Hi, Matt,
I'm not sure how to interpret this line from your post:
But it's naive to project our values, preferences and capabilities (maybe
even our anatomies and physiologies)
into an unknowable future and seek to impose them on our successors.
Are you saying that because we can't know what people of the future will
want, we shouldn't be concerned about what we will leave them?
Martin M. Meiss
2012/7/29 Matt Chew <[email protected]>
> One of the ways people become prominent in a profession is by listening to
> what others are saying, then saying it louder, in more auspicious
> settings. Leaders in that sense aren't likely to make waves, but they're
> very good at riding them. Reflecting the common wisdom is the source of
> their popularity, power and authority. Some folks toe the lines pretty
> carefully until they feel immune to criticism for one reason or another,
> then have their say. More than one of my co-authors on "Don't Judge
> Species on their Origins" last year in Nature fits that category. Joan
> Ehrenfeld knew our paper would be her final word on ecology. But you can't
> count on anyone being willing and able to make any particular case in their
> swansong. Then there are people like me who find themselves in the midst
> of naked emperors, but have no ambition to take their places. To take a
> literary/cinematic tangent, we are the ones more eager to smelt rings of
> power than wear them, more concerned with breaking elder wands than
> wielding them. So I'm not the kind of person you were hoping for in this
> case, but I'll say this anyway: life on earth has never been about
> sustainability. It's always been about individuals of the current
> generation--of the moment, in fact--surviving under prevailing conditions.
> Every generation (of every population) is born into a different world.
> Sometimes slightly different, sometimes profoundly different, sometimes
> favorably different, sometimes fatally so. Domesticating that uncertainty
> and aspiring to negotiate a fair deal with the ghosts of generations yet to
> come seems appealing at first glance. But it's naive to project our values,
> preferences and capabilities (maybe even our anatomies and physiologies)
> into an unknowable future and seek to impose them on our successors.
> Consider how much trouble we have wrapping the US Constitution around
> today's issues only nine or ten generations down the pike. Most of us are
> so decoupled from even the previous two or three generations to have much
> more than the most general idea what futures they were hoping for on our
> behalf. It isn't clear what ought to be sustained. It's even less clear
> what CAN be sustained. It's never too late to act, because it's always too
> early to decide.
>
> Matthew K Chew
> Arizona State University School of Life Sciences
>
> ASU Center for Biology & Society
> PO Box 873301
> Tempe, AZ 85287-3301 USA
> Tel 480.965.8422
> Fax 480.965.8330
> [email protected] or [email protected]
> http://cbs.asu.edu/people/profiles/chew.php
> http://asu.academia.edu/MattChew
>
