Berry makes a very good point when he mention the term: limitless. We have believed that we are a higher species and our needs are above all others and therefore we will use things to our benefit with little or no regards to anything else. We have thought that these materials that we do use have been limitless in the sense that we can use it as much as we want and there will always be some of it readily available. But that unfortunately is not the case. And now we realize as we have moved away from coal to oil. But what will happen when we are forced to move away from oil? Where will we go from there? He makes the point to quote words that are supposed to be comforting, that we have "250 billion tons of oil reserves" that will "last us 100 years" (Berry 2). But this fails to recognize the fact that "we have inhabited the earth for many thousands of years" and although it is comforting to hear that it will last us a bit longer, in the context of how long we've been on the earth, it's not enough time at all (Berry 2).
We want solutions that will be the most efficient and the least invasive. Ones that require a certain amount of technology. Yet we still choose to believe that everything is limitless. Berry blatantly calls this "fantasy" because we are "entering a time on inescapable limits" (Berry 4). We can no longer be so stupid to think that we can solve the problem of technology abusing the environment with more technology. Perhaps there is no such thing as "clean technology" that the only true answer to preserving and saving the earth is to start to live with limits. They way we live now it limitless and but using more technology to solve our limitless amount of problems is only aiding us in the continuation of living limitlessly.
Berry suggests that the only way to "recover from our disease of limilessness" is to come to the realization that we are not a species above the rest sent by god. It is sort of this Christian belief that we are above all other creatures because god has created us in that way. We should take the reliance off of science and technology and have a "new look at the arts" (Berry 9). His prior reference to art was that they have limits depending on the size of their canvas and therefore must choose what to depict on their limited frame of art and he again closes with this idea that artists know limits far better than scientists could understand.
I agree with you when you discuss how we as human beings tend to just do what we want to do regardless if it is affecting our surroundings. We tend to overlook the fact that our actions have consequences, and honestly some people just don't care if the things they do are harmful to their surroundings.
ReplyDelete