When we go camping or canoeing, we aren't necessarily looking for wildlife, but critters always seem to find us. Seeing a pelican or a coyote or a snake, for that matter, makes a trip to the country all that more worthwhile. The Hanford Reach afforded many critter glimpses.
Humanity must take steps to protect the world of nature. There are limits to what the natural world can bear in terms of the demands we put upon it. To say, just let nature take its course, is to deny the the responsibility that is ours alone to address. There is a moral crisis in the degradation of the natural world, as is alluded to in the 2004 document "The Prosperity of Humankind" by the Baha'i International Community. -gw
| The fallacies in theories based on the belief that there is no limit to nature’s capacity to fulfill any demand made on it by human beings have now been coldly exposed. A culture which attaches absolute value to expansion, to acquisition, and to the satisfaction of people’s wants is being compelled to recognize that such goals are not, by themselves, realistic guides to policy. Inadequate, too, are approaches to economic issues whose decision-making tools cannot deal with the fact that most of the major challenges are global rather than particular in scope. |
The earnest hope that this moral crisis can somehow be met by deifying nature itself is an evidence of the spiritual and intellectual desperation that the crisis has engendered. Recognition that creation is an organic whole and that humanity has the responsibility to care for this whole, welcome as it is, does not represent an influence which can by itself establish in the consciousness of people a new system of values. Only a breakthrough in understanding that is scientific and spiritual in the fullest sense of the terms will empower the human race to assume the trusteeship toward which history impels it. |
Posted via email from Baha'i Views
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