vii
Foreword
On the Nature of Ecological Paradox is unquestionably a masterpiece, in the tradition of two great treatises by Ludwig Wittgenstein and Baruch Spinoza. Nothing
like it has ever been written before. It mirrors the dizzying careers of two people
deeply in love. Michael Charles Tobias and Jane Gray Morrison have – collectively – conducted field research on every continent in an effort to understand and
communicate the fall-out on Earth from human infliction, a mournful epoch geologists call the Anthropocene, which equates with the sixth (possibly seventh) global
extinction event in the 4.2 billion years of documented life on this planet. While
their field work – articulated in hundreds of published essays, over 75 books and
100 films, lectures, keynote addresses, and several professorships between them –
has clinically analyzed one ecological crisis after another, often prophetically,
Tobias and Morrison have also focused on solutions, or at least pathways toward
amelioration. Their canvas of theoretical, empirical and applied research encompasses the natural sciences, deep demography and family planning, energy strategies, geopolitics, the history of ideas, conservation biology, systematics, taxonomy,
ecological anthropology and animal liberation. But, in addition, Tobias and Morrison
have for their entire careers been equally focused on ecological aesthetics, art and
literary history; philosophical traditions; paleontology; psycholinguistics; comparative ethics, both in practice and in the ideal, as well as the vast array of psychoanalytic theories and tools to better grasp the human condition going back to its far
distant hominid origins.
Some of their most notable past films and books include Antarctica: The Last
Continent (1986); Ahimsa – Non-Violence (1987); Black Tide(1989); the ten-hour
dramatic television series Voice of the Planet(1990); World War III: Population and
the Biosphere at the End of the Millennium (1996); A Day in the Life of India (1997);
Nature’s Keepers: On the Frontlines of the Fight to Save Wildlife in America (1997);
the sprawling, 1836-page modern-day Don Quixote, The Adventures of Mr. Marigold
(2005); the massive Sanctuary: Global Oases of Innocence (2008); the PBS feature
film trilogy Mad Cowboy (2005), No Vacancy (2006) and “Hotspots” (2008); God’s
Country: The New Zealand Factor (2011), and seven recent books with Springer
Nature Publishers (New York/Switzerland), including Anthrozoology: Embracing
Foreword
On the Nature of Ecological Paradox is unquestionably a masterpiece, in the tradition of two great treatises by Ludwig Wittgenstein and Baruch Spinoza. Nothing
like it has ever been written before. It mirrors the dizzying careers of two people
deeply in love. Michael Charles Tobias and Jane Gray Morrison have – collectively – conducted field research on every continent in an effort to understand and
communicate the fall-out on Earth from human infliction, a mournful epoch geologists call the Anthropocene, which equates with the sixth (possibly seventh) global
extinction event in the 4.2 billion years of documented life on this planet. While
their field work – articulated in hundreds of published essays, over 75 books and
100 films, lectures, keynote addresses, and several professorships between them –
has clinically analyzed one ecological crisis after another, often prophetically,
Tobias and Morrison have also focused on solutions, or at least pathways toward
amelioration. Their canvas of theoretical, empirical and applied research encompasses the natural sciences, deep demography and family planning, energy strategies, geopolitics, the history of ideas, conservation biology, systematics, taxonomy,
ecological anthropology and animal liberation. But, in addition, Tobias and Morrison
have for their entire careers been equally focused on ecological aesthetics, art and
literary history; philosophical traditions; paleontology; psycholinguistics; comparative ethics, both in practice and in the ideal, as well as the vast array of psychoanalytic theories and tools to better grasp the human condition going back to its far
distant hominid origins.
Some of their most notable past films and books include Antarctica: The Last
Continent (1986); Ahimsa – Non-Violence (1987); Black Tide(1989); the ten-hour
dramatic television series Voice of the Planet(1990); World War III: Population and
the Biosphere at the End of the Millennium (1996); A Day in the Life of India (1997);
Nature’s Keepers: On the Frontlines of the Fight to Save Wildlife in America (1997);
the sprawling, 1836-page modern-day Don Quixote, The Adventures of Mr. Marigold
(2005); the massive Sanctuary: Global Oases of Innocence (2008); the PBS feature
film trilogy Mad Cowboy (2005), No Vacancy (2006) and “Hotspots” (2008); God’s
Country: The New Zealand Factor (2011), and seven recent books with Springer
Nature Publishers (New York/Switzerland), including Anthrozoology: Embracing