Economists (and others) who are satisfied with nature-free equations develop a dangerous hubris about the potency of our species
Interpretation
The quote warns against overconfidence in our ability to manipulate the environment without considering natural limits.
Garrett Hardin emphasizes the peril of relying solely on abstract economic equations that ignore the constraints of nature. Such an attitude may lead to a dangerous arrogance about humanity's power to control and dominate the natural world, potentially resulting in detrimental consequences for both the environment and society.
In practice
In a lecture on environmental ethics, one might use this quote to discuss the limitations of economic models.
Moreover, the practical recommendations deduced from ecological principles threaten the vested interests of commerce; it is hardly surprising that the financial and political power created by these investments should be used sometimes to suppress environmental impact studies.
A technical solution may be defined as one that requires a change only in the techniques of the natural sciences, demanding little or nothing in the way of change in human values or ideas of morality.
Thou shalt not transgress the carrying capacity
A finite world can support only a finite population; therefore, population growth must eventually equal zero.
Indeed, our particular concept of private property, which deters us from exhausting the positive resources of the earth, favors pollution.
Society does not need more children; but it does need more loved children. Quite literally, we cannot afford unloved children - but we pay heavily for them every day. There should not be the slightest communal concern when a woman elects to destroy the life of her thousandth-of-an-ounce embryo. But all society should rise up in alarm when it hears that a baby that is not wanted is about to be born.
I profess to learn and to teach anatomy not from books but from dissections, not from the tenets of Philosophers but from the fabric of Nature.
The fact that I was going to be the first American woman to go into space carried huge expectations along with it.
If spiritual science is to do the same for spirit that natural science has done for nature, it must investigate quite differently from the latter. It must find ways and means of penetrating into the sphere of the spiritual, a domain which cannot be perceived with outer physical senses nor apprehended with the intellect which is bound to the brain.
What an odd time to be a fundamentalist about adaptation and natural selection - when each major subdiscipline of evolutionary biology has been discovering other mechanisms as adjuncts to selection's centrality.
The question now at issue, whether the living species are connected with the extinct by a common bond of descent, will best be cleared up by devoting ourselves to the study of the actual state of the living world, and to those monuments of the past in which the relics of the animate creation of former ages are best preserved and least mutilated by the hand of time.
Whether you can go back in time is held in the grip of the law of quantum gravity.
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