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THE CHANGING LANDSCAPES OF CHICAGO: PRAIRIE BALL FIELDS AND LOUISVILLE SLUGGER IDEAS A PHILOSOPHIC RIFF ON CONSERVATION, PHILOSOPHY, AND ETHICS |
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BY: STRACHAN DONNELLEY, PRESIDENT OF THE CENTER FOR HUMANS AND NATURE
CHICAGO HUMANITIES FESTIVAL PEGGY NOTEBAERT MUSEUM, CHICAGO IL OCTOBER 27, 2007 In the words of the new Nobel Prize winner, Al Gore, 2007 has been the year of inconvenient truths. Calving Greenland glaciers and melting Arctic ice, perhaps more then Gore’s film itself, are driving home the sobering realities of global warming, rapid climate change, indeed long-term ecospheric change in which we humans are inextricably enmeshed. We continue to cringe over the mishaps, if not misadventures, of the Iraq war. We are stunned and disheartened by the ongoing political and civic failure to deal with Katrina and its aftermath. (For example, there is no adequate mental health care for the region’s most vulnerable survivors, save for 50 psychiatric beds in prison.) We witness an ecologically ill advised rush into biofuels, especially corn ethanol, which will only exacerbate Midwestern industrial agriculture’s pillaging of soils, fresh water, wildlife, and rural communities, not to mention dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico and atmospheric affects. In the background are entrepreneurial dreams of mining the Midwest and Canada for coal, nickel, and fuel from tar (oil) sands, all promising environmental and ecological disasters. Further, we are living through a paralysis of governments in Washington, Springfield, and elsewhere. We are amidst presidential primary races that seem more like American Idol than genuine, democratic processes. Our political and cultural, if not civic, lives run to the tune of, or are run by, a free enterprise market economy which characteristically knows no moral oughts or civic responsibilities. And as they say on NPR’s Market Place, “the market giveth, and the market taketh away.” The glib biblical allusion is telling. What god does present American civic society worship? Which god or ultimates should we the people worship? Given that the state of the union is more or less in disarray, this is a serious moral and civic question. Here are a few inconvenient truths with which we must grapple. On a more personal note, this spring, at the Vernal Equinox, I turned sixty-five, the old mandatory retirement age. On my birthday, I woke up Grumpy Gramps, but thanks to my family, which includes five daughters and five grandchildren, the dark cloud soon passed. However, a week later we lost a good, old friend. We had to turf, put down, our 13 year old black Labrador, Snorri. No, Snorri was not named after one of Sleeping Beauty’s seven dwarfs, but after the great poet historian of the legendary Icelandic Sagas, stories of times long past. As I gently stroked Snorri’s head for the last time, I told him that I soon enough would follow, a remark which unnerved the young attending veterinarian. Memento mori, perhaps inevitably provoking stock taking and mortal reflections. How did I get to where I am today? Indeed, where am I now? And where will I be going in the future? For how many years? For how many good, productive years? I am amidst my own climate of concern and change. These questions are worth pondering, at least for me. Here they serve as the backdrop for a philosophic riff on prairie ball fields, Louisville Slugger ideas, and conservation philosophy and ethics. I was born in 1942 during World War II. After my father returned from the Navy in 1945, we soon left the Chicago suburban town of Lake Forest and moved to a nearby rural farming community, Libertyville, population 5000 - a fateful move for me and my family. We first lived in an old house adjacent to a dairy farm that my father rented to a farm family with over 20 children. Our house was on the corner of Casey and Almond, both gravel roads. In 1952, we moved to a new house built atop a former alfalfa field. We called our new homestead, which included a small barn and dog kennel, Windblown Hill. Though I and my own family have lived in New York City since 1969 and both of my parents are gone, we still hold on to Windblown Hill, not only for sentimental reasons and the beauty of the Midwestern farmscape. Over the last 45 years, Libertyville has radically changed (present population, 30,000 +). It is now a full-blown suburb of Chicago. Windblown Hill lies in the heart of Liberty Prairie Preserve, some 2000 acres of mostly protected farmland, woods, marshes and wetlands, remnants of native prairie, even a 3,000 year old archeological site. The Preserve is a challenging community effort aimed at protecting the traditional farmscapes from encroaching housing developments and wildfire sprawl emanating from Chicago and its older suburbs. The dairy cows are gone. Casey and Almond are now paved roads, with morning and evening rush hours and traffic jams. Over the same intervening 45 years, I have become a philosopher and grey beard keenly interested in nature and conservation. In 2003, I helped found the Center for Humans and Nature, a non-profit organization dedicated to philosophically exploring and practically promoting long term moral and civic responsibilities to humans and nature in all their innumerable