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NATURAL_PROBLEM

                                             April   7, 2013
                                             October 8, 2013

    Charles C. Mann's book "1491":

    As the title should make clear (1492
    minus 1), this book is a history (or
    pre-history) of the Americas back
    before the Europeans showed up.

    One of Mann's themes is that the
    land the Europeans encountered was very
    much a land of their own creation,
    without them being aware of the fact.

    The myth of the unspoiled wilderness of
    the Americas was a creation of a land
    devastated by imported diseases, the
    noble savages living in a state of nature
    were reduced to that state by the
    depredations of earlier "explorers".


    One of the things Mann touches on is
    the "enironmentalist" syndrome of
    seeking the preservation of the
    natural state, i.e the world
    untouched by human hand.

    When you look really closely it turns
    out that "the natural state" is really
    all agriculture: what we took to be
    "the natural world" is a lot of
    escaped, cultivated species.

    The thundering herds of bison,
    the legendary flocks of passenger
    pigeons, these are break-out
    species invading the human niche,
    once Indians were wiped out by
    diseases imported from Europe.



            But without "preservation" as our
            ideal, what do we steer by?  There's
            no question that the bad old days of
            unrestricted industry were really bad.
                                                       EMPIRICAL_MORALITY
            Mann points toward a notion of an
            environmentalism involved with
            creating environments.


                  Similarly:

                  Stewart Brand objects to the Romanticism
                  of the environmental movement, prefering
                  instead to treat environmental problems
                  as engineering problems.

                                         WHOLE_EARTH_DISCIPLINE


                        Snyder vs Dyson:

                              STEADY


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