Monday, January 08, 2018

Shepard for the Day.1

"My question is: why do men persist in destroying their habitat?  

I have, at different times, believed the answer was a lack of information, faulty technique, or insensibility.  Certainly intuitions of the interdependence of all life are an ancient wisdom, perhaps as old as thought itself, occasionally rediscovered, as it has been by the science of ecology in our own society...

In time, even with the attention of the media and a windfall of synthesizers, popularizers, gurus of ecophilosophy, and other champions of ecology, in spite of some new laws and indications that environmentalism is taking its place as a new turtle on the political log, nothing much has changed.

Either I and other "pessimists" and "doomsayers" wer wrong about the human need for other species, and the decline of the planet as a life-support system, or our species is intent on suicide--or there is something we overlooked.

Such a something could be simply greed...But it is hard to be content with the theory that people are bad and will always do the worst."

Paul Shepard
Nature and Madness (1982) pp. 1-2

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