6
effect widespread parities or distributional justice across diverse constituencies.
These gaps in the collective measures of all things—gaps between experience, education, cultural norms, and attitudes—are of greatest concern in a nuclear world,
and at the very moment, the fast-waning biodiversity—the underlying, essential
pillar of all—is least accounted for. That accountability factor shines the spotlight
on human narcissism. As will be explored herewith, that one unconditional, human
consciousness, and the one species that all but remains its principal beneficiary,
provide vastly insufficient room to negotiate a truce with earth; to mentor the human
personage in meaningful, ethical guises other than itself.
Sang Christine De Pise, “…Victim of thy cruelty!... May it not an emblem prove/
Of untold but tender love?”..
3
And the twelfth-century Troubadour Jaufre Rudel, “I am happy to weep while
singing,/it is the only way/to calm this sadness/which engulfs me./I sigh one hundred sighs a day…”.
4
It is this forlorn centrality, within the dream of peace, the centered rural life of all
those who have been subsumed by the seasons, lulling late-afternoons, mottled
lights of the winding orchards of Medieval France; reticent personages pondering
their world, simply enjoying the fellowship of their flocks in the solace of shade
trees, that so strikingly invokes its tortured aftermath. Any testament to those prior
times necessarily invokes the psychological and anthropological reconciliation,
from inside ourselves, that contradictory relationship of our kind to nature, however
uncomfortable or bathetic its revelations.
The fact so much pain, murder, exile should have correlated with the very birth of
Renaissance music and poetics does much to subsume human nature in the perplexity
of all those exquisite visions, paradise scenes, celebrations and degrees of confidence,
and sheer curiosity at our world that heralded the rise of the ecological sciences.
Except that now, our temptation to escape into the pensive elegiacs of lore, far
removed from Black Plagues and Spanish Inquisitions (we would like to think), is
an ill-afforded nostalgic luxury for dreamers. Nature has equipped us with only so
much tolerance for each other, beyond all the ecstatic love affairs and intimations of
some destiny, leading across our neighbor’s fields to the pivotal horizon-teeming
questions: What have we done? Who are we?
1.3 A Counter-Intuitive Discourse
Ecological Paradox hopes to shine an even light on some of humanity’s foibles
where self-interest easily undermines species and, by implication, the biosphere’s
survival, a guaranteed backfire on our kind. We do so throughout the book, with the
3 Specimens of the Early Poetry of France – From The Time Of The Troubadours And Trouveres To
The Reign Of Henri Quatre, by Louisa Stuart Costello, William Pickering, London, 1835, p. 103.
4 The Music Of The Troubadours, Provençal Series amo ut intellegam, Volume 1, edited by Peter
Whigham, Ross-Erikson, Santa Barbara, CA, 1979, p. 39.
1 Introduction
effect widespread parities or distributional justice across diverse constituencies.
These gaps in the collective measures of all things—gaps between experience, education, cultural norms, and attitudes—are of greatest concern in a nuclear world,
and at the very moment, the fast-waning biodiversity—the underlying, essential
pillar of all—is least accounted for. That accountability factor shines the spotlight
on human narcissism. As will be explored herewith, that one unconditional, human
consciousness, and the one species that all but remains its principal beneficiary,
provide vastly insufficient room to negotiate a truce with earth; to mentor the human
personage in meaningful, ethical guises other than itself.
Sang Christine De Pise, “…Victim of thy cruelty!... May it not an emblem prove/
Of untold but tender love?”..
3
And the twelfth-century Troubadour Jaufre Rudel, “I am happy to weep while
singing,/it is the only way/to calm this sadness/which engulfs me./I sigh one hundred sighs a day…”.
4
It is this forlorn centrality, within the dream of peace, the centered rural life of all
those who have been subsumed by the seasons, lulling late-afternoons, mottled
lights of the winding orchards of Medieval France; reticent personages pondering
their world, simply enjoying the fellowship of their flocks in the solace of shade
trees, that so strikingly invokes its tortured aftermath. Any testament to those prior
times necessarily invokes the psychological and anthropological reconciliation,
from inside ourselves, that contradictory relationship of our kind to nature, however
uncomfortable or bathetic its revelations.
The fact so much pain, murder, exile should have correlated with the very birth of
Renaissance music and poetics does much to subsume human nature in the perplexity
of all those exquisite visions, paradise scenes, celebrations and degrees of confidence,
and sheer curiosity at our world that heralded the rise of the ecological sciences.
Except that now, our temptation to escape into the pensive elegiacs of lore, far
removed from Black Plagues and Spanish Inquisitions (we would like to think), is
an ill-afforded nostalgic luxury for dreamers. Nature has equipped us with only so
much tolerance for each other, beyond all the ecstatic love affairs and intimations of
some destiny, leading across our neighbor’s fields to the pivotal horizon-teeming
questions: What have we done? Who are we?
1.3 A Counter-Intuitive Discourse
Ecological Paradox hopes to shine an even light on some of humanity’s foibles
where self-interest easily undermines species and, by implication, the biosphere’s
survival, a guaranteed backfire on our kind. We do so throughout the book, with the
3 Specimens of the Early Poetry of France – From The Time Of The Troubadours And Trouveres To
The Reign Of Henri Quatre, by Louisa Stuart Costello, William Pickering, London, 1835, p. 103.
4 The Music Of The Troubadours, Provençal Series amo ut intellegam, Volume 1, edited by Peter
Whigham, Ross-Erikson, Santa Barbara, CA, 1979, p. 39.
1 Introduction