Wednesday, March 14, 2012

The very naughty Charles LYELL ....

"We must all learn to live together within Nature: all diners at her common table (commensal) or all learn to die together, frying up in the upcoming global climate meltdown."   (Blog Mission Statement.)

Modernist Man still views life on earth through the prism of geology, the legacy of that very wicked barrister Sir Charles Lyell.

Man's continued existence on Planet Earth, in this schema, is practically guaranteed by the fact that the geological processes of the earth are supposedly uniform in character , uniform all over the world and uniform in nature back to the beginnings of time.

Supposedly these geological forces are what created and sustain the great natural cycles - the circulation streams of  rain, water and air and of oxygen,nitrogen, carbon, sulfur et al.

But while it is true that because our planet was stony with a fluid metallic core, this allowed life the ability to begin here, most of those vast natural circulations wouldn't exist if life, Microbe Life mostly, didn't sustain them.

In fact most of the minerals and ore bodies that we take for granted as being of geological origin, actually were created and assembled by biological forces.

True, Geology gave us all the elements that make up the Earth - but most of our minerals and compounds owe some or all of their creation to Life forces.

Man, pace Robert Solow, could not live on rocks alone - we need Life to live ; all Life....

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Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...

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