Stop continental drift
Is it a cynical gesture to glue a ‘Stop Continental Drift’ bumper sticker on your gasoline addicted car? Absolutely. Yet indirectly it also criticizes the romantic environmentalist longing to perceive nature as static: something that must not change – although environmentalist typically perceive themselves as progressives, such a static concept of nature is undoubtedly a conservative longing.
Perhaps the bumper sticker learns us that, rather than merely trying to stop all changes that are taking place, we should spend more time on developing a more flexible attitude towards the changes in our environment. After all, continents drift, climates alter and change happens.
Via Stardove. Related post: Doggerland – Mapping a lost world, Country looking for new land, If the implications of Global Warming were fair, Diesels global warming ready campaign, Humans to blame for global warming.
What is a romantic environmentalists? Is this a Victorian notion and does it even apply today? Doesn’t it make sense that preserving green nature also means that we allow it to continue as it will?
Roads through the wilderness divide the land, in essence sectioning off areas from one another and disrupting the flow of complex organic systems ( erosion, life cycles, and weather, etc). Championing nature, imo, means letting nature do as it has for millions of years. Green nature is as big a process as humankind’s experiment, are we to dense a species to respect to our roots? I worry Next Nature is more of an excuse for human culture than a synergy of both.
@chris:
we are indeed letting nature do as it has for millions of years. humans and their technology were created by nature and are thus a part of it.
this paradigm that nature and mankind are separate entities is as arrogant and absurd as the assumption that the earth is the center of the universe or that we were created by god in seven days.
nature will adapt to the effects of our fledgling species. there have been mere bacteria in the past that have had a much higher impact on our atmosphere and environment. and if a road dividing the wilderness is such an ill effect, then what is a river?
trees drop their leaves, wasps build their paper nests and men mold plastic shopping bags out of the petrol remains of ancient plants. it IS nature.
@ systmh
Well said.