The Evergreen and Climate Change

The fact that The Evergreen promotes nature and the value and interconnectedness of the natural world as one of its main tenets got me thinking about climate change in the present time. What would J. Arthur Thomson and Patrick Geddes think of the state of the natural world now, as the various climate-related issues have increased over the past few decades? The balance and harmony of nature has been deeply disturbed and challenged in a way that is exponentially larger than what the world would have been like in the 19th century. They of course would still have had concerns regarding industrialization, but they did not have to deal with things like excessive wildfires, coral reefs dying, and garbage in the ocean. Thomson’s and Geddes’ argument that nature showed cooperation to be key to survival, which goes against Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” concept, in part explains why a man made disruption to an ecosystem is so disruptive, chaotic, and devastating. If the intricate balance is disturbed, it can cause a chain reaction of problems which has a domino effect on certain ecosystems or parts of the world. If today’s world still had the 19th century notion of science being closely connected to nature, it would probably be easier to enact processes to repair the damage of climate change, because the gap between nature and science would not be so wide.

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