LETS CONSERVE THE ENVIRONMENT!
No settled family or community has ever called its home place an
“environment.” None has ever called its feeling for its home place
“biocentric” or “anthropocentric.” None has ever thought of its
connection to its home place as “ecological,” deep or shallow. The
concepts and insights of the ecologists are of great usefulness in our
predicament, and we can hardly escape the need to speak of “ecology” and
“ecosystems.” But the terms themselves are culturally sterile. They
come from the juiceless, abstract intellectuality of the universities
which was invented to disconnect, displace, and disembody the mind. The
real names of the environment are the names of rivers and river valleys;
creeks, ridges, and mountains; towns and cities; lakes, woodlands,
lanes roads, creatures, and people.
And the real name of our
connection to this everywhere different and differently named earth is
“work.” We are connected by work even to the places where we don’t work,
for all places are connected; it is clear by now that we cannot exempt
one place from our ruin of another. The name of our proper connection to
the earth is “good work,” for good work involves much giving of honor.
It honors the source of its materials; it honors the place where it is
done; it honors the art by which it is done; it honors the thing that it
makes and the user of the made thing. Good work is always modestly
scaled, for it cannot ignore either the nature of individual places or
the differences between places, and it always involves a sort of
religious humility, for not everything is known. Good work can be
defined only in particularity, for it must be defined a little
differently for every one of the places and every one of the workers on
the earth.
The name of our present society’s connection to the
earth is “bad work” – work that is only generally and crudely defined,
that enacts a dependence that is ill understood, that enacts no
affection and gives no honor. Every one of us is to some extent guilty
of this bad work. This guilt does not mean that we must indulge in a lot
of breast-beating and confession; it means only that there is much good
work to be done by every one of us and that we must begin to do it.”
―
Wendell Berry
“When I consider that the nobler animal have been exterminated here -
the cougar, the panther, lynx, wolverine, wolf, bear, moose, dear, the
beaver, the turkey and so forth and so forth, I cannot but feel as if I
lived in a tamed and, as it were, emasculated country... Is it not a
maimed and imperfect nature I am conversing with? As if I were to study a
tribe of Indians that had lost all it's warriors...I take infinite
pains to know all the phenomena of the spring, for instance, thinking
that I have here the entire poem, and then, to my chagrin, I hear that
it is but an imperfect copy that I possess and have read, that my
ancestors have torn out many of the first leaves and grandest passages,
and mutilated it in many places. I should not like to think that some
demigod had come before me and picked out some of the best of the stars.
I wish to know an entire heaven and an entire earth.”
―
Henry David Thoreau,
The Journal, 1837-1861
“In every remote corner of the world there are people like Carl Jones
and Don Merton who have devoted their lives to saving threatened
species. Very often, their determination is all that stands between an
endangered species and extinction.
But why do they bother? Does it
really matter if the Yangtze river dolphin, or the kakapo, or the
northern white rhino, or any other species live on only in scientists'
notebooks?
Well, yes, it does. Every animal and plant is an integral
part of its environment: even Komodo dragons have a major role to play
in maintaining the ecological stability of their delicate island homes.
If they disappear, so could many other species. And conservation is very
much in tune with our survival. Animals and plants provide us with
life-saving drugs and food, they pollinate crops and provide important
ingredients or many industrial processes. Ironically, it is often not
the big and beautiful creatures, but the ugly and less dramatic ones,
that we need most.
Even so, the loss of a few species may seem
irrelevant compared to major environmental problems such as global
warming or the destruction of the ozone layer. But while nature has
considerable resilience, there is a limit to how far that resilience can
be stretched. No one knows how close to the limit we are getting. The
darker it gets, the faster we're driving.
There is one last reason
for caring, and I believe that no other is necessary. It is certainly
the reason why so many people have devoted their lives to protecting the
likes of rhinos, parakeets, kakapos, and dolphins. And it is simply
this: the world would be a poorer, darker, lonelier place without them.”
―
Mark Carwardine,
Last Chance to See
Small-scale
disasters are so frequent that we can call them routine disasters,
everyday disasters. And of course, losses from disasters are also
increasing, but it is poor communities that bear the brunt of disasters,
they are more likely to be affected by a disaster, and less able to
recover. And we expect that climate change will continue raising the
frequency and intensity of natural disasters.
