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تاريخ التسجيل : 26/10/2009
وســــــــــام النشــــــــــــــاط : 6
 | |  Nature as One, God, Reality, What Exists | |
 Nature as One, God, Reality, What Exists
I believe in the cosmos. All of us are linked to the cosmos. So nature is my god. To me, nature is sacred. Trees are my temples and forests are my cathedrals. Being at one with nature. (Mikhail Gorbachev)That which we call Nature is therefore the power which permeates and preserves the whole universe, and this power is not devoid of sense and reason. Every being which is not homogeneous and simple but complex and composite must have in it some organising principle. In man this organising principle is reason and in animals it is a power akin to reason, and from this arises all purpose and desire. (Cicero)So we see that the parts of the world (for there is nothing in the world which is not a part of the universe as a whole) have sense and reason. So these must be present to a higher and greater degree in that part which provides the organising principle of the whole world. So the universe must be a rational being and the Nature which permeates and embraces all things must be endowed with reason in its highest form. And so God and the world of Nature must be one, and all the life of the world must be contained within the being of God. (Cicero)All things come out of the One and the One out of all things. (Heraclitus, 500BC)Reality cannot be found except in One single source, because of the interconnection of all things with one another. (Leibniz, 1670)I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings. (Albert Einstein)
 Human Impact on Nature
.. it has still been humans who have, by divine decree, had " dominion ... over all the earth [which they are enjoined to] fill and subdue .... and over every living thing that moves upon the earth" (Genesis. 1:26, 28) (Warwick Fox, 1995) The idea that humans are the crown of creation, the source of all value, the measure of all things, is deeply embedded in our culture and consciousness. (John Seed, Fox, 1995) We don't know nearly enough to manage the ecosystems on our own. If we think we can eliminate those natural ecosystems and substitute prosthetic devices, like creating clean air or water with fusion energy or sustaining the stability of cropland- in fact, (if we think we can) keep the planet in that delicately balanced, highly peculiar state on which humanity depends for its continued existence - then we are kidding ourselves. (E.O WILSON, The Diversity of Life, New York: Norton, 1992) How can I put this without sounding callous? If all humanity disappeared, the rest of life, except for domestic animals and plants, which only represent a minute fraction of the plants and animals of the world, would benefit enormously. The forests would gradually grow back, and relative stability would return to the ecosystem services that control global temperature and atmosphere. The fish in the oceans would recover, and the most endangered species would slowly come back. Of course, there would be no humans around to enjoy this, but as far as the survival of numbers of species goes, the planet would be better off.
However, if all members of one of the groups of smaller creatures, such as ants, were to vanish, the results would be close to catastrophic. Ants turn and aerate a very large part of the Earth's soils. They're major predators of other insects, and they're the chief scavengers of small animals, removing and breaking up more than 90 percent of any small, dead creatures as part of the soil-nutrient cycle. They even pollinate many plants. If they were to disappear, there would be major extinctions of other species and probably partial collapse of some ecosystems. (E.O Wilson) (Suzuki, Naked Ape to Superspecies, 1999) ..we need to see nature as the true capital on which our lives and economy depend. And if we learn to value nature, our real wealth, we will take better care of it. Our economic system works for no one, except maybe the one percent at the very top. Our system wastes the environment. It wastes people. And it's very, very expensive. We need a radical change in how we relate to resources and people and the environment. (Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce)Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind. With respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have ever lived a more simple and meager life than the poor. ...None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty. Of a life of luxury the fruit is luxury, whether in agriculture, or in commerce, or literature, or art. There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet is admirable to to profess because it was once admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live accordingly to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically but practically.
