|
Nature and Society Quotations used in the February - March 2007 edition Not only is life on this planet amazing, and deeply satisfying, to all whose senses have not become dulled by familiarity: the very fact that we have evolved the brain power to understand our evolutionary genesis redoubles the amazement and compounds the satisfaction. Richard Dawkins In this book we are concerned with evolutionary history, with the dead as well as the living. When we are talking about all the animals that have ever lived, not just those that are living now, evolution tells us there are lines of gradual continuity linking literally every species to every other. When we are talking history, even apparently discontinuous species like sheep and dogs are linked, via the common ancestor, in unbroken lines of smooth continuity. Richard Dawkins ...nuclear power only reduces the greenhouse impact of producing electricity if there are rich deposits of uranium ore. Once they are exhausted, so much conventional energy will be required to produce nuclear fuel from the low-grade deposits that the process will release more carbon dioxide than burning gas to generate the same amount of electricity. The known resources of high-grade uranium ore are equivalent to about 20 years use at the present rate, with nuclear power producing about 10 per cent of the world’s electricity. So the conclusion is clear: the resources simply do not exist to allow nuclear power to replace other forms of electricity production, even if nuclear power were seen as environmentally and socially acceptable. Ian Lowe, A Big Fix The obvious lesson to be learnt by developed nations about the Angkor story is that climate change, population pressures, and over-use of natural resources can bring sophisticated societies to an end. It’s a lesson that becomes gloomier each time it is re-learnt. Richard Stone, University of Sydney, 2006 In fact, practically all desirable features of modern life were once utopian visions made real by visionaries who worked systematically to achieve their dreams of a better world. Similarly, anyone who thinks about the impact of our choices on other species, on future generations and on the less privileged of this generation, has a moral responsibility to work towards a sustainable future. Ian Lowe We should always remember that the future is not somewhere we are going, it is something we are creating. Ian Lowe I have a post-Armageddon vision. We and all other large animals are gone. Rodents emerge as the ultimate post-human scavengers. They gnaw their way through New York, London and Tokyo, digesting spilled larders, ghost supermarkets and human corpses and turning them into new generations of rats and mice, whose racing populations explode out of the cities and into the countryside. When all the relics of human profligacy are eaten, populations crash again, and the rodents turn on each other, and on the cockroaches scavenging with them. In a period of intense competition, short generations perhaps with radioactively enhanced mutation rates boost rapid evolution. With human ships and planes gone, islands become islands again, with local populations isolated: ideal conditions for evolutionary divergence. Within five million years, a whole range of new species replace the ones we know. Herds of giant grazing rats are stalked by sabre toothed predatory rats. Given enough time, will a species of intelligent, cultivated rats emerge? Richard Dawkins Take the average domestic power tool. However much DIY we plan on doing, the truth is we throw these away after using them, on average, for just 10 minutes. Most will serve 'conscience time’, gathering dust on a shelf in the garage, but the end is inevitable: thousands of years mouldering underground. A power tool consumes many times its own weight of resources in its design, manufacture, packaging, transportation and disposal, all for a shorter active lifespan than that of the average mayfly. Ed Douglas ... consumerist culture instead idolises novelty. We know we can’t buy happiness, but the chance to remake ourselves with glossy, box-fresh products seems irresistible. When the novelty fades we simply renew the excitement by buying more stuff. Ed Douglas We must recognise that we have no future at all even as a species, still less as a civilisation, unless we allow our natural systems to deliver breathable air, drinkable water, nutritious food, waste disposal services, a sense of place, biological diversity, cultural identity and spiritual sustenance. Ian Lowe Words or action? Every morning when I wake up I ask myself whether I should write or blow up a dam. Every day I tell myself I should continue to write. Yet I’m not always convinced I’m making the right decision. I’ve written books, good ones, and people have read them. At the same time I know it’s not a lack of words that’s killing salmon, but rather the presence of dams. Anyone who lives in this region and knows anything about salmon knows the dams must go. And anyone who knows anything about politics knows the dams will stay, at least for now. Scientists study, politicians and businesspeople lie and delay, bureaucrats hold sham input-output meetings, activists write letters and press releases, I write books and articles, and still the salmon die. It’s a cosy relationship for all of us but the salmon. Derrick Jensen Japan and whaling ‘... environmental issues attract almost no media attention at all in Japan. ... the ordinary Japanese are environmentally conservative at best; at worst, completely ignorant. For example, the Japanese tend to believe that the supply of fresh water is unlimited. ... They also have little knowledge of environmental and related political issues.’ Whaling a short tradition in Japan, Canberra Times, 26 December 2006, The problems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created them. Einstein Earlier generations of scientists would have treated the weather and the chemical composition of the atmosphere as givens too. Now we know that the atmosphere, especially its high oxygen and low carbon content is conditional upon life. So our thought experiment must allow for the possibility that in successive reruns of evolution the atmosphere might vary under the influence of whatever life forms evolve. Life could thereby influence the weather, and even major climatic episodes, such as ice ages and droughts. My late colleague, W.D.Hamilton, who was right too many times to be laughed away, suggested that clouds and rain are themselves adaptations manufactured by micro-organisms for their own dispersal. Richard Dawkins There is much that we are unsure about in science. Where science scores over alternative world views is that we know our uncertainty, we can often measure its magnitude, and we can work optimistically to reduce it. Richard Dawkins Humanity and cities Nowadays most of us live in cities. That means most of us live in an insulated cell, completely cut off from sensory information or sensory experience that is not of our own manufacture. Everything we hear, taste, smell, touch is a human artifact. All the sensory information we receive is fabricated, and most of it is mediated by machines. I think the only thing that makes it bearable is that our sensory capacities are so diminished – just as they are in all domesticates – that we no longer know what we’re missing. The wild animal is receiving information for all the senses, from an uncountable number of sources, every moment of its life. We get it from only one – ourselves. It’s like doing solitary in an echo chamber. People doing solitary do strange things. John A Livingstone Is there meaning to life? What are we for? What is man? The point I want to make now is that all attempts to answer that question before 1859 are worthless and that we are better off if we ignore them completely. George Gaylord Simpson Climate sceptics So what explains the staying power of the [climate change] sceptics’ argument? One possibility is that they’re right. But I think the real reason is that subconsciously many of us hope they’re right. If Mr Blair really believed climate change was a bigger threat than terrorism, for example, wouldn’t he devote more of his energies more urgently to it? Furthermore, wouldn’t you and I change our lifestyles more than the bits around the edges we’ve done so far? I think most of us have an inner George Bush, or a part which is in denial and believes it can‘t be as bad as all that, that surely something will turn up. Peter Barron On the day you read this the same volume of trade will take place as occurred in the whole of 1949. We now make as many phone calls in a day as were made in the whole of 1983. Ed Douglas I want to stress that science is a very conservative field. It works within accepted theories and is very slow to change. For example, we now know that the two crucial pieces of research that showed CFCs to be depleting the ozone layer were denied support by the conservative processes of science; the research was done only because the scientists concerned had access to limited amounts of discretionary funds that allowed them to do the work. Lawyers are very reluctant to call scientists as expert witnesses in court cases because any competent scientist can see enough complexity and uncertainty to be very unwilling to give a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer. Our understanding of the complex natural systems of the Earth is still primitive: a contemporary US biologist memorably described it as ‘islands of understanding in an endless sea of mystery’. Ian Lowe Humans of geological significance Ian Lowe summarised the report of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program in 2004 as follows. Human activity is measurably altering the great natural cycles of the planet; the carbon cycle, the nitrogen cycle, and the water cycle. Different human activities are interacting to cause effects that cascade through the Earth System in complex ways. Key environmental parameters are well outside the range of normal variability. The scale of the human population combined with our use of resources makes us a force of global significance. ‘We are now a significant geological agent, shaping the future of the Earth.
February - March 2007 edition accessible here Back to top
|