George Monbiot (Guardian Utd): Natural aesthetes

[Jack Rabbit]

From the Guardian Unlimited (UK)
Dated Tuesday January 13

Natural aesthetes
Forget about usefulness, beauty alone is reason enough to justify conservation
By George Monbiot

The world, if the biologists' projections turn out to be correct, will soon begin to revert to the Bible's fourth day of creation. There will be grass and "herb-yielding seed" and "the fruit tree yielding fruit". But "the moving creature that hath life", the "fowl that may fly above the Earth", or the "great whales, and every living creature that moveth" may one day be almost unknown to us.
Last week, the journal Nature published a report suggesting that, by 2050, around a quarter of the world's animal and plant species could die out as a result of global warming. To these we must add the millions threatened by farming, logging, hunting, fishing and introduced species. The future is beginning to look a little lonely.
Does it matter? To most of those who govern us, plainly not. To most of the rest of us, the answer seems to be yes, but we are not quite sure why. We have little difficulty in recognising the importance of other environmental issues. Climate change causes droughts and floods, ozone depletion gives us skin cancer, diesel pollution damages our lungs. But, while most people feel that purging the world of its diversity of animals and plants is somehow wrong, the feeling precedes a rational explanation. For the past 30 years, the conservation movement has been trying to provide one. Its efforts have, for the most part, failed.
The problem conservationists face is this: that by comparison to almost all other global issues, our concerns about biodiversity seem effete and self-indulgent. If we are presented with a choice between growing food to avert starvation and protecting an obscure forest frog, the frog loses every time. If climate change is going to make life impossible for hundreds of millions of human beings, who cares about what it might do to Boyd's forest dragon?

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[OneBlueSky]

1. great article . . .

and so, so true . . . the beauty and miracle that is our natural world is all the justification needed to preserve it . . . even at the cost of it's utlitarian value . . .

[PATRICK]

2. You just illustrated

part of the problem. Many people fighting for the environment(some in their odd way are Republicans) are doing it precisely for emotional aesthetics. the biggest disaster was when the ecological "movement" became a beautification then New Age awareness project. That is is just improving the orchestra music at Auschwitz.

The understatement and rigor of the careful scientific geniuses is the other side of absurdity. To know and become almost institutionally powerless to help .Knocking at least those two heads together might be the jolt that produces the more logical awareness:

Hey, we are all going to kill ourselves off. This is about survival of the human race, the biosphere and rationality added to higher human faculties such as foresight. We are all in a sense as feckless as those building places of permanence on ocean beachfront.

We are going to die and die dumb, but the extraordinary science is low key to the point of being bullied around by greedy morons. The pleasant feelings and love of nature is weak tea indeed in face of the reality. Why shed tears or feel warm and fuzzy and confident in the self-healing Gaea we are murdering quite methodically? Do we want to die so pathetically and vaporously? The real starvations, plagues and poisonings and upheavals will dispel that mood very fast.

We should be damned alarmed and concerned. We should act responsibly to counter our destructive actions that most of us naively participate in just by living our daily lives. Recycling 90% of my glass bottles and pop cans isn't enough. Letting the scientists observe us drowning from their exile into the ivory tower is not advisable. Appointing mediocre moneychangers as guardians of all is plain stupid and lazy. The debt is rising with the ocean.