interconnections. My hope is that Windblown Hill and a nearby Radke farm house will not only be a place for our family, but a significant home for Humans and Nature work, which has regional, national, and even global aspirations. Back to the late 1940s and 1950s. Though I continued school in Lake Forest, Libertyville, Windblown Hill, and the rural farming landscape importantly shaped my life and emerging self. I spent much of my time bicycling up and down the gravel roads, fishing for bullheads in the nearby Des Plaines River, hanging around the dairy farm and helping with seasonal haying, as well as practicing sports by myself, inside or outside our barn, on the driveway or the lawn, or in the surrounding fields, anywhere and any sport: football, basketball, ice hockey, baseball, not to mention fishing, hunting, and more. I was a sports nut. Here the wider world of Libertyville comes into play. Libertyville was a typical rural Midwestern town, crazed by baseball. Out of the population of 5,000 individuals, 500 boys and girls played on various teams, all in uniforms. Knowing no one save kids from Sunday School at the Presbyterian Church, I tried out for Little League baseball. In passing – this later will prove relevant – I should mention that my Sunday School experience was a mixed blessing. I was the new kid in the pew, and all was not brotherly love. I later came to consider that I had run into a particularly virulent form of Northern Illinois Presbyterianism, which eventually drove me into trout streams and salmon rivers for spiritual and religious nourishment. That was an unmixed, decided blessing. Whatever, well over 100 boys vied for four Little League teams. At age 11, this was my first encounter with open competition. I made the cut and was assigned to play first base for a team sponsored by the Sparkler Manufacturing Company. I had a double my first time at bat and a good season. The next year I was sent to an expansion team in a nearby rural town, playing for the Mundelein Businessmen’s Association. (We had blue hats with red bills, just like the then Milwaukee Braves.) After Little League, I played on Pony League and American Legion teams until my Midwestern career ended in my later teens. I will not dwell on my baseball exploits, success or failures. (Early on, I passionately wanted to play in the major leagues and with the Chicago Cubs in particular, which, given their prowess and talent, did not seem beyond the realm of imagination.) Rather, I want to fasten upon two facets of my Midwestern baseball years that vividly live on in the depths of my being: prairie baseball fields and Louisville Slugger bats. Old prairie ball fields are indeed memorable. Our Little League field had fences 255 feet from home plate; stands for 400 or so spectators (mostly parents and family); a loudspeaker and an announcer; and lights for night games. (We were well ahead of the Cubs and Wrigley Field.) However, it was in later years that the prairie ball fields really came into play. In the town of Half Day, the ball park had a cow pasture in right field, a cemetery in center field, and trailer park in left field. Where to hit? We chose right field, but not out of respect for the living or the dead. The right fielder moved ¬¬¬about gingerly, trying to avoid cow pies. There was also the baseball field in Volo, with a swamp in left center. To my and everybody else’s surprise, I lined a pitch into the swamp and chugged around the bases for a home run. Nature had come to my aid. Finally, there was a flat, featureless ball park (only a backstop) in Gurnee. As the sun set and evening twilight approached, I was playing centerfield, and our pitcher was protecting a 1-0 lead with a no-hitter. The batter hit a ball towards deep right center. I ran over as fast as I could and thrust my glove over my head into the air. The ball struck and stuck in the glove’s webbing. (Did I catch the ball, or did the ball catch me?) Our loyal fans went wild. The game and the no-hitter were saved. Horns blasted from 15 or more cars, the time honored way to celebrate on prairie baseball fields. I ran into the bench amidst a cacophony of honks, a triumphant moment. But what about the Louisville Slugger bats? There were no metal bats back then, with their tinny ping when the bat strikes a ball. This was the real thing, wooden bats. (We used to be off and running at the crack of the bat. What do runners do now – listen for pings?) My first Louisville Slugger was a 32”, big barreled, Johnny Mize model, used in Little League. Parents of opposing teams grumbled. The bat, they claimed, exceeded Little League regulations. No matter, I got 7 hits over two games before I broke the bat, or it was taken out of my hands. Choosing the right Louisville Slugger was always a fundamental ritual. Just to swing those straw-colored, shinely varnished bats, with the oval Hillerich & Bradsby trade mark, was magical. I remember my last Louisville Slugger, a 35” Ernie Banks model. I have it to this day, unmarred by baseball marks. It proved too heavy for me to use in games. I did not have Ernie’s powerful wrists, which propelled him into baseball’s Hall of Fame, despite having played for the Cubs. Louisville Slugger Ideas Enough of the past: prairie baseball fields and Louisville Slugger bats. I now find myself in different arenas, wielding different tools. As a