The Anthropocene
Humans have always wanted to be the makers of their own destiny, in some way or another. I always liked that quality; it makes us tenacious in the face of disaster. And indeed, we end up succeeding more often than not. Our wish to leave a legacy has managed to shift mountains, flatten hills, and has been known to block out the sun on occasion. Our impact is comparable to the massive roaming glaciers of the post ice age epoch, Holocene.
We may have yet to create a mountain range the size of the Appellations, though I’m sure more than a few people have thought about it, but our wanton shaping of earth has been no less effective thus far. Which is surprising, considering that the majority of us seem to lack the capacity to question, …show more content…
We may have coined the phrase look before you leap, but it now seems that we’d jump off a building if we were told that we could wear a golden parachute on the way down and there was a pool of money at the bottom to catch us. It was only as we hit the ground that we figured out that gold was too dense to make us float, and money was too unforgiving to ever break our fall.
Such was the case with DDT and other such pesticides, talked about in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring which I was responsible for discussing in our presentation. “DDT is Good For Me” as the chemical industry marketing departments would say. DDT was sprayed over huge areas of land with little to no oversight for years. It took an individual professionally unrelated to finally question the effects of this chemical.
As an aside, I have often found that the things most likely to be dangerous are the ones that most want you to believe that they are safe. You rarely see a commercial about the health benefits of bananas, but looking at my box of all natural whole grain cereal, with no less than 3 seals of approval from supposedly objective doctors, I can’t help but be skeptical. Not to say that this probiotic, sunkissed, antioxidant superfood is unhealthy, but it may not be all that it purports to be. In our investigations into the unmentioned side effects of our day to day products online, this trend seemed to hold across product areas including products like blistex and baby
Humans have always wanted to be the makers of their own destiny, in some way or another. I always liked that quality; it makes us tenacious in the face of disaster. And indeed, we end up succeeding more often than not. Our wish to leave a legacy has managed to shift mountains, flatten hills, and has been known to block out the sun on occasion. Our impact is comparable to the massive roaming glaciers of the post ice age epoch, Holocene.
We may have yet to create a mountain range the size of the Appellations, though I’m sure more than a few people have thought about it, but our wanton shaping of earth has been no less effective thus far. Which is surprising, considering that the majority of us seem to lack the capacity to question, …show more content…
We may have coined the phrase look before you leap, but it now seems that we’d jump off a building if we were told that we could wear a golden parachute on the way down and there was a pool of money at the bottom to catch us. It was only as we hit the ground that we figured out that gold was too dense to make us float, and money was too unforgiving to ever break our fall.
Such was the case with DDT and other such pesticides, talked about in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring which I was responsible for discussing in our presentation. “DDT is Good For Me” as the chemical industry marketing departments would say. DDT was sprayed over huge areas of land with little to no oversight for years. It took an individual professionally unrelated to finally question the effects of this chemical.
As an aside, I have often found that the things most likely to be dangerous are the ones that most want you to believe that they are safe. You rarely see a commercial about the health benefits of bananas, but looking at my box of all natural whole grain cereal, with no less than 3 seals of approval from supposedly objective doctors, I can’t help but be skeptical. Not to say that this probiotic, sunkissed, antioxidant superfood is unhealthy, but it may not be all that it purports to be. In our investigations into the unmentioned side effects of our day to day products online, this trend seemed to hold across product areas including products like blistex and baby