While my initial reaction to the introduction of Cradle to Cradle probably isn't fair, it is what it was. Wonderful, Green Police. Both of them sound something like stuck up environmentalists who think they're a step above everyone else since they can analyze every aspect of modern society with disgust. But wait, not only are they those sorts of people, but they think they're better than all the other people like them.
I suppose they didn't say that modern society was bad, just how we produce it. But really, their dissection of that 'perfect' scene in the very beginning did nothing but put me off. I wasn't outraged at our irresponsible production methods, I wasn't appalled that manufacturers exposed me to these things, I wasn't even impressed by their alternative book manufacturing methods. In fact, my first thought about this book was "Wow, that's incredibly heavy." I had just put down a copy of Gray's Anatomy, a book with well over a thousand pages, almost six times as long as Cradle to Cradle, and it weighed only perhaps twice as much. They say they're concerned about responsible production, how about the extra energy spent transporting such a dense book to market?
Admittedly, they do make a fine point regarding the things we expose ourselves too, but they act almost like it's a new thing. We've never had ideal environments to live in, it's just that now, we can identify the problems with it. And comparing us to ants feels just plain insulting. Yes, maybe ants can enrich their environments, but so do we. We want somewhere to grow food, and so we make a farm. The soil gets depleted, we introduce fertilizer, or use a different crop that likes the new balance we've created, or we adapt the old crops to fit the new soil. We want to live somewhere, we improve the land we live on to suit us better building homes and cities to facilitate our society and concentrate knowledge for our benefit. We improve what we feel is necessary to improve to enhance our lives.
Ants are no different. The difference is that ants have been here something like 130 million years, doing more or less the same thing they do now. Nature has had time to adapt. Humanity has been active in our present state for what? A couple thousand years, maybe ten thousand if you wanna push the limits. And nature is adapting. Life will not end because of human intervention, it will change. Environmentalists just want to idealize the world before humans and criticize any deviation from that.
And that's before we even touch on the 'human rights violations' ants commit to get to their 'perfect society' with each individual ant being minimally cognizant, bred into a rigid caste system, knowing what to do based on the sent of the urine on the ground from the last ant who walked by. Of course, there's some sort of poetic reflection of modern society in there, but we're that way because we chose to be, not because we have to be.
