[ROCKMAN]

Step back – I suppose they like to use the W word because it so much more dramatic than the C word….compromise. Which is the word I would use. I can’t think of a single instance when we’ve ever defeated Mother Earth. We can watch hurricanes from the satellites and build levees to protect areas but we can’t force Mother to stop creating them. We can develop a vaccine to prevent polio but we can’t eliminate it from the population that isn’t inoculated. We can extend life decades longer than where we were a few centuries ago but so far I’m fairly certain every one born will die eventually. We can completely destroy an ecosystem but, once abandoned by man, Mother will regenerate another ecosystem in its place as she sees fit. She has destroyed countless ecosystems herself and watch them transform anew.

So again, where have we ever completely subjugated nature for all time? Which is why I tend to chuckle when folks talk about man “destroying the planet”. What they usually mean is rendering some area unfit for man or some other creatures. We can greatly modify portions of the planet for our benefit for a period of time. But until Mother decides to spin the earth into a black hole it won’t be “destroyed”. We might make certain areas unpleasant by human standards but Mother has a different set of standards. Mother doesn’t care if we drive some species to extinction….she has destroyed more species than man can even count on the planet today let alone what we might destroy. Damage some aquifers with improperly disposed frac fluids? Mother once destroyed all life across much of the Indian subcontinent with massive basalt flows. The hubris to think that weak and pitiful humans could ever match the absolute lack of compassion Mother has for every living creature on the planet. This is her theater…man is just one of many life forms passing though.

[rollin]

I must fully agree with archdruid and his research, the effect of a human template upon science has been to build a narrow subset of conclusions and results compared to what science could actually achieve. Essentially a doughnut of knowledge instead of a pie, with the emptiness both inside and outside. Science itself is limited in it's ability to probe the universe and human intervention produces an even smaller set of results. Of course once the limited results of science become public, they are even more narrowly carried forward to serve the biopathic achievers of our species.

As far as the "Us versus Nature", that is a fog of disinformation promoted by religion, government and organizations to control people and justify actions. The reality is that mankind is fully a part of nature and is mostly directed by it's DNA as are other animals. Up until lately mankind was not capable of building anything as complicated as a beehive or termite mound . That ability only became possible with the advent of the fossil fuel age.
What mankind abounds in is the ability to visualize and create non-realistic thought patterns, i.e. imagination. This has led to a plethora of delusions and a series of paths that are non-functional, destructive and non-sustainable. Apparently the higher ability to stay on track exhibited by most animals is overridden by a super ego manufacturing imagined solutions. We are so proud of our destructive capabilities.

All this is an inevitable product of evolution and may have occurred to some extent several times before, with failures coming fairly quickly (see the present projections for homo sapiens). Homo sapiens appears to have swept away or absorbed it's intelligent cousins, thus reducing competition to nil.

With the limited length of the stability of our wonderfully stable sun, production of life-forms that have the ability to travel outward into the universe is the only way life can be continued for long periods of time. Whether this particular species will survive and evolve enough to move onward and spread DNA across space will be determined in the future. Right now the signs do not look promising. But take heart, we are just a blip in geological and biological time so far.

Possibly humans need to take a lesson from all the other creatures on the planet and try to fit into nature better rather than probing the purely mechanical to satisfy a distorted view of the world. Mother Nature would surely be pleased.

[Ibon]

Reading the Archdruid Report every week is one of my few routines. I cant recommend it enough.

This week's essay on the Archdruid Report reminded me of an independent study course I submitted 35 years ago to my college counselor. I made the case that field work in biology is narrowly focussed on specific problems and solutions and that although this allows for precise disciplined focussing it also results that you can sometimes not see the forest for the trees. My proposal was to go into the field for one semester without an agenda or an experiment with nothing more than observation skills and in this way see what is revealed in the field. This was an undergraduate course and "science light" but the point was to reverse the role of nature and scientist. Let nature take the initiative and have the scientist respond to that initiative.

I ended up walking in edge habitat between field and forest along some abandoned rail road tracks, observed a female clear winged sphinx bumble bee moth (Hemaris sp.) laying individual eggs on the underside of honeysuckle leaves. I took the leaves home, raised the larvae and described in detail the life history of this insect at the same time as I went out and collected larvae of other species. At the end of the semester I had several self raised pupae of a Prometheus sp silk moth that emerged as adults. A recently emerged female hung on the string of a curtain in my dorm room and at 4pm males started arriving attracted by her pheromones and one of males copulated with her for about 12 hours (my texan girlfriend was impressed probably because at that age I was good for about 12 seconds!) I ended researching pheromones and learned that the female of many moth species release pheromones on very specific times of day and night for a variety of reasons, for example to not interfere and cross over with other closely related species that can confuse the males. Another reason is that large silk moths are preyed upon by bats at night and the females of certain species evolved to release pheromones precisely in the pre dawn hours after the bats have returned to their roosts thus avoiding predation of the male on his nuptial flight.

The whole point of that independent study again was to do a season of field work without a predetermined experiment in mind that would then influence the observations in the field. Letting nature take the initiative. (This was the baseline approach by the way our human ancestors used when migrating to new habitats and finding new food sources).

This is a model one could take through ones life just as it could be a model for a society to follow in its relationship with the natural world.

