Thursday, September 15, 2016
Launch Post
In both the TedTalk segment by Emma Marris entitled Nature is Everywhere and the excerpt from Bill McKibben's "The End of Nature", the steady decline of wildlife is seen as a problem caused by humankind. Marris also discusses the fact that with the way global warming is going, nature as we know it will be destroyed by the time our generation's children reach adulthood, while McKibben focuses on the already apparent ways in which we as humans disrupt nature; he uses the example of him walking through wilderness and enjoying the lack of human activity, until he hears the sound of a chainsaw cutting down trees. Another point brought up by Marris is that even with state parks and nature reserves, we put lots of effort into making these areas appear to be untouched by humankind. This brought to mind something that Marris said a bit later on during her presentation; "That which is untouched is unloved". So I wonder, is humankind's creation of technological advancements (landscape wise) a form of love? Do you think we so readily tear down trees and build condominiums and malls because we love the world, and are therefore trying to advance it? And on the opposing side of that, do you think it is possible for humankind to coexist with nature without altering it, and if we aren't altering nature, are we truly touching it- and by extension, loving it? Explain.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
You've posed some really fantastic questions here. What does (and/or should) our relationship to nature look like?
ReplyDeleteAt first, the idea that technological advancements were a form of love was laughable to me. I thought immediately about just this week, when over a quarter million gallons of gas leaked from a crude oil pipeline in Alabama - and it's not the worst spill they've experienced. (https://goo.gl/t1SURq) Spills like this have proven time and again to be disastrous to plant & animal life, yet still America alone uses about 140.43 billion gallons of gas in a year. (https://goo.gl/BmwAF9) We also use our technological advances specifically to destroy aspects of nature. In our use of trees, "some 46-58 thousand square miles of forest are lost each year — equivalent to 48 football fields every minute." (https://goo.gl/KC4S1V)
Then I realized that, as Bill McKibben mentions, until a few decades ago, humans thought that we were incapable of truly injuring or altering the natural world. He likens our blunders to stabbing a man with a toothpick - annoying, but altogether not that harmful to the function of the body. Since we don't enjoy admitting our mistakes, it's taken a long time to admit that we need to take serious action. The agreement that came out of the Paris climate conference last year gave governments a start with some guidelines, but without any consequences for not adhering to those guidelines, it could be just empty words on a pretty page. Even so, scientists that recognize the threat to our environment have made some pretty great advancements in recent years. Solar panels are cheaper and more efficient - there's even a glass solar panel in development that could be used in windows & electronics, like your phone, which absorbs light that isn't on the visible spectrum. (https://goo.gl/r0fkbY) Switching to green energy like solar, wind, and wave-based power is a common goal that aims to reduce the carbon emissions we add to our atmosphere.
But some scientists have a different goal - to physically remove carbon from the atmosphere. Just one example is the Reykjavik Energy team in Iceland, which managed to store carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as a liquid inside volcanic rocks. Within two years, 95% of the carbon dioxide solidified into a mineral. (https://goo.gl/vwyx1X)
So, to answer the question of whether technological advancements are a form of love: No, I don't believe our technology is inherently a form of love toward nature. In fact, I feel that most technology is a form of love toward ourselves, nature be damned. But when we choose to be empathetic to the suffering and negative alteration of nature, we're capable of expressing love by trying to fix our many mistakes. Ultimately, we are now capable of determining how our actions affect the world around us, which means we are fully capable of - and, in my opinion, entirely obligated to - living with and experiencing nature while making technological advancements that do not negatively affect the world as we know it.