Man (un)Makes Himself
Man inhabits two worlds.
“One is the natural world of plants and animals, of soils and airs and waters which preceded him by billions of years and of which he is a part.
“The other is the world of social institutions and artefacts he builds for himself, using his tools and engines, his science and his dreams to fashion an environment obedient to human purpose and direction.
human experience
“The search for a better-managed human society is as old as man himself. It is rooted in the nature of human experience. Men believe they can be happy. They experience comfort, security, joyful participation, mental vigour, intellectual discovery, poetic insights, peace of soul, bodily rest. They seek to embody them in their human environment.
cramped & haunted
“But the actual life of most of mankind has been cramped with back-breaking labour, exposed to deadly or debilitating disease, prey to wars and famines, haunted by the loss of children, filled with fear and the ignorance that breeds more fear. At the end, for everyone, stands dreaded unknown death. To long for joy, support and comfort, to react violently against fear and anguish is quite simply the human condition.” (page 35)
[snip]
staggering acceleration
“His condition is to live aspiringly and uncertainly where the ‘biosphere’ of living things and the ‘technosphere‘ of his inventions interact.
“But today, as we enter the last decades of the twentieth century, there is a growing sense that something fundamental and possibly irrevocable is happening to man’s relations with both his worlds. In the last two hundred years, and with staggering acceleration in the last twenty-five, the power, extent and depth of man’s interventions in the natural order seem to presage a revolutionary new epoch in human history, perhaps the most revolutionary which the mind can conceive.
“Men seem, on a planetary scale, to be substituting the controlled for the uncontrolled, the fabricated for the unworked, the planned for the random. And they are doing so with a speed and depth of intervention unknown in any previous age of human history.” (page 37)
[big snip]
planet Earth
“Alone in space, alone in its life-supporting systems, powered by inconceivable energies, mediating them to us through the most delicate adjustments, wayward, unlikely, unpredictable, but nourishing, enlivening and enriching in the largest degree - is this not a precious home for all of us earthlings?
“Is it not worth our love? Does it not deserve all the inventiveness and courage and generosity of which we are capable to preserve it from degradation and destruction and, by doing so, to secure our own survival? (page 298)
‘Only One Earth’, 1972, Barbara Ward & Rene Dubois
Subtitled ‘The Care and Maintenance of a Small Planet.
‘Introduced as ‘An unofficial report commissioned by the Secretary General of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, prepared with the assistance of a 152-member Committee of Corresponding Consultants in 58 countries.’
‘Silent Spring’
“… we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself …
We are challenged as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves.”
Rachel Carson (1907 - 1964) author of ‘Silent Spring’ said this at a conference after her book was published.
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March 27th, 2008 at 3:19 am
This very question is why I am so thrilled to having discovered permaculture. Seeking to follow Nature’s patterns, to be inspired and constrained by her methods and cycles as we design a path of security for our selves and our civilization, is the ultimate blend of bio and techno.
Unless you count the Borg. But in my opinion, that was a malevolent blending.