conservation philosopher, I now ply my wares in natural ecosystems and landscapes, including their human communities. I use what skills I have as a thinker, which fundamentally involves ideas, inherited from the past or brewed up anew. Some people traffic in drugs. I traffic in ideas. Whatever, these new arenas and tools have deep experiential and metaphorical roots in my Libertyville youth and baseball past. I am fortunate to have had graduate school, doctoral training in the history of philosophy, going back to the Presocratic Greeks. (I studied at the University in Exile, home of mostly Jewish scholars fleeing Hitler’s Europe: The Graduate Faculty at the New School for Social Research in New York City.) Even for a student of philosophy, this was a rare opportunity. (Academic philosophy, to its own impoverishment, usually spurns its own history.) I have always been drawn to big, bold thinkers with truly big ideas, the Magic Mountains of philosophy’s history, to borrow a phrase from e.e. cummings. In short, I have been primarily drawn to cosmological thinkers – those interested in understanding the universe or cosmos and our human place within it, big picture philosophy. Cosmologies (theories of the structure of cosmos) and Cosmogonies (theories of the birth or coming into being of the cosmos) are always undergirded by ruling ideas: Louisville Slugger ideas lighting up the cosmic playing field. Here is where my past experientially and metaphorically undergirds my present. The young one in me refuses to grow up and stop swinging for the fences or the swamp. Many professional thinkers consider that we are, or should be, well beyond the age of such heroic, big picture thinking. They are wrong. Such thinking is inevitable, as well as necessary and good, if done critically and with awareness of what we are doing: pursuing philosophic, speculative understanding and meaning, not scientific knowledge, testable by recurrence to natural or empirical phenomena. Such understanding and meaning are necessary for us to gain a fundamental orientation in the world and, moreover, to discern our fundamental moral and civic responsibilities to the earthly world of humans and nature. In short, the heights and depths of philosophic speculation have decided and important practical implications. Before briefly exploring the importance of fundamental ideas in discerning the landscape of conservation ethics and our attendant moral and civic responsibilities, let me give you a few relevant examples of such ruling ideas. I want particularly to keep our eye on the philosophic interpretation of humans’ relation to nature. For many, the term ‘cosmogony’ is esoteric. We have never heard of it. Yet cosmogonic stories or creation myths are central to our cultural lives, as they have been to all human societies. A dominant cosmogonic myth (or myths) of the Western tradition is expressed in the Bible’s Book of Genesis. God created the world in six days; set its existential, including human, dramas in motion for all time; and saw or declared His creation was good. (There is a Louisville Slugger, world orienting, idea if ever there was one.) But we should note at once that this is not the only cosmogonic myth the world has known and that it may not capture the “whole truth” that we practically and morally need. There have been innumerable cosmogonic myths, reflecting their times, places, and worldly settings. For example, the 5th century B.C. Presocratic Heraclitus claimed that it is wise to know that all things are one: The Logos or Everliving Fire, kindling and extinguishing in measures. When duly elaborated, this fundamental idea explains all things as dynamically and essentially intertwined and mutually dependent on each other and the underlying Logos for their very being or existence. This dynamic, living cosmic web includes the “fiery” philosopher Heraclitus himself. The knower, knowing, and the known are radically, fundamentally one and the same (aspects of the Everliving Fire). This powerful idea and worldview remains importantly suggestive to me, and others, to this day. Or take the much later scientific and philosophic revolution of the 16th and 17th century in Europe, which involved a significant shift in fundamental, world-orienting ideas. Descartes and his philosophic and scientific cohorts elaborated a new kind of “substance” philosophy, defining substance “as that which requires nothing else in order to exist.” Descartes posited three kinds of substance: God, Mind (res cogitans) and Matter (res extensa). Here is Descartes’ famous dualism of mind and body, his radical split of humans and nature, which haunts us to this day. Arguably, he was most interested in fashioning a fundamental new conception of nature: a merely material nature - no minds, no values - that is ruled by deterministic, billiard balls-in-motion causation. This conception served the new mathematical – mechanistic science of the day, which was interested in discovering the universal and timeless laws of nature (for example, the laws of gravitation, thermodynamics, and more.) All this led to a new Deistic conception of the universe. God created matter ex nihilo, set it in motion guided by divinely instituted laws of nature, and exited the natural cosmic scene. Scientists and philosophers were left free to use their rational wits (res cogitans) to discover the