Earlier this week (on August 13, 2007), The New York Times ran an editorial comment on "The 17 Percent Problem and the Perils of Domestication" by Verlyn Klinkenborg:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/13/opinion/13mon4.html
Klinkenborg's piece is a commentary on the "Science" paper that Allen Thompson
(http://people.clemson.edu/~athomp6/web/home.html and
http://poe1860.blogspot.com/) posted to the BIBLIOGRAPHY for the 2007 Environmental Ethics course at the University of Montana:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/316/5833/1866/
As part of his conclusion, Klinkenborg says:
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.”I would add to Klinkenborg's comments that, in conceiving of ourselves as the earth's übermanagers, we apply the the necessarily restricted and relatively barren viewpoint of one, recently arrived species. In doing so, we lose a significant part of the humility and humanity that does make us special.
2 comments:
Hi Don,
Thanks for bringing this response to our attention - it will be very useful to me.
Whoops, I meant to say more...
I share the intuition that some brand of humility speaks against advocating the idea of our managing the planet but, apart from that recognition, it seems to me that we are not and will not be in the position to choose to NOT be the managers. I think that if taking a manigerial role is inevitable, then we are best served by recognizing this early so as to have some hope that doing it consciously will yeild a better result than doing it blindly and with denial, as we have been. Can't our humility be put to some good use other than what may be vain hopes of preventing the inevitable?
-Allen
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