Quo vadis?
Solipsism
Egocentrism
Ethnocentrism
Anthropocentrism
?

"Now I admit that nature can't improve upon man.
We're probably the supreme being."

So said Floyd Dominy, commisioner of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation from 1959 to 1969.  He was one of the most prolific builders of dams in human history.

The dams and their reservoirs provide many people with many necessities and pleasures.  But they also can damage or destroy much that was missed by the perceptions of the dam builder. 

The man who "admits" that nature can't improve upon man could not possibly be "seeing" that nature has already improved upon man in the evolution of the polarization perception of the bee, and in the electric field perception of the shark, and in the six-factor color perception of the bird.   Man was ignorant of such things for thousands of millennia—until he found ways to see well beyond the edges of easy human comprehension.   To "see" six-factor color man must use reasoning tools far past those edges.   That reasoning opens up vistas of dimensionality, not simply beyond the three dimensions of human color vision, but also into the far-reaching notion of concepts that extend out from the pinched vision of the scalar-limited viewpoint.  It looks into the tensor-like spaces that are, in fact, parts of the real world we are immersed in.  Obvious...yet unobserved.

The science of the past three centuries has been a glimpse of what lies beyond the pinched perceptions of primitive man.

 
"...It was just a nice place...   I'd have to be honest with you.  I'd been happier if we didn't have the lake.  Glen Canyon was a beautiful piece of water..."
[If you had to vote today, would you vote...]
"I'd vote against it.  I've become convinced that while water is important—particularly to those of us who live in the desert—it's not all that important."
Barry Goldwater,
inCadallac Desert, PBS-TV
 
"Draining Lake Powell may or may not be in our best interests or even in the best interests of our grandchildren. But we should have the integrity and sensibility to reexamine decisions that we have made in the past ...  We owe it to ourselves, future generations , and the lands of the Colorado River to finally evaluate the costs and benefits objectively."
Scott Miller, atty
in Stanford Environmental Law Journal
January 2000, pp 120-207
 

 

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