laws and workings of this “naturally necessitated” world. Note the radical change in worldview from traditional Greek and Christian conceptions. This change was effected by a shift in fundamental ideas and presuppositions. (And the more hard-nosed, practical, and pragmatic among us rigorously claim that ideas do not matter!) Moreover, we should note that Descartes was immediately challenged for the incoherence of his novel dualistic thinking and philosophic meditations by Spinoza, among several others. Spinoza claimed that in truth there is only one substance, God or Nature (Deus sive Natura): an infinite substance with infinite attributes, acting out of the necessity of its own being (no choice, no free will). All else are modifications or modes of this one substance, sharing in the attributes of which we know only two: body and mind (or the idea of the body). Each finite mode has, as its essence, a conatus, an active endeavor to preserve in its own individual being. All modes are systemically and causally interlocked with one another in their individual endeavors to persevere in their being. Spinoza as a philosopher conceives himself as integrally interwoven in this cosmic realm of natural, dynamic necessity. He nevertheless points the way to freedom through rational (scientific and philosophic) knowledge and to high blessedness (the intellectual love of God or Nature). In Spinoza’s monistic thinking we can discern shades of Heraclitus and a whole new rack of Louisville Slugger ideas which may yet serve us well, especially considering that, with Spinoza, nature is alive (animated) and value laden, and not dead and valueless, as with Descartes and more orthodox and positivist materialists and physicalists. We have actually been preparing the way for my main topic of interest: the fundamental, world-orienting ideas that we require to elaborate a comprehensive and persuasive conservation ethic, one that will help us discern our complex civic and moral responsibilities to humans and nature, both in the present and long into the future. For this task, I want to turn to Charles Darwin and evolutionary, ecological biology. Ernst Mayr, perhaps the leading 20th century evolutionary biologist and philosopher, has claimed that Darwin inaugurates the most profound revolution in western scientific and philosophic thought - a revolution that most of us, including molecular biologists and other scientists, have yet to grasp. To follow our guiding metaphor, there has been a radical change of profound Louisville Slugger ideas that, for the most part, has escaped notice. (My philosophic mentor, Hans Jonas, once quipped that we Americans are allergic to metaphysics, the critical consideration of our deepest big ideas.) Yet, according to Mayr, unless we digest and assimilate this fundamental conceptual shift, this new framework of thinking, we will never appreciately understand evolutionary and ecological realities and our responsibilities to nature and ourselves. We can briefly summarize evolutionary theory. The theory holds that there is a common descent of all life (including our own) from a single earthly origin via an evolutionary two-step: genetic and organismal (bodily and behavioral) variation and natural (and sexual) selection or elimination. So far, so good. But, according to Mayr, to understand the theory of evolution, we must consider this definition outside the conceptual framework of thought inherited from Newton and Descartes, with its attendant and outmoded fundamental ideas and assumptions. (In short, we need to think outside the old box.) Fortunately, Mayr, born in Europe, was philosophically well trained and adept, indeed masterful, at critically dealing with fundamental ideas. To be specific, he claims that there are numerous traditional assumptions that we must philosophically discard and get over if we are going to understand Darwinism. He fastens upon three in particular: cosmic teleology or purposiveness; Newtonian, physicalist (material) determinism; and typological or essentialist thinking. Cosmic teleology gets all the popular press and attention, but the other two ideas are equally as important. All three together must be left behind in the dust of old ball parks as characterizing outmoded worldviews. Cosmic teleology is the notion that the natural universe and earthly life are fashioned by a Divine intelligence and purposive or goal directed Designer or Watchmaker. Darwinism holds that there is no such designer, as traditionally conceived. Nature, and animate (organic) nature in particular, creates its own forms, capacities, and structures in passing. The realm of evolutionary life is undergirded by a Blind Tinkerer, not an Intelligent Designer. Though this does not rule out all possibilities of theology, it does call for a more or less radical revision of certain traditional theistic worldviews. Newtonian, physicalist determinism holds that all material “consequents” are strictly causally determined by their physical ¬¬¬¬“antecedents,” with no brooking interferences from mind or supernatural forces. It is this underlying idea that crucially allows for the conception of abiding “laws of nature,” which are essentially unchanging and atemporal in character. They hold always and everywhere and thus have no essential reference to any particular time and place. Thus, according to this view, “natural