Harmony, Shmarmony
In an appeal for money a wildlife organization sent me a 2014 calendar with glamour shots of various animals. Granted, the tiger looked very appealing, even if what it was actually thinking was "I really want to eat you". But they lost me with their motto of "living in harmony with nature".
There ain't no such animal. Nature is not in harmony.
Think about the summary of evolution as "survival of the fittest". How does that work unless survival is uncertain? And in turn, doesn't that mean that someone or something is trying to make your survival uncertain? In the days when the average person can get past the half-century mark without even trying hard, I think we've forgotten just what a "natural" way of life means.
True, we have no dedicated predators -- there are no animals that consider us the primary food source. But disease and famine did all too well for the majority of human history. It wasn't so long ago that average life expectancy was only around forty. And worse still, the median age of death -- the age by which half of all infants born had died -- was about six. Indoor plumbing is not just a modern convenience. Once you know the germ theory of disease, it's a moral necessity.
And to get indoor plumbing, you need pipes. To get pipes, you need mines for the material, and factories to make them. And you need transport to get the material to the factory, and to move the pipes to where they're needed. Then you need energy to make the transport move and to run the factories. Don't try to use horses forever, or eventually your cities will be drowning in horse manure, and disease will rear its ugly head again. And now -- welcome to the industrial age.
I went into engineering rather than political science because even back in the idealistic days I saw, like Buckminster Fuller, that technology was far more likely to solve the problems facing humanity. To the age-old question, "who shall hew the wood and draw the water?", no political theorist has ever come up with a better solution than central heating and indoor plumbing. Or is ever likely to.
There ain't no such animal. Nature is not in harmony.
Think about the summary of evolution as "survival of the fittest". How does that work unless survival is uncertain? And in turn, doesn't that mean that someone or something is trying to make your survival uncertain? In the days when the average person can get past the half-century mark without even trying hard, I think we've forgotten just what a "natural" way of life means.
True, we have no dedicated predators -- there are no animals that consider us the primary food source. But disease and famine did all too well for the majority of human history. It wasn't so long ago that average life expectancy was only around forty. And worse still, the median age of death -- the age by which half of all infants born had died -- was about six. Indoor plumbing is not just a modern convenience. Once you know the germ theory of disease, it's a moral necessity.
And to get indoor plumbing, you need pipes. To get pipes, you need mines for the material, and factories to make them. And you need transport to get the material to the factory, and to move the pipes to where they're needed. Then you need energy to make the transport move and to run the factories. Don't try to use horses forever, or eventually your cities will be drowning in horse manure, and disease will rear its ugly head again. And now -- welcome to the industrial age.
I went into engineering rather than political science because even back in the idealistic days I saw, like Buckminster Fuller, that technology was far more likely to solve the problems facing humanity. To the age-old question, "who shall hew the wood and draw the water?", no political theorist has ever come up with a better solution than central heating and indoor plumbing. Or is ever likely to.