To the point of this thread science has followed a couple of hundred years of trying to harness and control and conquer the natural world. When this becomes a society's modus operandi than everything becomes about control and the other half of the relationship, where nature takes the lead, is unexpressed. This one way flow of control unaltered for a couple of hundred years can lead you to the imbalances we find ourselves in today.

Ultimately, nature ignored for too long rises from oblivion to obliterate.

This is the obvious result of attempting the hubris of control while never listening or tuning into what the natural world is telling you. Those inconvenient externalities. We have a situation today where our biosphere is literally blowing a trumpet into our collective ears and we remain deaf. If it wasn't such a tragedy it would be a comedy of sorts. The hubris has taken on an almost caricature like quality.

For the remainder of this century the attempts of the dominant paradigm of scientific thought, that to control nature, will come up against increasingly challenging feedbacks from the biosphere. We will observe humans attempt to engineer ways out of these feedbacks in an exercise in futility that will awe future historians. At some point in this century capitulation will happen as a result of these failures and a new religious spiritual sensitivity will be born that JMG has been writing essays about on his weekly Archdruid reports. That paradigm shift in our relationship with the natural world is not ideological wishful thinking. It is inevitable.

The thread I started awhile back in reference to Worshipping the Overshoot Predator is actually about this new orientation and religious sensitivity about our relationship to the natural world.

Kudzu Ape's relationship with our planet is entering the twilight of overshoot and the twilight of the dominant paradigm of scientific thought of controlling and conquering nature. If you want to see the forest for the trees keep a keen eye on the events that will increasingly challenge this futile paradigm and thus align yourself as an early pioneer to this emerging religious sensitivity in relationship to our natural world.

[Newfie]

Humm.

There was a time when humanity was clearly at odds with nature. There was a battle going on. The battle was on our minds.

That battle was an upfront and personal affair. Farmer, fisherman, sailor, etc. all had daily contact with, and were at the mercy of the weather and the Earth.

That has changed significantly over the last hundred years or so, so that now we are largely isolated from the weather and from Earth. According to the EPA we spend something like 90% of our time indoors, sheltered from the weather. If you live in a city there is a very good chance you have not see an sunrise or sunset in years, if ever. How many Americans have seen an unobstructed horizon, clear of man made monuments?

At this point in time I don't think we are so much at War with Nature as we are totally oblivious to Nature. By and large, we just don't experience Nature, on her own terms, anymore. As a culture we have forgotten we live in a Natural world.

This is a grievous mistake, for which we will pay dearly.

[ROCKMAN]

Step back – Cute dog pic…thanks. Made me think of my two. Folks might disagree but I always share a morsel of what I’m eating when they are present. They have a healthy diet but I do it to respect the Law of the Pack. Pack members share…period. It’s their nature and I see no reason to violate the LOTP. LOL.

And that reminds me of a philosophical question I read years ago. It’s been known for a wolf to chew its foot off to escape from a trapper’s snare. The question: is the wolf being brave or is it cowardice? The answer is neither: it’s simply following its nature. But man can’t use such excuses. Trapped he can chose to free himself even if in doing so damages himself or he can chose to stay in the trap in hopes of destroying the hunter when he returns and thus saving others of his kind.

The point is the same today with man’s approach to the natural world: we can make choices that benefit the rest of our pack even if we diminish ourselves in the process or we can maximize our personal wellbeing and be less concerned about the fate of the rest of the pack. Despite so much hopeful rhetoric out there I think we have enough facts before us to provide an answer. Through science we discover that nature offers lots of examples of the LOTP. Man simple choses to right his own law. It’s that dang free will thingy again. LOL.

[Ibon]

Despite so much hopeful rhetoric out there I think we have enough facts before us to provide an answer. Through science we discover that nature offers lots of examples of the LOTP. Man simple choses to right his own law. It’s that dang free will thingy again. LOL.

Rhetoric has no incisors when confronting the control and conquer paradigm.

[Ibon]

This is a grievous mistake, for which we will pay dearly.

There is a graph somewhere that I tried to find that shows the percentage of human population that shifted away from agrarian, forestry and rural environments over to urban and suburban environments during the past 100 years. We have like 80% of humanity in these indoor artificial environments today. As you say this only takes humans into a more abstract and distant relationship with the natural world.

Parallel to this we continue to drive technology in virtual cyber directions and further marginalize the average human through advances in automation aggravated by a global financial system that puts efficiency before humanity and we thus have a situation today that makes Godfrey Reggio's film Koyaanisqatsi seem down right quaint after almost 25 years since its release.

In the greater picture of seeing the forest for the trees the further extension of moving modern humans into the outer realms of the abstract is actually building up the kinetic energy that will make humans ripe for a punctuated leap towards a new ethos and mythology once the current paradigm implodes.... I am referring to those modern humans that make it through the bottle neck. The rest will be dead.

[dohboi]

Me too. But 12 seconds! C'mon man, show some self control!!
...

Baha wrote: "

Unfortunately our present society thinks we can use that knowledge to control nature.

It's not just 'present society.' Francis Bacon, often called the father of the experimental method and the scientific method, often talked about the value of science to control nature, and iirc said something about putting nature on the rack so he could torture the truth out of her.

[Newfie]

"Progress" or " Growth?" They are similar with subtle differences.

I've actually had discussions with our Leader ( pastor) about this suggesting that Growth/Consumerism is the religion of this age and preaching simplicity would be akin to atheism. He didn't get the point.