Survivor!

[Michael Perelman]

Engels. 1940. Dialectics of Nature (The Part Played by Labour in the
Transition from Ape to Man) (NY: International Publishers).    !!The text here
is from a different translation!!    291-2: "Let us not, however, flatter
ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature.  For each
such victory nature takes its revenge on us.  Each victory, it is true, in the
first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third
places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel
the first.  The people who, in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor and elsewhere,
destroyed the forests to obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that by
removing along with the forests the collecting centres and reservoirs of
moisture they were laying the basis for the present forlorn state of those
countries.  When the Italians of the Alps used up the pine forests on the
southern slopes, so carefully cherished on the northern slopes, they had no
inkling that by doing so they were cutting at the roots of the dairy industry
in their region; they had still less inkling that they were thereby depriving
their mountain springs of water for the greater part of the year, and making
it possible for them to pour still more furious torrents on the plains during
the rainy seasons.  Those who spread the potato in Europe were not aware that
with these farinaceous tubers they were at the same time spreading scrofula.
Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a
conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature -- but
that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its
midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the
advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply
them correctly."

   292-3: "And, in fact, with every day that passes we are acquiring a better
understanding of these laws and getting to perceive both the more immediate
and the more remote consequences of our interference with the traditional
course of nature.  In particular, after the mighty advances made by the
natural sciences in the present century, we are more than ever in a position
to realise, and hence to control, also the more remote natural consequences of
at least our day-to-day production activities.  But the more this progresses
the more will humanity not only feel but also know their oneness with nature,
and the more impossible will become the senseless and unnatural idea of a
contrast between mind and matter, humanity and nature, soul and body, such as
arose after the decline of classical antiquity in Europe and obtained its
highest elaboration in Christianity."

Carl Remick wrote:


> >From: Sam Pawlett <rsp at uniserve.com>
> >
> >  Anyway and seriously, humans are part of nature and part of the same
> >ecosystems that all other lifeforms are and are subject to the same
> >laws, so why ignore it?
>
> George Monbiot had an interesting quote from Friedrich Engels in his
> Guardian column yesterday, viz.:  "Let us not flatter ourselves for our
> human victories over nature.  For every such victory, it takes its revenge
> on us. We with flesh, blood and brain belong to nature and exist in its
> midst."  Does anyone know the source and context of that remark?
>
> Carl
>
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--

Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
michael at ecst.csuchico.edu
Chico, CA 95929
530-898-5321
fax 530-898-5901