Are Humans and Their Actions Part of Nature?
Posted: Mon May 28, 2007 1:29 pm
During my CDT yo-yo, I wrote an article On Being Human.
This thread is for comments on that article.
This thread is for comments on that article.
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I agree with point #1. I do see both sides. I'm just sharing how my perspective has changed. All this backpacking opened my eyes up to the perspective that man is just a cog in the wheel of this earth.xjenx wrote: 1) I don't believe you .... You, I think, can see both of the perceptives, man being part of nature, but man's actions as 'unatural' in that they are damaging what we have.
Yes, I'll talk about that in my global warming email. You're right about scale, I admit to that when I say that "humans are like beavers on steroids." But an asteroid hitting the earth is like humans on steroids! (Oh wait, a human on steroids is Barry Bonds...)xjenx wrote: 2) Scale! The Beaver can do whatever he pleases, reconfiguring
all the rivers in the world is nothing compared to altering the chemical
make up of the atmosphere and potentially/making extinct a whole range of organisms. (I am sure you will cover this in your global warming email...
Sort of. Most animals are emotional too. That's where we get it from. So emotion isn't a unique trait of "being human." I don't think you were suggesting that it is a unique human trait, but I wanted to clarify.xjenx wrote: 3) We have a sophisticated brain and are able to type emails like this.
We have the privilege of being able to put things in perspective and
think retrospectively. We are emotional and that is as much of being
human as anything else.
I disagree. I'm sure some polar bear "environmentalists" would be protesting against the freezing of the earth, but as a species, they'd push the FREEZE button in a heartbeat.xjenx wrote: The polar bear who pushes the freeze button
(love it!) might think twice about putting his paw down if he had the
brain to firstly appreciate natural beauty and the diversity of the
world at this moment in Life's history and secondly the comprehension
that by pushing it, he would be destroying all of that.
xjenx wrote: We have the capability of planning. Yeh we could all live like they do in Tokyo in a barren world with no biodiversity but would we be happy? Are we even happy now? All that nature might want and what we are adapted to do is to replicate DNA but we understand this – so if we
don't like it we can do something about it. E.g. choosing not to have
kids – its 'unnatural' but we can make that choice.
xjenx wrote: And what happens when we hit it? I reckon our population will suddenly crash. If we all lived in carbon neutral houses and didn't pollute then hypothetically we could reach massive numbers (we could work out this number using an equation) but we wont ever live like this –its contrived. Instead we will get to the point when all the rivers are unfit to drink and all the food is no longer giving us the nutrients
we need and the air is rank.
I think it is better we quit now while we are ahead
xjenx wrote: Have you always been a vegan? That's a pretty unnatural diet to your standards
xjenx wrote: Are humans prepared to pay the cost of this? If this is the attitude we must take, we must be prepared for life as we know it to rapidly change and the population to plummet and then rebuild. This is not pleasant, its very harsh truth with a lot of death and suffering. I'd say most people would rather avoid it and with our brains we could do.
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-st ... redux.html has some fun thoughts about thatFrancisTapon wrote: Some scientists predict that we'll grow to 5-10 quatrillion humans over the next few centuries:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overpopula ... rojections
Why would we stop?
Ben, good thinking and comments! :idea:ben wrote:perhaps someday, perhaps in a zero-g environment where we can do without our legs, people will remove their legs (use a hover-chair), freeing up tons of sensory cortical space. then they just plug in a little "box" filled with vat-produced sensory neurons specifically engineered to respond to parts of the energy spectrum never before encountered on earth, allow these new neurons free reign in the empty cortical space, and viola! maybe in a few hours these astronauts would start "seeing" some crazy things that had only previously been seen by radio telescopes.
ben