..What is the nature of luxury which enervates and destroys nations? Are we sure there is none in our lives? (Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854)When the forests began to disappear .. we had flooding, we had erosion ... and the role of science was misapplied. The Army Corps of Engineers looked at the floods and said, ' The answer is to build dams,' .... so now we have 114 dams on the Columbia River. And the relationship between those dams and the salmon is that the temperature of the Columbia and the Snake rivers has permanently risen. It is quite common, in the summer months, to find the Columbia and Snake rivers exceeding 65 F. At 65 F, those waters are lethal to salmon. (TED STRONG, YAKIMA TRIBE MEMBER)(Suzuki, 1999)
In tropical rain forest alone, for example, we're eliminating, at a very conservative estimate, about 25 000 entire species every year. Biologists are alarmed by the human-caused acceleration of extinction. (Suzuki, 1999)
The United Nations Commission on the Environment and Development recommended in 1987 that all countries protect 12% of their land base. The target seems to accept that 88% of the land is ours to use as we wish. But we are merely one species among perhaps 10 million, and we are still completely dependent on the services performed by all of that biodiversity. By co-opting such a large part of the planet's photoynthetic activity to fuel our energy needs, we deprive many of the other species that would have used it, and thereby drive them to extinction. (Suzuki, 1999)
Riparian habitat, the zones along the riverbanks, has long been recognised as one of the richest areas of diversity of life on the planet. In harsh desert or tundra reigons like Israel or northern Canada, riverbanks shelter almost all of the life that exists. That's why dams or river diversions there wreck such environmental havoc. So much water is taken out of the Colorado, the river whose force dug the Grand Canyon, that by the time it reaches the ocean there is none left. The Tennessee is the fifth-largest river in Northern America, and there isn't one inch of it that hasn't been dammed or channeled. These rivers function as ecological circulatory systems that conduct life's fluid to the land, yet we've altered them so extensively that water shortages are a looming fear for the entire planet in the next few decades.(Suzuki, 1999)People in the vast majority of traditional and indigenous groups believe that the Earth is alive, that it is an organism, like Gaia. And they believe that human beings are as much a part of the natural world as insects or whales or clouds. Most of them believe that humans have a responsibility to take care of the other creatures around them, that calamity will result if we are greedy, wasteful and destructive. They cement this understanding of the physical world not with scientific data, but with emotion and experience. (Suzuki, 1999)We don't seem to worry about this as much as we should, I think largely because we have an unwarranted faith in the ability of science and technology to pull us out of the mess that our technological prowess has created. In my opinion, no more destructive belief exists than the idea that we have escaped the constraints imposed by nature on all other species. We assume that by enabling us to exploit and alter our surroundings, our intellect has freed us from dependence on specific habitats. We believe we are no longer part of nature, because we have acquired the ability to control and manage the forces impinging on us.
This illusion of escape from nature has been reinforced by our extraordinary transformation in this century from country dwellers to city dwellers. In an urban setting, we live in a human-created environment, surrounded by other people plus a few domesticated plants and animals, as well as the pests that have overcome our defences. Living among such a dearth of species, we no longer recognise our dependence on the rest of life for our well-being and our very survival. It is simpler to assume that the economy delivers our food, clean air, water and energy and takes away our sewage and waste. We forget that the Earth itself provides all these services, and so makes economists and the economy possible. We are biological beings, as dependent on the biosphere as any other life form and we forget our animal nature at our peril. (Suzuki, 1999)The point is, Holland and countries like it, most of the developed nations, for that matter, are often used as models for the Third World to follow. But ... it's not possible for the Third World to follow these models because in many respects the Third World is providing the surpluses that these countries exploit in order to have their extremely high standards of living. So for every country that has an ecological deficit, there has to be another part of Earth that has an ecological surplus. If every country runs an ecological deficit, then we are quite literally consuming the Earth. And in fact ... that is exactly what we are doing. (Suzuki, 1999) While there are far more people in poor countries like India, China, Kenya or the Philippines, more than 80% of the planets resources are being consumed by countries like the US, Japan, Germany and Canada. If you are a Canadian or an American with only one child, that child will consume more than forty times what two little Bangladeshis will. The problem with overpopulation is not just numbers. It's a factor of both population and per capita consumption. (Suzuki, 1999)Many people believe that as technology improves, we'll be able to find as substitute for any resource that gets scarce, even scarce everywhere. In other words, human ingenuity can find a substitute for any good or service provided by nature ... So when you put the whole issue of trade and technological advance in the basket, it seems that carrying capacity is an irrelevant concept for human beings.
