Brenton
Living With Nature
February 21st 2008 13:16
There’s a 100% effective way to protect beach goers from shark attacks. Kill all the sharks. And why stop there? We see people dying from spiders, snakes, lions, tigers, bears, wolves… let’s just kill the lot of them.
Of course, this is a stupid idea. We can’t just eliminate all the dangers in nature. However our common approach seems to be to hide from nature – put ‘us’ in the house, control the places where trees are and aren’t, cut the grass and determine the boundaries between our space, and natural space.
There is still a niggling feeling that we have yet to really, as collective humanity, worked out how to best live with nature. And that maybe by cutting ourselves off from the natural world, we are avoiding the complications rather than dealing with them in increasingly more complex and intelligent ways.
I don’t think that we should be wearing loincloths made of dingo skin, and living up gum trees. And I don’t think that we should live in floating cyber-complexes with plastic grass. But somewhere in between there is an answer which is so far better than we’ve been able to work out. As soon as we realize it’s worth working out, it will be awesome.
Of course, this is a stupid idea. We can’t just eliminate all the dangers in nature. However our common approach seems to be to hide from nature – put ‘us’ in the house, control the places where trees are and aren’t, cut the grass and determine the boundaries between our space, and natural space.
There is still a niggling feeling that we have yet to really, as collective humanity, worked out how to best live with nature. And that maybe by cutting ourselves off from the natural world, we are avoiding the complications rather than dealing with them in increasingly more complex and intelligent ways.
I don’t think that we should be wearing loincloths made of dingo skin, and living up gum trees. And I don’t think that we should live in floating cyber-complexes with plastic grass. But somewhere in between there is an answer which is so far better than we’ve been able to work out. As soon as we realize it’s worth working out, it will be awesome.
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