Foto dell'autore
28 opere 224 membri 2 recensioni 1 preferito

Opere di Chris Maser

The redesigned forest (1605) 26 copie

Etichette

Informazioni generali

Sesso
male
Nazionalità
USA

Utenti

Recensioni

"About the Author:
I spent over 25 years as a research scientist in natural history and ecology in forest, shrub steppe, subarctic, desert, coastal, and agricultural settings. Trained primarily as a vertebrate zoologist, I was a research mammalogist in Nubia, Egypt, (1963-1964) with the Yale University Peabody Museum Prehistoric Expedition and a research mammalogist in Nepal (1966-1967), where I participated in a study of tick-borne diseases for the U.S. Naval Medical Research Unit #3 based in Cairo, Egypt. I conducted a three-year (1970-1973) ecological survey of the Oregon Coast for the University of Puget Sound, Tacoma, Washington. I was a research ecologist with the U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management for thirteen years--the first seven (1974-1981) studying the biophysical relationships in rangelands in southeastern Oregon and the last six (1982-1987) studying old-growth forests in western Oregon. I also spent a year as a landscape ecologist with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (1990-1991)."

This book is such a sleeper! I expected it to be relatively dry, & very factual. Part One was exactly that: Nature's Design of a Forest versus Our Design of a Forest. Part Two, As We Think So We Manage, opened the subject of looking at our preconceptions, and our ideas about what a forest is & should be.

But Part Three! Wow! Change, Why Are We Afraid of It? has little to do with forests per se, but more to do with humankind's fears.

The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save the way we think and thus we drift toward unparalled catastrophe.
--Albert Einstein

The author talks about change and why we fear it, and then brings in Buddhist philosophy:

The First Noble Truth -- Truth or Suffering: the outstanding characteristic of the human situation is suffering or frustration, which comes from our difficulty in accepting that everything around us is impermanent and transitory.
The Second Noble Truth -- Truth of the Cause of Suffering: It is futile to grasp life from a wrong point of view, from ignorance. Trying to create anything fixed or permanent in life and then trying to cling to its perceived permanence is a vicious circle, which is driven by karma, the never-ending chain of cause and effect./blockquote>

The point he's making is that seeing forests as static, economic expedients will result in the total destruction of forests -- that we must learn to perceive the forest as a whole (root systems, flora and fauna, soil, water resources, etc.). We must learn to approach forest from a Buddhist perspective, before we kill them all.

I was utterly charmed by this book, with its Buddhist chapter in the middle, and would recommend it to anyone who's interested in ecology or the environment, with a good dash of Buddhism thrown into the middle.
… (altro)
 
Segnalato
Aspenhugger | Jan 23, 2021 |
Firstly, Chris Maser has written a very valuable book about the natural world and its problems which are worse now (2016) than when the book was published in 1992.

He's concerned with habitats and species and says (P33), “... the notion is that species continue to evolve until they at last occupy all available habitat niches in the biosphere, which keeps changing, so that species must continue adapting.”

Some habitats offer more possibilities than others and he highlights the extraordinary richness of the world's tropical rain forests quoting biologist Louise Emmons, with regard to the Gabon African rainforest; “You can stand anywhere and be surrounded by hundreds of organisms that are all “doing something”, going about their living in countless interactions – ants carrying leaves, birds dancing, bats singing, giant blue wasps wrestling with giant tarantulas, caterpillars pretending that they are bird droppings, and so on.”

Then he shows how humans are destroying natural habitats at an accelerating rate, becoming the principal cause of extinctions and evolutionary leaps. Like he says (1992), Each year, an area 80% the size of the State of Oregon burns in the Brazilian Amazon alone”, and this is a lot, considering that tropical rainforests are one of the world's oldest ecosystems, occupying only 7% of the Earth's surface but home to more than 50% of all the Earth's species.

His point is that human beings approach nature in a manner formed by their past. For most of their history they were an insignificant part in its vastness, and actually threatened by it – hence the memes of “carving out the new frontier”, “taming nature” etc. which are all wrong now that the tables have turned.

Maser shows that intensive chemical based agriculture is seriously removing fertility from soil around the world as green cover is removed along with he natural cycle of dead organic matter returning to the earth (also covered in Peter Andrew's excellent book “Beyond the Brink”).

He does show a growing awareness of the problem and engages in a very interesting argument (P186) contrasting Ethos with Law. Ethos is something that puts down deep roots into society and moulds it from the bottom up (in other words it IS society). In contrast Law is much more superficial concept that without Ethos it is easily circumvented, as for example with dead letter Environmental Laws routinely ignored by special interests. Like he says, “This is not the doing of the scientists, foresters, rangers, and others at working levels the agencies. It reflects decisions made by higher authorities in the executive branch of government i.e. They know they can get away with it because most of the population don't care.

Maser could have suggested how to internalize (build an Ethos) of sustainability in the general population, but it's a difficult problem and this is still a great book. Five stars so far and I have decided to ignore the negatives.

**************************

The author somehow feels the need to link the foregoing to CCP (Counter Cultural Progressive) activism without considering that the CCP's are much more interested in activism than the environment.

So we get:

“The native Indians viewed the land as something Holy to be revered” (Most larger animals in the Americas disappeared with the arrival of Native Americans 10-11.000 years ago).

“Shackles of our European heritage”, West vs East = Linear vs Cyclical thinking (China is in fact Nº1 in wasteful resource extraction, pollution and lack of regard for the environment + Chinese oligarchs have allied with corrupt SE Asian governments and Japanese buyers to lay waste to SE Asian hardwood rain forests + Latin Americans is doing a good job of destroying the Amazon.)

“Unsafe, dirty nuclear energy”. (In fact it's notably safe and clean, and nature lives from the radiation of the sun's billion year old nuclear reactor that's still working fine).

In fact on P179 he admits that, Cultural Capacity (what the land can produce in an environmentaly-sustainable way) is a Conservative Concept (i.e. nothing to do with a Neoliberal world free for all).

A recommended book.
… (altro)
 
Segnalato
Miro | Aug 21, 2016 |

Potrebbero anche piacerti

Autori correlati

Statistiche

Opere
28
Utenti
224
Popolarità
#100,172
Voto
½ 4.3
Recensioni
2
ISBN
65
Lingue
1
Preferito da
1

Grafici & Tabelle