Page 181 - Contribution To Phenomenology

174 ULLRICH MELLE

internal dynamic of the deterioration-and-deciine scenario will take over."^
According to him "there is no precedent for the change in prospect."* He
goes on to compare the required "Environmental Revolution" with the
agricultural and industrial revolution "as one of the great economic and
social transformations in human history."^
Deep divisions of opinion exist about the character and direction of
this so-called environmental or ecological revolution. Involved are
fundamental questions about the kind of world we want to live in, the
kind of society we find equitable and appropriate to human needs and
aspirations, about the telos of human life and human history, about our
place in nature and the relationship between non-human nature and
human culture.
Until quite recently in the history of our species there used to be
mainly non-human nature on earth. Human settlement and human culture
was surrounded by vast areas of wild nature. Human culture was too
marginal in the biosphere to have any noticeable influence on the
fundamental parameters of nature like the climate and the weather. This
primal, pre-human nature had developed over hundreds of thousands of
years to an ecological climax state. It was an extremely rich, thick,
intricate and complex web of Ufe. Today there are only shrinking islands
of this primal nature left. And even these islands are affected in different
ways by the material reproduction of the global human household,
particularly its evaporations. As Bill McKibben in his moving elegy on
"The End of Nature" remarks succinctly: "By changing the weather, we
make every spot on earth man-made and artificial."* There is today no
natural nature anymore, but only anthropogenic or cultural nature. Nature
as a whole has become part of the human household. It is no longer the
huge and undisturbed backdrop of the cultural activities of the human
species. Not only will our pollution reach Antarctica, not only will the
ozone-layer and the weather over Antarctica be influenced by human
activity, but the preserved wilderness of Antarctica will only be granted
by humans on the ground of human interests and ideals.

^ Lester Brown, "Launching the Environmental Revolution," in: State of the
World 199Z A Worldwatch Institute Report on Progress toward a Sustainable Society,
by Lester Brown et el. (W.W. Norton & Co.: New York/London, 1992), 174.
^ Ibid,
'^ Ibid,
* Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (Penguin Books: London, 1990), 54.