Thought for the Day (Dec 23)

Subject: Thought for the Day (Dec 23)
From: Peter T.
Date: 23 Dec 99 - 09:59 AM

I was asked to give a speech yesterday at a conference on "What Have We Learned: The Environment in the 20th Century". This is a short excerpt:

The defining moment for the environment in the 20th century is usually said to be the shot of the earth from space, or Earth Day. I would like to suggest that a more important moment was the almost simultaneous ratification of the International Test Ban Treaty and the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in 1963. Both of these events were the result of a new vision, the prospect of a technological poisoning of some fundamental human goods in ways that had never been dreamed of before. The Test Ban Treaty was signed on the wave of protest against the appearance of strontium 90 and other radionuclides in mothers' milk, baby teeth, and throughout the natural world. Rachel Carson's book showed how, in a similar way, pesticides sprayed in one part of the world would percolate through the web of nature and find their way into the intimate mechanisms of our lives.
It was these threats to the fabric of life that created the environmental movement, and when we falter, it is because we forget that; and when we get a new wave of concern and support, it is almost always for the same reason. The loss of species tears at the fabric of life; acid rain turns life giving rain into poison; the hole in the ozone layer threatens the sky. For brief moments we see the depth of the struggle we are in.
We are now on the verge of the greatest of all threats to the fabric of life, because we have begun to take into our hands the weave of that fabric. The 21st century will redefine the nature of the human, the boundaries of species, the nature of Nature. What the 20th century taught us, reluctantly, is that the hope that we could alter nature without altering ourselves was wrong. We are a part of nature: when we poisoned the water and the air, we began to poison ourselves. That we have learned. But we have not even begun to consider what the exploitative rebuilding of the planet's natural systems for our purposes (which we have been carrying out at an accellerating pace) will mean, as we turn our attention away from natural resources to what they call in bureaucracies nowadays "human resources". We are about to do with ourselves what we have done with nature. We are, if I can put it like this, getting down to the guts of it.

Subject: RE: Thought for the Day (Dec 23)
From: catspaw49
Date: 23 Dec 99 - 10:18 AM

Well stroked.

Spaw