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Daniel Botkin: The Myth of Constancy |
| Section: NATURAL SCIENCE / SCIENTISTS: PAST AND PRESENT |
| Author: Joseph M. Lubin |
| Publication: The world & I online |
| Issue Date: 6/1/1991 |
| Size: 2,682 Words, 16,000 Characters |
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Facetiously, Daniel Botkin speaks of looking to nature for global renewal in the midst of environmental disasters as reminiscent of how his in-laws in New Hampshire once put up strawberry preserves for the winter. "We talk," he says, "as if nature were something we could bottle, put on the shelf, and take down occasionally to savor and admire. Indeed, this is the way that many nature preserves have been managed in the twentieth century."
In making the analogy, Botkin, professor of biology and environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is not simply referring to the forests of New England. His interests go far beyond environmental problems in the United States and are global in scope. He has studied elephants in Africa, moose in Michigan, and forests in New ...
. . .
...standing of nature's strange ecological systems, we are still like the passengers in the cabin who think they smell smoke or--misunderstanding how a plane flies--mistake light turbulence for trouble.
As Botkin concludes in his book, "We need to instrument the cockpit of the biosphere and to let up the window shade so that we begin to observe nature as it is, not as we imagine it to be."
(806 of 16,000 characters)
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