Wednesday, November 02, 2011

Watching the World Die

In the words of Aldo Leopold:
"One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise." Aldo Leopold



As an ecologist, everyday I feel about nature as I do about someone terminally ill; I see parts of them disappearing little by little, piece by piece. I grieve everyday I open my eyes. But with nature, other insults are added. Eons of evolution and community networks are destroyed for a banal stripmall, or the profits of foreign investors extracting ore and leaving a wasteland. The final insult is when the people who actually live here want this to happen, so they can get a bigscreen tv and an oversized truck. Some may wonder what is the best evidence for Evolution; it is fairly simple and clear. It is impossible for us to  be creatures of any god; no supreme being of any grand intelligence would create a species obsessed with monster trucks or small transparent pieces of  highly compressed carbon, or one that would destroy where it lives so it can have an atv. Only evolution could produce such an idiotic talking monkey.

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