Does our Bambi view of nature need to change?

I'd like to share this thought-provoking quote from this excellent piece I recently read entitled The Business of Cooling the Planet:

"The Bambi view of nature is the wrong view," Eisenberger tells me as we settle in for a long conversation on his porch, looking at the ocean below. "On a longer time scale, nature is very violent. It operates by creation through disruption -- asteroid impacts, super-volcanoes, giant tsunamis that totally reset things." These disruptions created beautiful places like the Mendocino coast or the Grand Canyon. "There's this whole correlation in nature between violence and beauty," Eisenberger says. He pooh-poohs the idea of preserving the earth in its "natural state" because there's no such thing. "If we just leave nature alone, nature will not leave us alone," he says. "We should manage nature."

A global problem and its self-creating solution

A month ago, I attended a talk about "Sustainable Development" by Jeffrey Sachs at Columbia University Center in Amman. In case that name means nothing to you, Sachs is the Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and author of the book "How to End Poverty". He's an economic activist (if there ever was one) who has campaigned with the likes of Bono to eliminate poverty around the world. Now who wouldn't want to hear from a guy like that? So Sachs comes in and starts talking very generally about sustainable development. Ten minutes into it and the lecture takes a sharp turn; we are suddenly listening to a diatribe about the evils of climate change. Now don't get me wrong, I am not a climate change denier, nor am I a blind follower of the sect either. But I felt like I was scammed into listening to a member of a cult bent on recruiting me.

The drive back

I spent all of yesterday at a waste disposal site in Jordan. Obviously, it was not a very pleasant experience. I saw the the site of the accident where one worker drowned in an industrial waste pond (hopefully from suffocation and nothing worse). I also visited a site where brand new clothes from the industrial estates were being burnt because they did not meet the specifications to be exported, no one was willing to pay customs on them and there was no mechanism for giving them to the needy.

On the ride back from the site, I was involved in a heated discussion between driver and the environmental engineer who accompanied me on the visit. Basically, the driver was upset at what he saw, saying that people shouldn't have to work under such conditions while the engineer was complaining that no one takes the environment seriously in this country. The driver was adamant that concern for the environment was a problem for other, more affluent people to worry about. While the engineer couldn't understand what the driver would lose if he segregated his waste and every once in a while brought a bag of papers into the office to place in the recycling bin, the driver couldn't understand what he would gain if he did.