Page 182 - Contribution To Phenomenology

PHILOSOPHY AND ECOLOGICAL CRISIS 175

The radical transformation of pre-human nature in the course of
human expansion is dramatically reducing the richness and diversity of
pre-human nature. The extinction-rate of plant- and animal-species today
is 10,000 times higher than in pre-human nature. According to the
German zoologist Bernhard Verbeek this is a catastrophe "that has not
yet happened on our planet since the beginning of life."^ The thick and
intricate web of life has been torn and the resulting nature is much less
stable and reliable. For its reproduction it becomes more and more
dependent on human manipulation and management.
With the fantastic—critics would rather say horrific—possibiUties which
the new bio-technologies, in particular the DNA-recombinations begin to
offer, a completely new stage in the human transformation, the humaniza-
tion of nature, appears on the horizon. Through genetic engineering and
manipulation new organisms can be tailor-made. As the life-forms of the
old nature are dying out at an accelerating rate, as the biological
productivity of the old nature is declining, we may be able to create in
our laboratories a new nature which is more resilient and more
productive. McKibben remarks, "just as the clouds of carbon dioxide
threaten to heat the atmosphere and perhaps starve us, we are figuring
out a new method of dominating the earth, a method more thorough,
and therefore more promising, than coal and oil and natural gas. It is not
certain that genetic engineering and *macro-management' of the world's
resources will provide a new cornucopia, but is certainly seems probable.
We are a talented species."^^
The probability of such a new technospheric cornucopia may be open
to serious doubt What is all the more likely that this will be the
direction in which a major part of the scientific-technocratic, poUtical and
bureaucratic establishment will look for an answer to the pressing global
problems of ecological breakdown, resource-depletion, waste-disposal and
hunger. There seems to be no other alternative then to press on in the
hope that that which brought us into the present crisis will eventually
lead us out of it. We need more economic growth, further technological
break-throughs, more and more industries and bigger bureaucracies in
order to fight the afflictions brought about by previous economic growth,
previous technological and industrial development. In the words of Brian

' Bernard Verbeek, Die Anthropologie der Umweltzerstorung, Die Evolution und
der Schatten der Zukunft (Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft: Darmstadt, 1990), 69.
1^ Bill McKibben, 152.