Gregg Easterbrooks Thesis Essay, Research Paper

Destroy the Forest

Gregg Easterbrook’s Thesis – Nature itself is much older and wiser than the human race. It knows how to adapt to its surrounding and how to mend all its wounds. Man is just another pretext for nature to evolve further and learn new tricks of survival and it “may be on the verge of reasserting itself.” (Easterbrook 650) “Nature is not ending, nor is human damage to the environment unprecedented. Nature has repelled forces of a magnitude many times greater than the worst human malfeasance.”

- “There has never been and can never be any fixed, correct environmental reality. There are only moments on the Earth. Moments that may be good or bad.”

- “All environmental errors are reversible save one: extinction.”

- “If nature’s adjustment to the human presence began thousands of years ago, perhaps it will soon be complete.

? E.O. Wilson argues that we don’t use the sun’s energy to its greatest potential. This only hurts human’s and actually helps nature because less humans are getting fed and therefore the population is decreasing. Although we eat less vegetables species are not declining because we raise them in mass quantities to be eaten. “Even with most societies confined today to a mostly vegetarian diet, humanity is gobbling up a large part of the rest of the living world.” “The awful truth remains that a large part of humanity will suffer no matter what is done”. (27) CO2 is rising, ozone depletion, we are destroying our selves. Nature can repair itself; we can not.

? Even a disaster so great as Chernobyl has left nothing more than a easily fixable dent in the environment. Although scientist may have predicted a tremendous fall out “animals have generally adapted, and humans have refused to succumb to a disaster that has irrevocably changed their lives.” (Audubon 67)

? Vonnegut argues in “A fate Worse Than Death” that the since the earth is “a sinking Noah’s Ark (with half the animals dead already)” (110) we need to stop our destructive behavior and start conserving for the sake of the survival of humans as well as life on earth in general. This theory is however false. Human kind’s nature may be destructive, but as we harm the earth the earth conforms to out ways and mends itself. Vennegut goes on to argue that “the most parlyzin news is that Nature is no conservationist. It needs no help from us in taking the planet apart and putting it back together some different way.” (111) Here Vonnegut contridicts himself. He is admitting that the earth, with or with out us will adapt to changing surroundings with our destroying its self. Considering this fact, humans play no significant role in the fate of nature. We are simply one obstacle in the its path to unreachable perfection.

? Scientific analysis is absolutely unreliable. Scientist can no better tell the future than a Gene Machine at an arcade can. “In the West many forms of pollution’s have begun to decline in the very period that environmental doctrine has declared them growing worse.” (Easterbrook 648) For example Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Explosion used scientific data to prophesize that mass starvation would break out in the US by 1980. “Weapons aside, technology is not growing more dangerous and wasteful. It grows cleaner and more resource-efficient.”

? Enviromentalists are overestimating the damage that human’s are actually doing to the earth. They take fudged data from unreal models and report their findings through forms of mass media resulting in a wide spread panic over an unrevearsable dooms day. Senator Frank lautenberg of New Jersey was out raged at an article proclaiming evidence of cleaner air in American cities. “Senator Lautenberg did not challenge any of the factual material in the article. He appeared upset simply that positive environmental information was being reported.” “Most recoveries from pollution will happen faster than even optimists project.”