those arrogant humans…

Are gar­den­ers more hum­ble peo­ple? Do we know things a lot of oth­ers don’t or believe in things oth­ers choose not to believe? Here are a cou­ple thoughts for Earth Day, the first one a soft feather bed of a quote, the sec­ond one a bed of nails.

Human beings–any one of us, and our species as a whole–are not all-important, not at the cen­ter of the world. That is the one essen­tial piece of infor­ma­tion, the one great secret, offered by any encounter with the woods or the moun­tains or the ocean or any wilder­ness or chunk of nature or patch of night sky.–Bill McK­ibben in an inter­view with Susan Salter Reynolds, in the Los Ange­les Times Book Review, April 13.

If wildlife species are to become extinct, that will be regret­table. But any lit­er­ate per­son knows that extinc­tion is the way of evo­lu­tion, and is in the fun­da­men­tal flow of life. How­ever, man is dif­fer­ent. If man is not immor­tal, then there is no pur­pose or mean­ing in his exis­tence. Which in turn would mean no pur­pose or mean­ing in the uni­verse. The human immor­tal­ity imper­a­tive is absolute and rad­i­cal. That is why wildlife con­ser­va­tion has never been per­mit­ted to move to the ques­tions of ulti­mate value. There is no place for an ulti­mate non­hu­man value in our west­ern meta­physics, because of neces­sity, the human inter­est is the cos­mic inter­est. That is what it is all about. Wildlife is an “exter­nal­ity.” — John. A. Liv­ingston in The Fal­lacy of Wildlife Con­ser­va­tion, in The John A. Liv­ingston Reader (2007: 101).

April 22 2008 08:24 am | Categories: gardening • quotes • rambles | Tags: • • • • •

One Response to “those arrogant humans…”

  1. Greg on 22 Apr 2008 at 8:49 pm #

    I think I’m with McK­ibben on this one.

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