812
More recently, in the context of New Zealand adopting Bhutan’s vision of Gross
National Happiness as a viable index to replace conventional gross domestic product (GDP), New Zealand’s Finance Minister Grant Robertson declared, “How could
we be a rockstar… with homelessness, child poverty and inequality on the rise?”
19
In grappling with biological terms and definitions, how we might remedy humaninduced imbalances and destruction, debate over every detail is argued ad nauseum.
In philosophy, previously unimagined crevasses sunder even the slightest cohesion.
20
Ethical purgatory tracks biological data deficiency even at the level of forensic analysis of an aftermath, such as crab, shrimp, and amphibian mutations, hybrid
invasives, an exploded vault of nullities following an ecological disaster.
21
Never has objectivity applied to who people are or how they behave. Objectivity
strips natural history of any potential moral injunctions because, by definition, it
ignores our complexity, and the power of our mood swings, invoking the false neutral. In representing such conceptual contradictions, our very models—mathematical, linguistic, “multi-criteria analysis” driven—waver between the abstract and a
set of probability targets, as we endlessly search for increasingly ingenious ways to
test the great experiment which is the idea of reality, and the even more bizarre
verisimilitude of ourselves—a liable fact made even more vulnerable by that school
of thought which holds all consciousness to be an illusion. Of course, illusion, delusion, every eccentric misapprehension nonetheless involves a fundamental act of the
mind, not the pineal gland, which some, like Descartes, imagined to be the “seat of
the soul.”
Human perception of the solid ground of a biological planet commands and controls through our presumption of human consciousness—whatever it is—making its
way onto the world stage by our constantly inventing tools meant to design, implement, and ultimately resuscitate that which has been wounded. Pain, and the distractions we enlist to escape it, is the fullest extent of the world with which our minds
have co-evolved. While many are quick to reclaim our earliest co-habitation with
canids, felids, crickets, and apple trees, the evolution of those Beings remains independent of our own. Collectively, as paleontology and genetics have rapidly attested,
we snuck up on the world, one tribe at a time, with varying, sometimes merging,
infra-specifics and super-spreaders—until our numbers surpassed 1 million, then
100 million, and so on. We’ve lost track of other mammalian guidelines, baseline
data that would give us some numerical understanding of comparable carrying
19 See “New Zealand Ditches GDP For Happiness And Wellbeing,” by James Ellsmoor, Forbes
OnLine, July 11, 2019, https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesellsmoor/2019/07/11/new-zealandditches-gdp-for-happiness-and-wellbeing/#6ac6d5501942. Accessed February 11, 2020.
20 See Odenbaugh, Jay, “Conservation Biology”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall
2019 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), forthcoming URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/
fall2019/entries/conservation-biology/.
21 “Persistent and substantial impacts of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on deep-sea megafauna,”
Craig R. McClain, Clifton Nunnally and Mark C. Benfield, Published: 28 August 2019, https://doi.
org/10.1098/rsos.191164, The Royal Society Publishing, https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/
full/10.1098/rsos.191164. Accessed September 16, 2019.
93 Ecological Idealism
More recently, in the context of New Zealand adopting Bhutan’s vision of Gross
National Happiness as a viable index to replace conventional gross domestic product (GDP), New Zealand’s Finance Minister Grant Robertson declared, “How could
we be a rockstar… with homelessness, child poverty and inequality on the rise?”
19
In grappling with biological terms and definitions, how we might remedy humaninduced imbalances and destruction, debate over every detail is argued ad nauseum.
In philosophy, previously unimagined crevasses sunder even the slightest cohesion.
20
Ethical purgatory tracks biological data deficiency even at the level of forensic analysis of an aftermath, such as crab, shrimp, and amphibian mutations, hybrid
invasives, an exploded vault of nullities following an ecological disaster.
21
Never has objectivity applied to who people are or how they behave. Objectivity
strips natural history of any potential moral injunctions because, by definition, it
ignores our complexity, and the power of our mood swings, invoking the false neutral. In representing such conceptual contradictions, our very models—mathematical, linguistic, “multi-criteria analysis” driven—waver between the abstract and a
set of probability targets, as we endlessly search for increasingly ingenious ways to
test the great experiment which is the idea of reality, and the even more bizarre
verisimilitude of ourselves—a liable fact made even more vulnerable by that school
of thought which holds all consciousness to be an illusion. Of course, illusion, delusion, every eccentric misapprehension nonetheless involves a fundamental act of the
mind, not the pineal gland, which some, like Descartes, imagined to be the “seat of
the soul.”
Human perception of the solid ground of a biological planet commands and controls through our presumption of human consciousness—whatever it is—making its
way onto the world stage by our constantly inventing tools meant to design, implement, and ultimately resuscitate that which has been wounded. Pain, and the distractions we enlist to escape it, is the fullest extent of the world with which our minds
have co-evolved. While many are quick to reclaim our earliest co-habitation with
canids, felids, crickets, and apple trees, the evolution of those Beings remains independent of our own. Collectively, as paleontology and genetics have rapidly attested,
we snuck up on the world, one tribe at a time, with varying, sometimes merging,
infra-specifics and super-spreaders—until our numbers surpassed 1 million, then
100 million, and so on. We’ve lost track of other mammalian guidelines, baseline
data that would give us some numerical understanding of comparable carrying
19 See “New Zealand Ditches GDP For Happiness And Wellbeing,” by James Ellsmoor, Forbes
OnLine, July 11, 2019, https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesellsmoor/2019/07/11/new-zealandditches-gdp-for-happiness-and-wellbeing/#6ac6d5501942. Accessed February 11, 2020.
20 See Odenbaugh, Jay, “Conservation Biology”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall
2019 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), forthcoming URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/
fall2019/entries/conservation-biology/.
21 “Persistent and substantial impacts of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on deep-sea megafauna,”
Craig R. McClain, Clifton Nunnally and Mark C. Benfield, Published: 28 August 2019, https://doi.
org/10.1098/rsos.191164, The Royal Society Publishing, https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/
full/10.1098/rsos.191164. Accessed September 16, 2019.
93 Ecological Idealism