Word: mankind
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Chalk another one up to mankind's micromanagement of nature. Recklessly arrogant and myopic, Alaska's decision is rooted in special-interest economics, not biology. It's all the more distressing for what it tells us about ourselves as a species and our estrangement from nature. Alaska's folly is the product of a theme-park mentality in which nature exists for our amusement, to be enhanced by adding one species and subtracting another. An indiscriminate assault will kill off pack leaders, leaving wolves in hierarchical disarray, and harm eagles, foxes and wolverines, which dine upon the carcasses wolves leave...
...also attacks the planet's ozone layer, so chipmakers are looking for a substitute. Now AT&T may have one in N-butyl butyrate, a chemical found in, of all things, cantaloupes, peaches and plums. In fruit, it contributes to overall flavor; in the atmosphere, it should help reduce mankind's siege of the ozone layer, in turn relieving the onslaught of cancer- and cataract-causing ultraviolet light...
...That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind...
...20th century began slowly, to the ticking of grandfather clocks and the stately rhythms of progress established by high Victorian seriousness. Thanks to science, industry and moral philosophy, mankind's steps had at last been guided unerringly up the right path. The century of steam was about to give way to the century of oil and electricity, new and transforming sources of power and light. Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, only 41 years old in 1900, proposed a scientific basis for the notion that progress was gradual but inevitable, ordained by natural...
Still, for centuries humanity has confounded doomsayers by finding new supplies of food and energy. In the early 1970s some environmentalists interpreted temporary rises in food and oil prices to mean mankind was again pushing the limits of earthly resources, yet surpluses returned in later years. Julian Simon, among other economists, argued that this revealed a basic problem with the limits-to-growth argument. Price rises caused by scarcities, he argued, will always stimulate human ingenuity to improve efficiency and find new resources...