Vardaman Virtual Forestry Company
FRIDAY REPORT OF 09/01/06
The Most Direct, Frequent Link to Knowledge Workers in the Eastern Forest Economy
FINAL WORDS FROM
“THE END OF NATURE
by BILL MCKIBBEN”
Our quotes below are from this outstanding new book:
“Nuclear reactors are a new way to create electricity. But genetic engineering is the first way to create new life. It is a staggering idea – ‘the second big bang,’ as one biologist out it. It is among the most important scientific advances ever in physical and commercial terms – it is the method that offers the most hope of continuing our way of life, our economic growth, in the teeth of the greenhouse effect. It promises crops that need little water and can survive heat; it promises cures for the new ailments we are creating as well as the old ones we’ve yet to solve; it promises survival in almost any environment we may create. It promises total domination…
“The pace of this revolution keeps speeding up. Though it has taken more cash than originally expected to bring certain pharmaceuticals to market, over three hundred small companies in the United States alone are trying to invent and market such products; some four hundred genes have been cloned. Several of the ideas I’ve already mentioned – genetically ‘improved’ trees, for instance – already exist. A Seattle company selects ‘elite’ redwoods’ from its wild stands, on the basis of such qualities as straightness, height, specific gravity of the wood, and ‘proper branch drop.’ Then it clones the trees and plants the wonder seedlings; eventually, the gnarly, crooked trees will be gone from its stands. Classical methods of improving seeds simply do not ‘adequately satisfy the criteria of the rapid availability of trees of superior quality,’ one researcher has explained. Christmas-tree growers, threatened by the rise of artificial trees, are now cloning trees with branches that lift upward at the proper 45-degree angle and carry ‘thick needles that do not fall off to litter the living room floor.’
“The Gaian atlas I quoted earlier calls for a ‘new approach to the wild based on rational management rather than on arbitrary exploitation’ – that is, herding elk, farming alligators. But after a few years of ‘rational management’ the wild will be the tame. These people are like the public relations officer for an Oregon national forest who kept insisting to me that one reason the Forest Service opposed protecting a prime chunk of land as wilderness was that if it was protected the authorities would then be unable to go in and ‘improve’ the wildlife habitat. ‘For instance,’ he said, ‘you can open up streams where there’s a waterfall by blasting the waterfall to create a more gentle grade, so the fish would have a chance to go farther up.’ I’m not arguing that he’s wrong (though, by and large, fish seemed to squeak by before the invention of dynamite). It’s just that his concern is for something that looks a lot like nature but isn’t…
“We live at the end of nature, the moment when the essential character of the world we’ve known since we stopped swinging from our tails is suddenly changing. I’m not intrinsically attracted to radical ideas anymore. I have a house, and a bank account, and I’d like my life, all other things being equal, to continue in its current course. But all other things are not equal – we live at an odd moment in human history when the most basic elements of our lives are changing. I love the trees outside my window; they are part of my life. I don’t want to see them shrivel in the heat, nor sprout in perfect cloned rows. The damage we have done to the planet, and damage we seem set to do in a genetically engineered business-as-usual future, make me wonder if there isn’t some other way. If there isn’t a humbler alternative – one that would let us hew closer to what remains of nature, and give it room to recover, if it can. An alternative that would involve changing not only the way we act but also the way we think…
“We just happen to be living at the moment when the carbon dioxide has increased to an intolerable level. We just happen to be alive at the moment when if nothing is done before we die the world’s tropical rain forests will become a brown girdle around the planet that will last for millennia. It’s simply our poor luck; it might have been nicer to have been born in 1890 and died in 1960, confident that everything was looking up. We just happen to be living in the decade when genetic engineering is acquiring a momentum that will soon be unstoppable…
“The thought that people living in poverty, be it desperate poverty or just depressing poverty, will curb their desire for a marginally better life simply because of something like the greenhouse effect is, of course, absurd. A cyclone killed three hundred thousand Bangladeshis in 1970. As soon as the water drained, people resettled the land. The willingness to take this sort of risk testifies to a hunger that can only increase if, as expected, the country’s population doubles. They are going to moderate their ‘lifestyles,’ pare down their ‘desires,’ in order to avoid releasing carbon dioxide? The subsistence farmers of the tropics, with no alternative method for feeding their families, will cease their slash-and-burn agriculture?…
“As birds have flight, our special gift is reason. Part of that reason drives the intelligence that allows us, say, to figure out and master DNA, or to build big power plants. But our reason could also keep us from following blindly the biological imperatives toward endless growth in numbers and territory. Our reason allows us to conceive of our species as a species, and to recognize the danger that our growth poses to it, and to feel something for the other species we threaten. Should we so choose, we could exercise our reason to do what no other animal can do: we could limit ourselves voluntarily, choose to remain God’s creatures instead of making ourselves gods. What a towering achievement that would be, so much more impressive than the largest dam (beavers can build dams) because so much harder. Such restraint – not genetic restraint or planetary management – is the real challenger, the hard thing. Of course we can splice genes. But can we not splice genes?…
“The strongest reason for choosing man apart is, as I have said, the idea that nature has ended. And I think it has. Bit I cannot stand the clanging finality of the argument I’ve made, any more than people have ever been able to stand the clanging finality of their own deaths. So I hope against hope. Though not in our time, and not in the time of our children, or their children, if we now, today, limited our numbers and our desires and our ambitions, perhaps nature could someday resume its independent working. Perhaps the temperature could someday adjust itself to its own setting, and the rain fall of its own accord.
“Time, as I said at the start of this essay, is elusive, odd. Perhaps the ten thousand years of our encroaching, defiant civilization, an eternity to us and a yawn to the rocks around us, could give way to the ten thousand years of humble civilization when we choose to pay more for the benefits of nature, when we rebuild the sense of wonder and sanctity that could protect the natural world. At the end of that span we would still be so young, and perhaps ready to revel in the timelessness that surrounds us. As I said, much earlier, that one of the possible meanings of the end of nature is that God is dead. But another, if there was or is any such thing as God, is that he has granted us free will and now looks on, with great concern and love, to see how we exercise it: to see if we take the chance offered by this crisis to bow down and humble ourselves, or if we compound original sin with terminal sin…
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