living creatures whose activities are locked together in precise but tenuous global cycles of energy and transformed organic matter. The biosphere creates our special world anew every day, every minute, and holds it in a unique, shimmmering physical disequilibrium. On that disequilibrium the human species is in total thrall. . . . When we destroy ecosystems and extinguish species, we . . . threaten our own existence. . . .
"[Humans] exist as one organic miracle linked to others. The natural environment we treat with such unnecessary ignorance and recklessness . . . remains our one and only home. To its special conditions we are intimately adapted in every one of the bodily fibers and biochemical transactions that gives us life."
In Chapter 5, Wilson gives us a similar warning from ecological economists: "To supplant natural ecosystems entirely, even mostly, [with technological substitutes] is an economic and even physical impossibility. . . . [A] much greater dependence on artificial means--in other words, environmental prostheses--puts at risk not just the biosphere but also humanity itself.
"Most environmental scientists believe that the shift has already been taken too far. . . . Ancient and vulnerable, [Mother Nature] will not tolerate the undisciplined appetite of her gargantuan infant much longer."
And yet, Wilson's projection in Chapter 3 of a future after biosphere collapse is nowhere near as bleak as that of T. C. Boyle in his novel, A Friend of the Earth.
( Read more )
E. O. Wilson, author of Biodiversity, recently put out a new book ambitiously titled The Future of Life. In Chapter 2, he states that far from being a "special-interest lobby" whose proponents are always "exaggerat[ing] their case . . . [e]nvironmentalism is something more central and vastly more important. . . . [Earth's] soil, water, and atmosphere . . . have evolved over hundreds of millions of years to their present condition by the activity of the biosphere, a stupendously complex layer of living creatures whose activities are locked together in precise but tenuous global cycles of energy and transformed organic matter. The biosphere creates our special world anew every day, every minute, and holds it in a unique, shimmmering physical disequilibrium. On that disequilibrium the human species is in total thrall. . . . When we destroy ecosystems and extinguish species, we . . . threaten our own existence. . . .
"[Humans] exist as one organic miracle linked to others. The natural environment we treat with such unnecessary ignorance and recklessness . . . remains our one and only home. To its special conditions we are intimately adapted in every one of the bodily fibers and biochemical transactions that gives us life."
In Chapter 5, Wilson gives us a similar warning from ecological economists: "To supplant natural ecosystems entirely, even mostly, [with technological substitutes] is an economic and even physical impossibility. . . . [A] much greater dependence on artificial means--in other words, environmental prostheses--puts at risk not just the biosphere but also humanity itself.
"Most environmental scientists believe that the shift has already been taken too far. . . . Ancient and vulnerable, [Mother Nature] will not tolerate the undisciplined appetite of her gargantuan infant much longer."
And yet, Wilson's projection in Chapter 3 of a future after biosphere collapse is nowhere near as bleak as that of T. C. Boyle in his novel, A Friend of the Earth.
( Read more )
