Chapter 22 natural person

Social scientists, especially economists, have been digging into ecological and environmental issues lately, with disturbing results from their research.Knowing that we can perform budget analysis on lakes, meadows, nesting gannets, and even entire oceans can be a little uncomfortable.As hard as it is for us to face up to the multitude of possibilities and difficult choices in our environment, it's even harder when we see the glaring costs.Even the new term is annoying: our hearts ache when we read environments.That plural form means that there are so many options that need to be considered and voted on like picking products in the market.Economists really need a cool head and a hard heart to do these studies, and they must write cold, often slippery prose.

Most of us are just beginning to realize how deeply involved we humans are in controlling life on Earth.This means another revolution in human thought. The coming of this revolution is not easy either.We have just come through an inconclusive journey on the same subject, and are just about to make up our minds about our attitude to nature, just as a large committee has just come to some agreement and finds it time to reconsider the subject. again.Now, let's do it again. The oldest and most acceptable idea is that the earth is our private property, our vegetable garden, our zoo, our treasury, our energy source, which is at our fingertips to consume, decorate, and tear it into pieces if we choose.Improving the human condition, as we have interpreted it in the past, is the only raison d'être of the world.Man wants to conquer the sky, grasp the mystery, and control everything.This is a moral responsibility and a social obligation.

In recent years, this way of seeing things has taken a sudden twist and we've reached a sort of consensus.That is, we were wrong in the past.Although there are still some disputes about the details, we have been reluctant to admit in almost all respects that we are not the masters of nature as we once thought.We depend on other life in the same way that a leaf, a midge, or a fish depend on other life.We are part of an ecosystem.One way to put it is that the earth is a loosely structured spherical organism with all its living parts linked together in a symbiotic relationship.From this point of view, we are neither owners nor manipulators, but at best we can see ourselves as a kind of information-receiving agency—perhaps in the best of all possible worlds. , our role is the nervous system of the whole organism.

Some argue that this view places too much emphasis on dependence.They would like to see us as a separate, qualitatively distinct and special species, unlike any other form of life, even though we share genes, enzymes, and organelles with other organisms.However, at the bottom of this point of view is the following: whether we are dominant or not, we have to care about the ecosystem in which we live, otherwise we cannot survive alone.This meaning has been strong enough to start a movement to preserve the face of the natural environment and protect wildlife, enough to shut down insatiable technological development, enough to lead to a movement to preserve "the whole planet."

But today, just when new ideas seem to be gaining momentum, we may be about to turn the corner again.This turn was more frustrating and uncertain than any I had experienced before.In a sense, we will be forced back, we still have to believe in new ideas, but we are conditioned by the facts of life, so we have to live in the old way of life.Perhaps, as it turned out, it was too late to live by the new ideas. In fact, whether we want to or not, we are the masters of all things. This situation really makes us despair.On the one hand, we are actually the human beings of the 21st century, full of new knowledge, and have the concept of one family of all things; on the other hand, we are still the people of the 19th century, wearing spiked leather boots, stepping on nature The uncovered face subjugates and civilizes it.Moreover, we cannot stop this controlling behavior unless we ourselves disappear from the foot of the mountain.That's embarrassing enough.If there is such a thing as the spirit of the world, I am afraid that I will go crazy in the face of this problem.

The truth is, we are more involved than we can imagine.The fact that we sit in a circle like this, seriously worrying about how best to protect life on Earth is by itself the most indicative of the extent to which we are involved in controlling life on Earth.It is not human arrogance that leads us in this direction.This is the most natural thing in nature.That's how we develop and grow.We are such a species. Despite our pain, despite our reluctance, we are nature itself again.We grow everywhere, covering the entire surface of the earth like a new organism, touching and affecting all other kinds of life, merging with ourselves.The earth is in danger of being suffocated by our overflow.Now, we are the dominant features of our own environment.Humans, the massive metazoans of the planet, are powered by the symbiotic microbes that inhabit them, following instructions from the oldest living nucleic acids, by neurons that are essentially the same as any other organism on Earth Originally obtained information, it has the same structure as mastodon and lichen, and lives by the sun.This is human beings, who are now in charge of the earth, in charge of the earth, whether it is good or bad is another matter.

Is that really the case?You also know that it can be the other way around.Perhaps, we are the ones being invaded, conquered and used. Certain marine animals survived as part animal, part plant.They swallow algae, which transform themselves into complex plant tissue vital to the life of the whole complex.I figured that if the giant clam had a better mind, it might regret what it had done to the plant world from time to time, regretting that it swallowed up so many lives, turned so many green cells into slaves, and relied on their Live by photosynthesis.However, regarding this matter, plant cells may have a different view, thinking that they have captured the giant clam under the most satisfactory conditions, and rely on the small lenses in its tissues to gather sunlight for their own benefit.Perhaps, the seaweed will also feel sad because it has overthrown the clam world.

With luck, we're probably in the same situation as giant clams, only on a larger scale.Presumably this is the case: at a specific stage of Earth morphogenesis, beings like us are needed, at least for a while, to harvest and deliver energy, to tend to new symbiotic systems, to accumulate information for a future period, to contribute A certain amount of decoration, even seeding the solar system.That's it.Earth has found work. If I had any say, I'd be more than willing to play this useful role instead of being an essentially non-earthly being (to which we actually seem to be evolving).This would mean that, if we really believed that we were inseparable parts of nature, we would have to undergo a rather fundamental change in our attitudes towards each other.The environment we should be most worried about is undoubtedly ourselves.We will discover in ourselves the wonders we have seen in other parts of nature.Maybe we'll even admit that we have the fragility inherent in all highly differentiated organisms, and start a movement to protect ourselves as a endangered and precious species.We will not fail.