re: #91 theheat

Years ago, there was a documentary about the Ganges river in India, full of human waste, floating dead cows - you name it - and how the ignorant people thought there was no limit to the amount of pollution it could withstand because it was iconic in their culture as being an “absolute”. Without offending people that actually believed that, engineers were developing ways to allow people to still bathe in it, drink from it, shit in it, and float their dead critters down it - without offending their ideas that they were actually a major part of the problem, and - no - the river could not sustain that level of contamination.

I’m reading Jared Diamond’s Collapse right now and he talks a little about how people don’t want to see the impact of human change on the environment. In some ways it’s because anthropologists and others who study populations don’t want to see the people that they study as “bad” or “damaging” and partially because we’ve never quite gotten over the “Noble Savage” concept - those innocent pastoralists and hunter-gatherers happily hand-in-hand with Nature in a state of Edenic, uncorrupted cooperation.

It’s a really good read, and I recommend it to anyone that hasn’t read it.