Conservationists are actually doing harm by trying to convert the lay mind to the view that human artifactual reality is part of nature.... We must make ourselves indegenes, natives returning to a lost landscape still somewhere in our hearts and minds, the Paleolithic ideal, a country of abundant wildlife, rich in fruitful native vegetation, pure water, and fresh air. Otherwise we will remain what we have been for ten thousands of years: a sort of perpetual exotic, never ceasing to invade, disrupt, and degrade the pre-existing natural landscapes.
- Raymond Chipeniuk
'Coming Home to the Pleistoscene,' p. 168
Our human ecology is that of a rare species of mammal in a social, omnivorous niche. Our demography is one of a slow-breeding, large, intelligent primate. To shatter our population structure, to become abundant in the way of rodents, not only destroys our ecological relations with the rest of nature, it sets the stage for our mass insanity.
- Paul Shepard
'Coming Home to the Pleistocene,' p. 169
I can understand the allure of the Pleistocene: clean air, crystal clear creek water, fresh veggies & herbs harvested by your own hands & eaten still smelling of richly tilled soil. That was one aspect of part of my childhood growing up in the backwoods.
ReplyDeleteHowever, the Summer People who spoke enviously about "the simple life" didn't stick around to find out about the grinding poverty of February in the backwoods: sleeping on mattresses on the open seacliffs to get up at 4 a.m. to pry mussels off the rocks just have food to eat because the yard veggies were just a Summer memory & the unemployment had run out & the gypo sawmills weren't hiring yet. Of being sick or injured & having no money to pay for medicine or a doctor.
I'd love the Pleistocene as long as it includes my synthroid & timely surgery for cancer & grocery stores so I can be sure of having food on hand every day all the year around. But therein lies the rub (ummm, The Bard, right?)
--Kay