Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
and was overtaken by Islamic forces.The Normans invaded and conquered
Britain, theVikings reached the coast of North America, and in China trade
was flourishing under the Northern Sung dynasty. In Meso-America, the
Maya and Toltec civilizations were building cities.These migrations of pop-
ulations and contacts of cultures brought exchanges of biota. The quarry-
ing of stone and the building of temples and fortifications changed the
landscape. Agricultural improvements led to population growth and to the
clearing of forests. Human impact on the environment continued in the
centuries that followed. A hundred years ago, people in this country were
talking about the end of the frontier, and now there are topics with omi-
nous titles such as Bill McKibben's
The End of Nature.
So let us now think about the year 3000.What will this planet be like in
a thousand years? I don't have an answer to that question, but I offer you a
dream of what could be. This Smithsonian publication seems an appropri-
ate place to talk about dreams of the future, because it was not far from the
Smithsonian, on the National Mall, that another man once spoke of such a
dream. Martin Luther King Jr. didn't know exactly how to get to the place
he dreamed of, but he envisioned people coming together in an ethical
community. He saw black children and white children joining hands as sis-
ters and brothers. Now I suggest that we think also about the children of
salmon, the children of elk, the children of blue-green algae. Perhaps it is
time to widen the circle, to define society as an ecological community. Just
as a social contract flowed from John Locke's seventeenth-century concept
of person-to-person relationships, with authority deriving solely from the
consent of the governed, so an ecological contract could flow out of our
sense of being part of a much larger community, a community in which we
must behave with consideration for all forms of life.
The dream I offer is of “island civilization.” It may not be the best of all
possible futures, it may not be the sort of civilization that market forces are
propelling us toward, but I believe it is the vision that ethics compels us to
choose. Island civilization, quite simply, is a reversal of the direction in
which we are now going.Today we have islands of land that are wilderness,
surrounded by sprawling mega-cities. Michael Robinson refers to bioparks
as “islands of nature,” but I am thinking of wilderness on a much larger
scale. If you look at photographs of Earth at night, these patches of unin-
habited land appear as islands of darkness in seas of light, the light produced
by human settlements. I am concerned that the islands are small and that
the areas of light are becoming extensive.
