Nature and Society

Quotations featured in the June - July 2007 edition

If any substantial fraction of the more colossal segment of humanity did consequently give up part of their resource-devouring extensions out of humane concern for the less colossal brethren, there is no guarantee that this would avert die-off. It might only postpone it, permitting human numbers to continue increasing a bit longer, or less colossal peoples to become a bit more colossal, before we crash all the more resoundingly.

William Catton
Overshoot, 1982, p 174

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Forced to choose between limiting population or trying to increase food production, we chose the latter and ended up with starvation, warfare and tyranny.

Jared Diamond
The Worst Mistake in Human History
Discover magazine, May 1987

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Eustace didn’t have a lot of friends. He wasn’t much like anybody else, and he already new this, even at the age of ten. When he looked at other boys his age, he saw kids who spent hours watching television, talking about what they saw on television, and imitating characters from television.

Elizabeth Gilbert
describing Eustace Conway
in The Last American Man, 2002, p.26

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It [bisphenol A] may be a hormone disruptor that probably will eventually leak out of well-loved polycarbonate bottles. I am hedging because it’s science. Multiple studies about BPA and the human body’s hormones indicate that we should be concerned...

Umbra Fisk, in her daily column
on 4 April 2007 at www.grist.org

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Extinction. That is a heavy charge to make. It proclaims that Sapiens had become a species so technologically powerful, so effectively deadly—and so psychologically fixed on its superiority to the rest of life—that it could eliminate one whole other species from its habitat. Not necessarily by intention—in fact probably by intention, not taking the time and care to figure out the long-term effects of its actions, though surely as hunters intimate with the ways of their prey they knew that mammoths took a long time to gestate and a long time to grow to reproductive age and, had arrogance not overpowered humility, they might have realized their effect on the dwindling herds and switched to other animals.

...Besides—and this is a terrible thought that seems all too likely—it may not have mattered to them: there were still herds of reindeer, elk, bison, auroch, red deer, and fallow deer to kill, and nature was always there to provide more food for human hunger, if the right ceremonies and rituals of control and replenishment were followed.

Kirkpatrick Sale
After Eden, 2006, p86-87
on the origins of our attitude to natural resources and the environment

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The future belongs to those who understand that doing more with less is compassionate, prosperous and enduring, and thus more intelligent, even competitive.

Paul Hawken

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The economy is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the environment, not the reverse.

Herman Daly

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The maximum is not the optimum.

Garrett Hardin
The Ostrich Factor, 1999, p.82

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The mass of mankind is ruled not by its intermittent moral sensations, still less by self-interest, but by the needs of the moment. It seems fated to wreck the balance of life on earth – and thereby to be the agent of its own destruction. What could be more hopeless than placing the Earth in the charge of this exceptionally destructive species.

John Gray, Straw Dogs, 2002

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Nature conservationists who work to protect wilderness areas and wild species should be called conservationists; and ... resource conservationists, who wish to domesticate and manage lands and species for the benefit and use of humans, should be called resourcists.

When environmentalists turn their attention from the so-called ‘built environment’ to nature, they can take either a conservationist or a resourcist pathway. I’ve named environmentalists who have a utilitarian resourcist view ‘enviro-resourcists.’

I’ve ruffled even more feathers lately by warning that enviro-resourcists have been slowing gaining control of conservation groups, thereby undercutting and weakening our effectiveness, and that nature lovers need to take back the conservation family.

Dave Foreman
Quoted in Grist, 28 March 2007

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A curious thing happens when fish stocks decline: people who aren’t aware of the old levels accept the new ones as normal. Over generations, societies adjust their expectations downward to match prevailing conditions. The concept of a healthy ocean drifts from greater to lesser abundance, richer to poorer diversity.

National Geographic magazine
April 2007, p.78

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Scraping the seabed to catch fish—bottom trawling—has been compared to clear-cutting the forest to catch deer.

National Geographic magazine
April 2007, p.81

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Resource reasons for conservation can be used if honest, but must always be presented together with the non-humanistic reasons, and it should be made clear that the latter are more important in every case.

The ‘Noah Principle’ states that ecological communities and species should be conserved because they exist and because this existence is itself but the present expression of a continuing historical process of immense antiquity and majesty.

There is simply no way to tell whether one arbitrarily chosen part of nature has more ‘value’ than another part, so like Noah we do not bother to make the effort. … I have tried to show…the devilish intricacy and cunning of the humanists’ trap. ‘Do you love Nature?’ they ask. ‘Do you want to save it? Then tell us what it is good for.’ The only way out of this kind of trap, if there is a way, is to smash it, to reject it utterly.

June - July 2007 edition accessible here

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