- Joined
- May 30, 2002
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- 374
You raise an interesting question when you talk about how important human lives are for us all. What I am about to write below does not directly adress your above quoted line. I am just using it as a starting point since it started up my braincells a bit.Originally posted by munk
Men are more important than this. If the bear was a 'drunk' we'd say we were enabling him. If he was a felon we'd say we were soft on crime and encouraging him to murder.
Let's say there was a predator around that in USA and Canada combined killed 50 000 people every year and injured 2 700 000. If we somehow saw it as a necessity to have this animal around then we would accept those numbers of deaths and injuries. How do I know that? Well, check out this link: http://www.ntsb.gov/ITSA/roaddata.htm
The numbers I gave are car accident statistics.
So this is where I miss the point when people try to tell us how dangerous predators are and therefore they must be extinguished or at least kept away from human settlements. We have cars around and accept their danger. Why do we do that? There must be some good reason. It is because we like having a 1. world economy functioning. So for shallow materialistic reasons we accept 50 000 kills and 2 700 000 injuries. Ok, fine, it has become an integrated part of our culture, I choose not to argue with that. When I buy myself a car one day I will be a cold blooded murderer myself, no problems! I just wish to call a spade for a spade.
Now, large predators... How high are their impact on our population? Much much lower, right? And some people engage a lot more fear, hatred and anger in arguing about bears than cars, right? So deducing from the widely accepted logic that selfish materialistic reasons are a valid cause for killed humans, then there should be even less important reasons for having bears around than shallow materialistic reasons. That can be the only logical thought behind wishing bears away as long as we accept cars.
This is where I get confused. Large predators are needed for keeping a healthy and functioning ecosystem. We depend on having functioning large scale ecosystems where evolution can happen freely in the generations to come so that life can adapt to the gradual changes of this planet and so life can survive on a long term basis. We need it for our species' survival. So I am confused because we choose to keep cars around for shallow materialistic reasons leading to some misfortunate accidental deaths while we don't want bears even though they are around for SURVIVAL OF OUR SPECIES on a long term basis. And the bear killing rate is even lower!
What I am getting at is that danger is part of life. What should we do with all the cliffs we can fall off in the forests? What shall we do with the unflat forest ground that you can stumble in and break your arm? What shall we do with the little wasps that sting you? Forbid them all? Life is dangerous.
Now, that was me arguing for preservation of large predators from the anthropocentric world view. This is called Shallow Ecology, better described by Fritjof Capra than me:
"Shallow ecology is anthropocentric, or human-centred. It views humans as above or outside of nature, as the source of all value, and ascribes only instrumental, or 'use', value to nature."
Personally I don't have this world view, I just employ it in order to reach some kind of people in this world that I don't understand. Personally I am a supporter of Deep Ecology:
"Deep ecology does not separate humans - or anything else - from the natural environment. It does see the world not as a collection of isolated objects but as a network of phenomena that are fundamentally interconnected and interdependent. Deep ecology recognizes the intrinsic value of all living beings and views human beings as just one particular strand in the web of life." -- by Fritjof Capra