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Ecological economics, a new subdiscipline, has been formed to put a green thumb
New indicators of progress are needed to monitor the economy, wherein the natural world and human well-being, not just economic production, are awarded full measure.
Biological diversity, or biodiversity for short—the full sweep from ecosystems to species within the ecosystems, thence to genes within the species—is in trouble. Mass extinctions are commonplace, especially in tropical regions where most of the biodiversity occurs.
But the introduction of aggressive exotic species and the diseases they carry come close behind in destructiveness, followed in turn by the overharvesting of native species.
Murder on the Orient Express
might appropriately be called the “Eremozoic Era,” the Age of Loneliness.
years, evolution required about 10 million years to restore the predisaster levels of diversity.
Why do we need so many species anyway?
The more species that live in an ecosystem, the higher its productivity and the greater its ability to withstand drought and other kinds of environmental stress.
wild species are the source of products that help sustain our lives.
There is a critical need to press the search for new antibiotics and antimalarial agents.
Why rush to save all the species right now? Why not keep live specimens in zoos and botanical gardens and return them to the wild later?
The order of difficulty, as I described it in Chapter 5, is comparable to that of creating a living cell from molecules, or an organism from living cells.
They cannot even imagine how to do
they could not then put the community back together again.
“assembly rules,”
realm of theory.
web of cause and effect.
Homo sapiens, like the rest of life, was self-assembled.
by processes too complex for reductionistic analysis.
We are entering a new era of existentialism, not the old absurdist existentialism of Kierkegaard and Sartre,
Human social existence, unlike animal sociality, is based on the genetic propensity to form long-term contracts that evolve by culture into moral precepts and law.
We are adults who have discovered which covenants are necessary for survival, and we have accepted the necessity of securing them by sacred oath.
The search for consilience might seem at first to imprison creativity.
Historians of science often observe that asking the right question is more important than producing the right answer.
Excerpt from “Is Humanity Suicidal?”
The Art of Tracking: The Origin of Science
