Re:2,000-year-old redwoods survive wildfire at California's ...
by Stupulous on Tuesday August 25, 2020 @06:38PM
(#24277093)
It is my view that our flavor of mastery over nature is a deterministic consequence of the advantage that it gives. I think that is unlikely that European society just decided to make that a value because they liked doing it, or had less knowledge than indigenous peoples.
To clarify, I don't think this is a good process, but I think it is an inevitable one. If there had been no colonialism, societies in the Americas would have reached their own equillibrium, and competition would have driven them to 'progress' as we know it. There would have been much less death, but civilisation would run its course all the same.
And additional clarification because I phrased my position on the current situation poorly: I think we can still save things. I just think there is no way for us to have skirted the initial destruction, and we would eventually have reached this point regardless.
I will challenge your conclusion though, at least in a qualified manner. We do preserve things that we understand better before the option to exploit them arises. But. We do tend to understand things by taking them apart like children. And like children, we often lack the sophistication to put them back together again for a long time. But the clocks, radios and wind-up cars we disassembled as children were inanimate objects. Vivisecting living things/systems has a little bit different moral gravity.
But we are where we are. The best we can do is say "we fucked up, how do we fix it?" and start trying to listen, even if much of that listening now has to be through historical anthropologists.