From Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez:
page 33.
... Human beings dwell in the same biological systems that contain the other creatures, but, to put the thought bluntly, they are not governed by the same laws of evolution. With the development of various technologies-- hunting weapons, protective clothing, and fire-making tools; and then agriculture and herding---mankind has been able to move into regions that were formerly unavailable to him. The animals he found already occupying niches in these other areas he, again, either displaced or elminated. The other creatures have had no choice. They are confined to certain niches---places of food (stored solar energy), water, and shelter---which they cannot leave without either speciating or developing tools. To finish the thought, the same technological advances and the enormous increase in his food base have largely exempted man from the effect of natural controls on the size of his population. Outside of some virulent disease, another ice age, or his own weapons technology, the only thing that promises to stem the continued increase in his population and the expansion of his food base (which now includes oil, exotic minerals, ground water, huge tracts of forest, and so on, and entails the continuing, concomitant loss of species) is human wisdom.
... Because mankind can circumvent evolutionary law, it is incumbent upon him, say evolutionary biologists, to develop another law to abide by if he wishes to survive, to not outstrip his food base. He must learn restraint. He must derive some other, wiser way of behaving toward the land. He must be more attentive to the biological imperatives of the system of sun-driven protoplasm upon which he, too, is still dependent. Not because he must, or because he lacks inventiveness, but because herein is the accomplishment of the wisdom that for centuries he has aspired to. Having taken on his own destiny, he must now think with critical intelligence about where to defer.
... I wanted to enquire, as well, among thougthful visitors, people who were taken with the land. Each culture, it seemed to me, is a repository of some good thought about the universe; we are valuable to each other for that. Lying there, I thought of my own culture, of the assembly of books in the library at Alexandria; of the deliberations of Darwin and Mendel in their respective gardens; of the architectural conception of the cathedral at Chartres; of Bach's cello suites, the philosophy of Schweitzer, the insights of Planck and Dirac. Have we come all this way, I wondered, only to be dismantled by our own technologies, to be betrayed by a political connivance or the impersonal avarice of a corporation?
A more concise thought, put forth by Prof. Robin McIlveen in a meteorology text entitled Fundamentals of Weather and Climate
p. 68:
This brief survey shows how far the present atmosphere has evolved from its paleoatmospheric origins; how a variable greenhouse effect has maintained surface temperatures in the narrow range needed to allow the accelerating evolution of life, and how that evolving life has in turn built up the reservoir of free oxygen on which it now depends. Such obvious self-regulation has recently encouraged the view that the terrestrial biosphere should be regarded as a coherent superorganism, Gaia (Lovelock, The Ages of Gaia, Oxford University Press), whose intrinsic purpose is to regulate its environment to its own advantage. Whatever the merits of such a view, it is impossible not to be impressed by (and grateful for!) the continued cooperation of the Earth's biosphere and atmosphere. It would be a sad irony if the only part of the biosphere capable of being consciously aware of such cooperation should choose to ignore its obvious lessons.
Gary