Quote:
Originally Posted by troymc
It depends on your relationship to the other species. I would not expect you to be directly affected by the suffering of some animal if it was somehow isolated from you. But I do think that your life would be affected if your neighbour beat his horses every day and you had to constantly hear their cries. Or if your local plant life was suffering from a disease and there was no green in your world. Or a disease was ravaging the local small animal population and going outside meant hearing their cries, stepping over their bodies, smelling their corpses. How would those change your quality of life and therefore impact you and those around you?
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That's interesting examples and some that affect the individual rather than the species. I was thinking of things that would affect directly, physically, and more at species level, but these are all fundamentally sentimental reasons, and would only affect you if you'd learned to empathise with animals or appreciate green - which most of us living in the western, modern culture has learned, but I'd say it's a purely cultural thing, which may change again.
Quote:
Originally Posted by troymc
To some killing a 5000 year old tree may be insignificant: Prometheus
But, it still makes me sick when I think about it. Killed the year before I was born - and for nothing. But has influenced me ever since I learned about it. |
While I read the article, I was struck by the thought that the tree only got its "meaning" or significance, i.e. that it was so very old, exactly
beacuse it was felled, or killed. If it hadn't been, it would have been another old tree with no special significance and you wouldn't feel for it as you do.
I guess I have grown more cynical as I get older. I think that the earth will survive with or without humans, just as it has survived so many other changes.
I think I can sympathise with the feeling of loss of 5000 year old tree - but in the big picture I don't think it's worth worrying about. 5000 years is a long time for a human, but a blink in the eye for the earth, and even less for the universe. We are bound by human-sized thinking.