Now that we have changed the most basic forces around us, the noise of that chain-saw will always be in the woods. We have changed the atmosphere and that is changing the weather. The temperature, the rainfall are no longer entirely the work of some separate uncivilised force, but are in part a product of our habits, our economies, our ways of life. Even in the most remote wilderness, where the strictest laws forbid the felling of a single tree, the sound of that saw will be clear, and a walk in the woods will be changed - tainted - by its whine. The world outdoors, will mean the same thing as the world indoors, the hill the same thing as the house.
An idea, a relationship, can go extinct just like an animal or plant. The idea in this case is 'nature', the separate and wild province, the world apart from man to which he adapted, under whose rules he was born and died. In the past we have polluted and spoiled parts of that nature, inflicted environmental 'damage'. But that was like stabbing a man with toothpicks: though hurt, annoyed, and degraded, it did not touch vital organs or block the path of the lymph or blood. We never thought that we had wrecked nature. Deep down, we never really thought we could: it was too big and old. It's forces - the wind, the rain, the sun - were too strong, too elemental.
But, quite by accident, it turned out that the carbon dioxide and other gases we were producing in our pursuit of a better life - in pursuit of warm houses and eternal economic growth and agriculture so productive it would free most of us for other work - could alter the power of the sun, could increase it's heat. And that increase could change the patterns of moisture and dryness, breed storms in new places, breed deserts. Those things may or may not yet have begun to happen, but it's too late to prevent them from happening. We have produced the carbon dioxide - we have ended nature.
andulkaphoto
baratheonpilled
2087
prguitarman
amandla
ellievsbear
