Wilson's "The Planetary Killer"

Read the following three passages.  In your groups, get a sense of what each is saying.  Then identify differences between them.  What do these differences teach you about the human condition.

a.  Genesis 1:28-30:  "And God blessed them, and God said to them, 'Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.'  And God said, 'Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food.  And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.'  And it was so."

b.  Al Gore, Earth in the Balance, page 218:  "The Cartesian approach to the human story allows us to believe that we are separate from the earth, entitled to view it as nothing more than an inanimate collection of resources that we can exploit however we like; and this fundamental misperception has led us to our current crisis.  But if the new story of the Deep Ecologists is dangerously wrong, it does at least provoke an essential question:  What new story can explain the relationship between human civilization and the earth--and how we have come to a moment of such crisis?  One part of the answer is clear:  our new story must describe and foster the basis for a natural and healthy relationship between human beings and the earth.  The old story of God's covenant with both the earth and humankind, and its assignment to human beings of the role of good stewards and faithful servants, was--before it was misinterpreted and twisted in the service of the Cartesian world view--a powerful, nobler, and just explanation of who we are in relation to God's earth.  What we need today is a fresh telling of our story with the distortions removed."

c.  Wilson, "The Planetary Killer," page 218:  "Mass extinctions in Australia did not begin with the arrival of Western civilization.  The cataclysm of its mammals during the past two centuries is only the latest episode in a much longer history of the decline of the overall fauna.  ...  It appears that the European colonists of Australia, long afterward and aided by their companion rats, rabbits, and foxes, have merely carried the extinction process to the next level beyond that inflicted by the aboriginals."