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May 4, 2008 4:30:51 PM
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Survival.
Food is made of animals & plants that eat each other, that need other organisms, that in turn need other organisms, in a complex web that we depend upon just to eat. The air and water we depend upon benefit from ecosystem services provided by all other life. Intelligence is in this design, and death is in countering the design. The bees that pollinate 'our' crops show us our direct dependence; we need so many other species in indirect ways. Like all food, air, and water, we are of this system, and what we do to it we do to ourselves, though it may be our innocent grandkids who reap what we sow.
"The first rule of intelligent tinkering: keep all the parts." - Aldo Leopold
Fisheries - A few species have collapsed because we exploited them as economic resources rather than as biological life forms with inherent value. Many more species of food fish are now under international management, limiting catches to avoid their collapse. Pirate fishing undercuts even these emergency limits. Farm species, both meat and grain, are kept from following the same pattern by intensive inputs derived & delivered from increasingly expensive oil. Farms surrounded by wilderness need fewer artificial inputs because of biological inputs from nearby wild species, but how many farms still have this support from life forms? If our "superior" choice is to remove wild species, that removes support from farms. Beyond the concerns with our food, we have less tangible needs to connect against loneliness toward membership in a whole, toward coherent meaning. The myth of our separateness threatens our survival.
by zotlynn
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