Bryant Gumbel, in last week's edition of his HBO show Real Sports, ended with a great shifting baselines editorial which would probably irk a lot of people who hate American pop culture. After talking about all the silly trivia that will fill the airwaves over the next two weeks addressing non-football topics (like which quarterback is cuter, Eli or Tom, or which coach is nicer) he finished by saying:
It is life in the modern age in a pop culture world, and is why Super Bowl Sunday's have been only partly about football, and mostly about American excess. Some may bemoan that fact and argue that its not like it used to be, but let's face it, neither are we.
I think that is SUCH a wonderful statement. For me personally, I am not entirely certain that losing lots of species and ending up with dull, colorless versions of nature is necessarily a bad thing. So long as we're aware of it happening and have made conscious choices to go in that direction. Pretty much nobody wants the gargantuan herds of buffalo and sky-blackening flocks of passenger pigeons (can you imagine the bird crap downpours they must have unleashed!) to return. That's a change we can handle.
But what is distressing is the idea of change occurring that was never perceived or wanted (and personally, no, I don't want a colorless world even if it is healthy). As Gumbel says, we are not the same people as 100 years ago, or even 10 years ago. Change is constant, and there's nothing inherently wrong in it. But I do think that failing to notice it is a dangerous thing.
Super Bowl: It's the breast time of the year!
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this post are not necessarily in line with the views held by the primary author of this blog.
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Count me among the "pretty much nobody", then. As for "change[s] we can handle"... wow. The life of our culture ("our" applying here to anyone on the continent of buffalo and passenger pigeons) has been one of expanding into what appeared to be limitless resources. Buffalo from horizon to horizon, so what's the harm in harvesting them? Pigeons so thick you don't have to aim. A country so vast, with so many resources, that expansion and excess will always be good. Home of the Whopper, the McMansion, the Colt .45, the 100-inch TV screen, muscle cars and Viagra. Bigger is better, more is better, and a return to stepping in pigeon crap is regression to a primitive past better suited for... I don't know, maybe Europeans. If God had not given us Texas, we would have been forced to invent it.
I was once stuck (in my car, thankfully) in the middle of a huge herd of bison. It was frightening, exhilarating, humbling, and beautiful all at once. The odds, in our day, of me (or anyone) being able to experience this are vanishingly small; the odds of our witnessing the passenger pigeon equivalent have vanished. Maybe you can live with those changes, especially if we have made them consciously... but somebody else made those decisions for me. And other people continue to make those decisions. And the people in charge of making those decisions are rarely those who are most aware of the ramifications of those decisions (remember James Watt?)--we do not base our use of nature on a scientific consensus. "Failing to notice it" is practically built into the structure of our culture.
And that includes human nature. In ignorance of a wider view of human history, we claim, based on a few centuries of unrestrained expansion, that people are of a particular nature, and that any attempt to rein in our use of resources will be in vain. We seek, instead, technological fixes which may or may not come, and which are too often focused on the short term. Human nature is, if anything, plastic; that is, flexible, malleable, changeable. Randy's post here speaks of "100, or even 10 years ago"; although I agree with the point, he ironically illustrates precisely the problem. A century of change, immense as it is, is a blink. We are basing our view of human nature on a baseline that is a tiny fraction of our history, and a drastically changing fraction.
The vast, expansive West that we saw as ours by God's grace, from which we harvested and nearly exhausted animal, vegetable, and mineral, is full of warnings of what happens if we assume that we can sustain a particular level of consumption. We call them ghost towns.
Ten years is not nearly long enough a baseline. But neither is a century. We can say that we can live with these changes... can our children? and theirs, and theirs?
Yeah, I'd take the crap downpour (fantastic in the garden) and that nuisance of entire limbs of the giant chestnut trees in my yard to crash to the ground under the weight of thousands of passenger pigeons.
Another phenomenon I just read about (I'm obsessed with the way the marine world would look 'without us' admittedly - Farley Mowat's "Sea of Slaughter" is as blissful as it is horrifying) I'd love to see return is thousands of giant Atlantic Halibut (up to 600 pounders) surface feeding (!) on schools of sand lance in deep water...
Bad Randy!!! Bad, bad, bad Randy!! Get with the orthodoxy and bemoan species loss or be forever excommunicated from the labile left.
I'm with you on one thing at least, we can't have our pristine world and use it too.
Most folks I know who take a systems view of ecology reach the conclusion that species diversity has value, especially when it comes to making our planetary life support system fault-tolerant. As an engineer, I find value in fault-tolerant systems. Thus I find value in species diversity and species preservation.
An attitude that condones loss does seem to work well as a distancing rationalization. Like others have commented, I haven't seen such rationalizations prevent erosion of our quality of life.