Proposes one of four ways to live better in balance with the Earth.
by R. F. Nash
October 16, 2008.
¶ = paragraph –––––––––––––––––––– essential meaning
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1 “we don’t often think in the wider angles that encompass our species as a whole
2 “extend our concern…to put forward a strategy for occupation of this planet long-run
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3 “a self willed land” that did not exist before domestication but is now in our minds
4 “an environmental transformation that left wilderness is scattered remnants”
5 “technological, capitalist-driven culture in its cancer-like tendency to self-destruct.”
6 Thoreau, Marsh, Muir, each extended the idea of wild as essential 1890 frontier’s end – “big industrial cities losing their luster."
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7 “passing over a tipping point from liability to asset
8 “the Wilderness Act of 1964 was revolutionary—its point was the” people’s benefit setting aside over 9 million acres of Federal Land.
9 “A new bio-centric rationale” for “wilderness” to have intrinsic value gesture o’ modesty
10 “Wildness is a civilization other than our own,” Holy Earth – ethical equality, a step toward ecology
Liberty Hyde Bailey
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11 A Leopold’s “biotic arrogance.” Carson -uncontrolled & unutilized environs =value
12 1972 MMPA & 1973 Endangered Sp. A-ESA- members in the biotic community
13 “Civilization appeared as vulnerable.” To ecological cutural /\disaster & social disintegration
14 wilderness is “where most of the thirty-odd million species sharing earth reside.”
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15 wasteland scenario (Business as usual) “Growth was confused with progress.”
16 garden scenario (homogenization, led to biotic impoverishment to feed our own appetites)
17 future primitive (the loss of 10,000 years of civilized feat, as the hunter gatherer prevails
18 Island civilization ”Better tools mean peace rather than war with nature.”
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19 Check population growth by giving women reproductive rights–reduce to 1.5 billion
20 100 mile closed circle units supporting say 3 million people
21 “It is not necessary to go back to the Pleistocene to live with a low ecological impact.”
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22 “we’d surrender some freedoms” – leave the islands to enjoy minimal impact wild
23 “For some five million years the planet was self-willed” 10K years ago experiment controlling
24 preserve+conservation biology & the rewilding idea—full implications of these ideas = IC
25 “The upward-trending curves cannot be sustained.” Made deliberately or desperately
26 We stand at the crossroads …of the entire evolutionary process.”
Conclusion – divorce; live separately but in harmony, love but to love enough to be freed from our control
“Maybe biocentric ethics and reverence for self-willed nature could turn us from cancerous to caring.”
“”Some now view this not just as a violation of the rights of humans to enjoy wild nature but the rights of other species and self willed environments themselves.”
“Their value was intrinsic and their membership in the biotic community indisputable.”
“ ‘environmentalism’ took a broader view of utility”
Ibid.
“put our dominion into the realm of morals. It is now in the realm of trade.”
Liberty Hyde Bailey, 1915
“ changing American attitude toward nature.” Conservation 1907.
Ibid.
”celebrated tools of an environmental transformation that left wilderness in scattered remnants.”
“Restructuring of human lifestyles and expectations.”
Nash, Island Civilization, 2008.
1582 when we started using
millennia
1851 Thoreau – “In Wildness
is the preservation of the world."
1864 Marsh Man and Nature – humans as an artifact
equal in impact to geological forces
1890 Closing of the frontier
– as the line of
uninterrupted settlement between east and west
1907 the word Conservation is
coined by McGee & Pinchot to comprehensively use resources
1915 Liberty Hyde Bailey’s
characterization of our dominion in Holy Earth: stewardship.
1927 “food chains” first used in ecological literature
1936 “ecosystem: coined by Tansley
1949 A Sand County Almanac published posthumously by Aldo Leopold
1950 BOOM in population –
one billion increase every 15 years / 6000 acre per day loss
1962 Silent Spring by Carson warns of the wasteland of chemicals we are
feeding the earth & one other.
1964 The Wilderness Act becomes
law setting aside circumscribed & bounded areas for wilds
1969 NEPA (not in the article)
1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act
1973 Endangered Species Act
Wild | Climate | Biodiversity | nature as an asset | reflecting ecologically | Airs, Waters and Places