"Many elements of what we today call our environmental crisis—climate change, resource depletion, groundwater contamination and scarcity, species extinction—are signs of battles won but a war being lost. Today we are accustomed to arguing that we should follow the science in an issue such as climate change, ignoring that our crisis is the result of long-standing triumphs of science and technology in which “following science” was tantamount to civilizational progress. Our carbon-saturated world is the hangover of a 150-year party in which, until the very end, we believed we had achieved the dream of liberation from nature’s constraints". - - (Patrick Deneen)
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Feel free to reply to any comment by clicking the "Reply" button.We got here because of greed, people exploiting the natural environment as profit, while passing the health and economic costs onto the public. Science made this far more efficient, but it didn't get us here. And it's not going to get us out of here.
Druvius
Level 8
Aug 7, 2022
0
I don’t know who Patrick Deneel is or what the context of this quote is… or what you might be suggesting by it.
He’s not wrong, but what implications do you draw from that statement?
That we should abandon science and civilization? That we should follow something other than science? That we could have civilization without science?
The only problem I can see with following the science is that science is never complete, but we can only work with what we have. Maybe the problem he’s suggesting is that we should include in our calculations more than science alone? I could agree with that. But not that we should ignore any of the science.
skado
Level 9
Aug 6, 2022
2
Pat acknowledges that “following science” was tantamount to civilizational progress so is only reminding us that it's also what brought us here. It's more a warning against treating science as an absolute. Considering what all quantum physics hold, for our understanding of everything, I think that's fair. I also see it as mockery for humans thinking we could use nature without concern for nature.
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