Self-Policing Biosphere (From The Archive)

To continue the thought stream from my dharma talk yesterday at EHZC, I interrupt this blog (again) for a public service announcement:

"Even reluctant observers find it obvious by now that in a finite and overexploited world, endlessly increasing material wealth for an endlessly increasing number of humans is a suicidal dream. That leaves us in the short term with two choices: to continue insisting that humans come first, though we know that only a few of those humans will ever enjoy the delusion, or to relinquish the ideal of a global ecology owned and controlled by human beings. In the long run, of course, the self-policing biosphere will edit any choice we make, and its list of alternatives is shorter".

-Robert Bringhurst
 The Tree of Meaning: Language, Mind, and Ecology (2008)

[NOTES: Bringhurst is also the author of the classic, The Elements of Typographical Style, one of my favorites. Image is from China.]