A few words about Ishmael.
1) Preaching will get you nowhere with any intelligent, rational human being.
2) Choosing a Wise Figure who isn't human to complain about humans creates an illusion of objective perspective that vanishes when you remember that the author was still human.
3) I see your use of the student-teacher paradigm to try leading your readers around by the nose. When your student is a thick idiot who blindly falls at the feet of your teacher, your reader loses respect for him. When your student fails to criticize your teacher - ever - and exclaims loudly how Marvelous, Wondrous and Amazing are your teacher's proclamations, any mildly skeptical reader will step back out of the story and say "Hang on."
4) Your grasp of science is minimal and unhelpful.
5) If you'd just written the story of the ape as a novel instead of using it as background for browbeating your points about human captivity, you'd have stumbled upon a useful allegory. Instead, you're kicking us in the stomach and telling us to be guilty because we LIVE OUR LIVES IN THE TIMES IN WHICH WE WERE BORN.
6) So you have a problem with human civilization. What, EXACTLY, do you intend or propose to do about it? What would you have any of us do about it that isn't self-absorbed naval staring, supremely unhelpful "leaving", or frighteningly destructive? Where do you stand on actually trying to have a society, a culture, that works with the environment without destroying everything that has become of human civilization? The point is NOT whether or not we have been destructive. The point is that we are here now, and all we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.
7) You are not a guru. You are a hack making money off white man's guilt. Now fuck off and let me live my life trying to FIX SOMETHING.
Enviro.sci is really starting to piss me the fuck OFF. Between that piss-ass of a book and the science teacher who disclaims large-scale evolution, I'm getting seriously disillusioned. Not with my choice of field or drive to work within it, but with the people with whom I might have to share it.
2) Choosing a Wise Figure who isn't human to complain about humans creates an illusion of objective perspective that vanishes when you remember that the author was still human.
3) I see your use of the student-teacher paradigm to try leading your readers around by the nose. When your student is a thick idiot who blindly falls at the feet of your teacher, your reader loses respect for him. When your student fails to criticize your teacher - ever - and exclaims loudly how Marvelous, Wondrous and Amazing are your teacher's proclamations, any mildly skeptical reader will step back out of the story and say "Hang on."
4) Your grasp of science is minimal and unhelpful.
5) If you'd just written the story of the ape as a novel instead of using it as background for browbeating your points about human captivity, you'd have stumbled upon a useful allegory. Instead, you're kicking us in the stomach and telling us to be guilty because we LIVE OUR LIVES IN THE TIMES IN WHICH WE WERE BORN.
6) So you have a problem with human civilization. What, EXACTLY, do you intend or propose to do about it? What would you have any of us do about it that isn't self-absorbed naval staring, supremely unhelpful "leaving", or frighteningly destructive? Where do you stand on actually trying to have a society, a culture, that works with the environment without destroying everything that has become of human civilization? The point is NOT whether or not we have been destructive. The point is that we are here now, and all we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.
7) You are not a guru. You are a hack making money off white man's guilt. Now fuck off and let me live my life trying to FIX SOMETHING.
Enviro.sci is really starting to piss me the fuck OFF. Between that piss-ass of a book and the science teacher who disclaims large-scale evolution, I'm getting seriously disillusioned. Not with my choice of field or drive to work within it, but with the people with whom I might have to share it.