Lindsey: What did you guys think was the thesis of her book?
Danny: I don’t know.
Helen: I think basically the most important thing she was saying was that science is a great thing to have and it is a good thing to know about and if you use it properly it is a great thing. But the quotes in the beginning are all about how the human race is taking advantage of science and how we are using it to ruin the environment when we could use it to help the environment. And eventually humans are just going to basically ruin the earth, and I think that her main point was our responsibility to the Earth and to us to use science carefully and not use the technology to harm Mother Nature.
L: I definitely agree with that.
D: Yeah it’s like about the advance of human self-interest rather than the betterment of the environment. We have these resources that could be beneficial to a lot of things. We have the ability to create resources that could be beneficial, but instead we are making pesticides and what ever we want.
H: One of the points in the beginning says “Our approach to nature is to beat it into submission. We would withstand a better chance of survival if we accommodated ourselves to this planet and treat it appreciative instead of skeptically and dictatorially.”
L: Yeah I though that quote was really good.
H: I thought that was important just because we are harming Mother Nature and we are not living in it we are just taking it over.
L: I thought it was also very interesting how she was not only a scientist but she was struggling because she was a woman, which I noticed is a theme somewhat in our readings, minus Prothero. I actually personally found the introduction more interesting than her actual chapters because it was a summary of everything. However, what I don’t understand is she keeps on writing these books about the Sea and then all of a sudden it is pesticides.
H: Well, one thing I thought was people said they were taking her seriously but she didn’t have a Ph.D. If I read a book by someone who was saying all this stuff and didn’t have a Ph.D. in biology or something like that or wasn’t in medicine I would be a little skeptical I think. I mean obviously they took her information and proved her correct…
D: Yeah.
H: …But I would be originally skeptical of it was somebody who wasn’t as qualified, who just randomly knew all this stuff.
L: They kept on saying her voice was a “trusted voice in a world riddled by uncertainty.”
H: But I don’t understand why?
D: It could be by the fact she was a woman but it could also be similar to like what we were talking about in class how the further you go up in educational learning from undergrad to graduate school to masters to Ph.D., you get narrower and narrower into what you know about a subject. So this woman doesn’t have a Ph.D. one could argue that she has maybe a less biased or less riddled by agenda kind of approach to this topic because she doesn’t have a doctorate in what she is trying to say.
L: Yeah. I thought it was also interesting how she said, “Intoxicated by ………himself and his world.” And it just got me thinking what are the other things that science is creating that could be potentially destructive in the long end. This was 50 years ago so what was destructive then is no longer really destructive now, but what is destructive in our society?
H: Well I think we have taken a lot of measure to like prevent a lot of the stuff she is talking about I mean obviously not to a full extent seeing as we have global warming and…
D: But we have also taken a hundred things in the opposite direction too.
H: So it is like one step forward, two steps back.
L: Well if think the big thing that is going to come next is genetically engineering.
D: Yeah.
H: That freaks me out
D: Who knows how that is going to affect the environment or nature or biology or whatever? But when we start engineering creatures and releasing them into the wild we will have no idea how that’s going to affect nature.
H: That’s true. It like when they come over from other…
D: Continents…
H: Yeah. Stuff like that and then. There is like a movie about it , but I forget what the name of it is, when is cents or other types of plants and stuff are brought over from other countries and they start imbedding themselves in our environment it does things to our natural order and set up
D: The Eucalyptus tree was brought over to California because they wanted to make houses and stuff. It grew really fast and it grew really big and so in five years they could cut down all these Eucalyptus trees and theoretically make houses from them. But what they didn’t know is that once the Eucalyptus tree is cut down the wood degrades and deteriorates. You can’t make houses with it, not to mention while it is alive it destroy all the other plants. It grows taller than all the other trees so they don’t get sunlight and they die. That happened 150 years ago when California was still being settled and processed and developed. The same thing could theoretically be true with any genetically engineered organism we make.
L: I though it was interesting how she talked about it in terms of insects, and how the insects grow in populations where there is more of a single plant. That is how all the farming is done these days; it focuses on one plant, one specialty focusing in on that.
H: And all of our food is genetically engineered, like the apples you buy in the grocery store.
D: Well you can buy organic. The watermelons in Japan are square. They have engineered their watermelons to be cubes for better and easier transportation.
H: Well that makes sense.
D: No. You don’t want to eat those watermelons.
H: I could see the logic.
D: That’s what everyone thinks, when we start talking about genetic modification. It makes sense logically but the human problem is that we think to small. We know what we need now, but we don’t know how it will affect us in 10, 20 , 30 years.
L: It also talks about how we keep erasing nature’s check and balances. What do you guys think are the checks and balances of nature? She talks about how the limit of the amount of sustainable habitat for each species, which is interesting. However, I could think of any checks and balances.
H: I have no idea how you would regulate something like that.
D: I guess she is talking about the food chain and the complicated for web of an ecosystem.
L: I know in my neighborhood in Connecticut we have a huge problem with deer overpopulation. We had a mountain lion in Greenwich, Ct and came all the way from the Rocky Mountains. Some one killed it and they were able to trace it back to the Rocky Mountains.
D: There was the whole awareness raising of the honeybee because they were getting this sickly illness. Scientists were saying that is the honeybee dies then plants will die because they wont be pollinated. Therefore, animals who eat plants will die, and so on leading to our death. Same thing is true in the Artic where the polar bears are going instinct. In Antarctica, the penguins are being exposed to the ice meltage and therefore their migration for food is changing. There breeding process is changing and it is getting warmer. Some animals as a result will go extinct.
L: I though her primary focus was the DDT and the pesticides but she talked about so much more regarding how we treat and respect our environment as a whole. What do you guys think we should do today to help change the way people view the environment? Especially not in an urban area like this.
H: Honestly though it has to start with the government. I don’t think it is the type of thing that people are just going to start doing. It is something that needs to be implemented through the government. I am sure there are people and groups rallying for different laws. I think that is really the only way to get people to change. I mean people are not just going to stop driving their cars one day. People aren’t going to change drastically, especially not in schools. I don’t think we are going to change, but we will move forward with caution.
D: As important as the issue of education is for people to inform them about how their actions affect the environment, it still has to start with the government. It has to start with alternative energy research so we don’t destroy the environment. It has to start with funding for greener technology and these things are in the works. But there isn’t enough general excitement about it to make it happen.
H: I think the issue is people don’t see it really because we do not know what the earth is going to look like in 50 years.
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