You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
RE: The Changing Face of the Ocean Part 2: No More Fish
It is quite depressing the rate at which man rapes this planet. It was once observed that Atlantic cod population was so vast that a man could walk on their heads from England to thr New World without getting his feet wet. All the world's governments are likely aware of the depletion of Oceanic fisheries; Japan has accumulated enough frozen blue fin tuna in their "strategic reserve" to last them for 30-years, after the tuna becomes extinct. The so-called Chilean bass will be extinct in less than 10-years hence. Only if man can be convinced to eat locusts, rats, cockroaches, and bed-bugs, those will be extinct within a year without the needfor the extermination industry.
Can anyone here spell "standing reserve"? For all that I dislike Heidegger as a person, his ideas about civilization, technology, and their interaction with nature are still pretty spot on.
I prefer Campbell's formulation. Once man began shifting perception of his environment from "I-Thou" relationship to "I-It" relationship, man began to exploit nature as a resource. Man's inhumanity towards his fellow man can also be attributed to "I-It" formulation aganst those with whom man disagrees. Man has a spiritual disease, from which all of creation suffers.
Joseph Campbell? Yeah, I like that formulation a lot.
The disease is a particularly infectious one, too. I've been reading a lot about our society's interactions with Amazon tribesmen and other indigenous people lately, and it's a particularly depressing one.