(Bill Rees, Suzuki, 1999)
Taking care of the ocean starts at the tops of mountains. What we do upstream affects everything downstream ... What we put on our backyards, on our farms or what we allow to go into the atmosphere flows onto the land and finally into the sea. Ultimately the sea is the sewer for the whole of civilization. Wherever we live on the planet, we are affecting the oceans of the world. (Suzuki, 1999)This is no longer a scientific fact that's in dispute (global warming). That doesn't mean that you can't find a few people who will say otherwise. You could also find people who don't believe in evolution .. Who don't believe in the Holocaust, and you can find all sorts of things. But this is as solid a physical fact as we have around us ... Tens of thousands of scientists have produced airplane hangars full of reports and studies and graphs and charts. We now know, beyond any reasonable doubt, what is taking place and what's likely to take place in the next one hundred years. We don't know exactly what's going to happen down to the last tenth of a degree or down to the last inch of sea level or something like that. But we do know that we've raised the temperature of the planet. 1998 was by far the warmest year, and that made 9 of the 10 warmest years on record within the last decade. (Bill McKibben, Suzuki, 1999)Climate changes all the time, but it changes slowly. We're doing it at an enormous rate of speed - by most estimates, something between ten and sixty times faster than it changes normally. That has real consequences ... Natural systems can't adapt to that sort of speed of change. (Bill McKibben, The End of Nature)
By and large, most of us can adapt to one degree. But four degrees is virtually the difference between an ice age and a warm epoch like the one we are in now. It takes nature 10 000 years to make those kinds of changes, and we're talking about changes like that on the order of a century. There isn't an ecologist anywhere who thinks that we can adapt to that without dramatic dislocation to the species in the world, and to agriculture and other patterns of living that depend on the climate. (Suzuki, 1999)When you watch a subject like climate change in the news, it's never treated as climate change. It's floods in China, or fires burning out of control in Florida, or people dying of a massive heat wave in the Midwest. But generally speaking, those short, fast stories aren't presented as what they are: one long, slow, compelling story of how human behavior is changing the climate of the world we live in. (Elizabeth May, Suzuki, 1999)
Automobiles' private benefits are enormous and well understood, yet their abundance makes them the source of a disturbing share of social problems. They are the cause of more environmental harm than any other artifact of everyday life on the continent.
(Alan Durning, Suzuki, 1999)About 70 percent of the world population now has television. Very little programming is produced locally; in most cases, it's from the U.S. and a few other developed, northern countries. So you have people in the South Pacific and people living in slums in Asia and South America seeing a bunch of white people standing around swimming pools drinking martinis and aspiring to nothing more than killing each other to take over each other corporate activities and make more money. Or they're watching cartoons or MTV or the Nike ads. And what you have is a set of images that are homogenising consciousness of the world. The incalculable cost of this erosion of local, diverse values, cultures and communities.
.. since these images are so believable, all that goes with them (appears to be) attainable, achievable, easy, nice and good. It's got such a gloss and an attractiveness to it that everybody kind of wants to go for it. And it's presented to them as a real alternative to the way they live ... There's no corresponding counter-force that tells people that this stuff they are watching, this lifestyle, is producing alienation, drug abuse, violence, suicide, family violence and disempowerment- on a level they've never imagined. And it's also bringing a tremendous breakdown of the environment. The level of consumption that's presented in this kind of imagery is directly connected to the overuse of the resources of the planet and the terrible waste problems that cause global warming, ozone depletion and our current destruction of habitat. All of the tremendous problems that are bringing us to the brink of evolutionary breakdown - forever - are hooked directly to this set of images that look so attractive (and harmless) in the first place. (Mander, ex-adman who runs the International Forum on Corporate Rule) (Suzuki, Naked Ape to Superspeci | |
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