history” is almost an oxymoron. Nature has no real history, only the eternal or everlasting play of natural laws working over and through physical matter. (Spinoza himself held a similar conviction.) However, natural history and its changing realities are at the heart and soul of the nature studied by evolutionary biology and ecology. Time (temporality) and historical becoming, contingencies, and chance really count. In particular, with organic individuals, populations, and species, genomes (with all their causal effects) are historically brewed up via variation and selection. In brief, though the realm of life may presuppose physical laws of nature, it is not solely constituted or determined by them. Indeed, evolutionary biology and ecology have no (are not ruled by) atemporal laws of nature. If we insist on looking at the world through Newtonian and Cartesian eyes, Mayr claims that we will never see and comprehend the world of animate, living nature, including our human selves. Finally, there is the issue of typological or essentialist thinking, which traces its roots back to Plato and the Pythagoreans, if not beyond. This fundamental conception holds that all individuals of any species (rose, dog, human being) are essentially alike. Any variation among individuals is merely accidental or adventitious and does not count in reality or in understanding the nature of things. (Note in passing how well the conception of typological thinking, with unchanging essences, ideas, or forms (eide), goes with the worldview of laws of nature and a rational cosmic designer.) But such thinking is fundamentally an anathema to evolutionary thought. It is precisely the variations among individuals within a population – almost without exception, all organic individuals have their variations or differences – that allows natural selection to blindly work its wonders: ongoing adaptations to changing worldly environments, and indeed the very diversification of animate life into new species, the engendering of biodiversity. None of this grand historical, worldly, natural drama can be captured by essentialist thinking and thinkers. Out with the old, outmoded rack of ideas, in with the new fundamental ideas and assumptions. But what are the new ideas? Following Mayr, we can start with “populational thinking,” which leads to a fundamentally new conception of what a biological species really is. Populational thinking flips essentialist thinking on its head. As noted, it is the variation among individuals in a biological population that importantly (really) counts. Variation accounts for one half of the evolutionary two-step. Species are now not defined by their timeless forms or essences, but by actual or potentially interbreeding individuals living in populations – by those who can share genetic variations among themselves and thus allow evolutionary and adaptive processes to engender themselves. Moreover, the fundamental conception of an interbreeding population living within a wider, causally efficacious historical and changing environment cries out for a fundamental, new conception of causation. Interactionism is the name of the game on and between all abiotic and biotic levels, including genomes, cells and organs, individual organisms, populations and species, natural communities and ecosystems, indeed the global ecosphere itself. Interactive causation simultaneously works upwards and downwards, as old Heraclitus would say (“the way up is the way down”). How can we best conceive this grand new fundamental idea? Imagine a musical, orchestral performance, say Verdi’s Requiem. What factors are at play? There is Verdi, the composer; the musical score; the conductor; the orchestra and the chorus; the soloists; the members of the audience (each with different musical ears and personal concerns); the orchestral hall with its acoustics; the wider world in its present historical and cultural moment; and no doubt more. Who or what is the cause of the performance? No one single thing or factor. Rather the performance emerges out of the interactions of all these factors. Change one or more factors, the interactions change, and a qualitatively different performance emerges. Without stretching the metaphor too far, we can call such systemic interaction “orchestral causation”. Here is a Louisville Slugger idea to replace Newtonian, physicalist causation and determinism. “Emergence,” in fact, is another such fundamental, new idea. Emergence is a conception central to evolutionary and ecological thinking. The idea coheres with the conception of a hierarchy of nested natural systems, systems including, or included within, one another. Interactions on one systemic level produce natural properties or entities on the next higher level that are in principal unpredictable. The simplest illustration is water, H2O. Who could have predicted that the interaction between hydrogen and oxygen atoms would produce “aqueousness”? Similarly, who could have predicted that the interactions of abiotic elements would produce biotic entities (organic molecules) and the interactions of the abiotic and biotic still further natural phenomena: genomes within cells within organs within organisms within populations within ecosystems within the ecosphere, all no doubt influenced by their wider cosmic, natural setting. Such unplanned and unpredictable ¬¬¬¬spatio-temporal, historical, dynamic emergence makes little or no sense within the ahistorical, deterministic, “laws of nature” worldview of Newton and Descartes. To emphasize the significance of this new rack or system of fundamental ideas – populational thinking, orchestral causation, and emergent properties and entities – I want to reconsider briefly the age old philosophic quandary over the nature of the human self and human communities. Given the rack of Darwinian ideas – we have considered only a few of its guiding ideas – new notions of the human self and human communities suggest themselves. We humans are complex, bodily organisms living within natural and cultural populations amidst historical, orchestral causation and emergent properties above and below our individual organismic selves and communities. The suggestion is that we too are emergent ones, selves emerging out of worldly (natural and cultural) interactions, and are so until we die. (Heraclitus and Spinoza would understand and concur). We are not “atom selves”, old time Cartesian substances, res cogitans or thinking beings, requiring nothing else (save God) in order to exist, essentially isolated from and unrelated to the world, natural and cultural. Quite the opposite. We are interactively involved with the world up to our ears. (I include our minds, our souls, the full reaches of our experience.) Moreover, our human communities and cultures, in all their diversities, seem to fit well in this Darwinian framework of ideas. They too are emergences, influenced and influencing, “unpredictable” properties or entities emerging from the interconnections of humanly organic selves interacting with each other and the wider historical world of animate and inanimate becoming. Again, the Heraclituses and the Spinozas, I think, were in their own ways clued into these natural and cultural realities. Descartes and dominantly essentialist thinkers are not. But what does this new rack of Darwinian ideas have to do with ethics and, specifically, our moral obligations to human communities and nature? A great deal, I think. The cosmos and our earth in particular are and have been a protean realm of historical becoming, engendering all sorts of natural and cultural capacities, forms, and patterns that characteristically strike us human, organic ones as good, significant, important, and valuable, if not strictly morally good in character. But all alike – and we know this most vividly and straightforwardly from our own human lives – are mortal, finite, and vulnerable to harm. We also know that we humans have become all too significant actors on the earthly, if not cosmic, scene. With our circumscribed powers of freedom and action, we affect earthly things, including our human, ¬multicultural selves, for better or worse. At present, we have become nature’s great harmers and degraders. In short, we carry a heavy moral burden and responsibility for what ongoingly happens on the earth, and not only in our human communities. We have decided responsibilities to natural processes, structures, and non-human forms of animate life. Recognition of these responsibilities is not new. It, no doubt, goes back for centuries. Certainly, our responsibilities were explicitly articulated by Aldo Leopold, among many others, in his A Sand County Almanac, some 60 years ago. Leopold exhorts us to uphold the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community or the Land, the complex admixture and interaction of the abiotic and the biotic which includes our humanly communal and cultural selves – humans within nature. Yet, as witnessed by a whole host of natural and human crises mentioned at the outset – the degradation of soils, water, air, wild flora and fauna, with climate change and global warming grabbing our latest immediate attention – we seem mired in a rut of moral and civic irresponsibility with respect to both our human selves and the rest of nature. Why? What is our particularly human problem? To be honest, this question baffles the best of minds. But beyond all questions of greed and parochial self-interest, among innumerable other factors, how much depends on our having the wrong set or rack of fundamental ideas in our heads? Ideas matter, and truly big ideas truly matter. Why are Darwinian ideas and worldviews still marginalized in our cultural communities? The United States is an especially striking example. Why are we ruled by old, outmoded ideas, inherited unthinkingly from the Western cultural past scientific, philosophic, and theological? If, as Hans Jonas claimed, Americans are allergic to deep, systematic thinking, we are indeed in deep cultural trouble. We remain on an old 19th century, coal fired, smoke belching locomotive train, headed for a mountain tunnel that has no exit. By not comprehending nature and our complex responsibilities to nature, we ignore our complex responsibilities to ourselves. Nature and humanity will be degraded, fail, or prosper together. Such is the message of everyday experience and Darwinian philosophic and scientific thinking. It is time to bring out our new Louisville Slugger ideas, rap ourselves upside the head, and engender the climate of worldview concern and change that we so sorely need. Thank you. STRACHAN DONNELLEY, PRESIDENT CENTER FOR HUMANS AND NATURE OCTOBER, 2007 |
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