I was watching something on PBS about the Amazon river and they showed some river otters eating fish and I thought, "Tho
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Archived from the IMDb Discussion Forums — Philosophy
unex — 6 years ago(August 11, 2019 05:18 AM)
I was watching something on PBS about the Amazon river and they showed some river otters eating fish and I thought, "Those fish are full of parasites and so are those otters." Fish are full of parasites. So are otters. The fish give the otters some of those parasites. And then I thought about how people see the otters and the fish as individual entities existing inside an environment, that the individuals and the environment are different categories, but that parasites living inside of both makes them both individuals and environments. And I thought, humans have a mistaken belief that they can separate themselves from nature.
People in the West have become pretty good at keeping things out. They are not full of parasites. They are not ravaged by disease. But they are lousy at keeping things in.
Drugs
and
rocket fuels
and more find their way into their water supplies, pollution stubbornly ignores property lines and zoning laws. And so insects and plants die off, frogs change sex and become sterile, corals bleach, the environment degrades.
People are finally realizing that the
bacteria in their guts have evolved with them
. Nature naturally mixes. It doesn't obey man-made categories. Humans are trying to unmix nature, fighting entropy, but they are necessarily losing. Humans are a part of nature. It sounds obvious but for a long time they have denied it. If they had realized they were part of nature rather than cut off from it they would not have so readily destroyed it. There is no place where the environment ends and the human begins. They are all mixed up. -
Ajgoodfellow — 6 years ago(August 11, 2019 07:11 AM)
This was a thoughtful post.
It reminded me how the bubonic plague has resurfaced in Los Angeles along with Typhoid and hepatitis outbreaks. We cannot escape nature or disease.
Hey Diddler, Diddler….the cat and the fiddler LOL
Schrodinger's Cat walks into a bar, and doesn't. 