The shift that has happened in 40 years which mainly has to do with
climate change. Forty years ago, I could say in the Whole Earth
Catalog, "we are as gods, we might as well get good at it".
Photographs of earth from space had that god-like perspective.
What I'm saying now is we are as gods and have to get good at it.
Necessity comes from climate change, potentially disastrous for
civilization. The planet will be okay, life will be okay. We will
lose vast quantities of species, probably lose the rain forests if
the climate keeps heating up. So it's a global issue, a global
phenomenon. It doesn't happen in just one area. The planetary
perspective now is not just aesthetic. It's not just perspective.
It's actually a world-sized problem that will take world sized
solutions that involves forms of governance we don't have yet. It
involves technologies we are just glimpsing. It involves what
ecologists call ecosystem engineering. Beavers do it, earthworms do
it. They don't usually do it at a planetary scale. We have to do it
at a planetary scale. A lot of sentiments and aesthetics of the
environmental movement stand in the way of that.
<http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/brand09/brand09_index.html>Link
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Posted By johannes to
<http://www.monochrom.at/english/2009/08/we-are-as-gods-and-have-to-get-good-at.htm>monochrom
at 8/27/2009 03:23:00 PM
