Ahhotep – When we have no choice, we are free!

RLF: How can you say that when we have no choice, that we are free?

A: In taking a journey through your country, can you not travel quicker and with more piece of mind when there is but one road before you?

This one road you are taking is the only one, and so it is the right road. There is not another to choose to take, or choose not to take. Once a fork in the road appears, a choice has to be made. Notice that if you know in advance which road to travel along, your way is unimpeded, you need hardly slow down to take the one you are about to follow, and in that sense, it is no choice – the other one being the wrong road, not the road for you.

If, however, you are unsure of the right road ahead, you have to make a choice – decide which road to follow, and in that uncertainty and in the making of that choice comes uncertainty and an amount of oppression of your soul.

RLF: That seems intuitively correct. I can add an example to verify it. My own father, whilst serving his country in the armed forces, never, so he stated, felt so free as he did during those two years spent in Egypt.

I put it to him that he was anything but free, that his movements were severely curtailed, first by his own officers’ orders, and second by the movements of the enemy. His conviction that he was free, felt free, was therefore free, remained steady throughout my doubt. His example would surely bear out the truth of your statements – that freedom from choice is indeed freedom.

A: Yes, even though it seems to go against logic, as you had thought when your father inclined to think himself free, even under the yoke of regimental duties.

Shall we move on to examine the reverse side of the coin of choice, I should say the lack of it, and freedom. That other side would provide a man with choice, allowing him perhaps to think that in his having the freedom to choose what best suited his taste and direction, he also had the largest amount of freedom.

RLF: It does sound as if he would have a great deal of freedom, were he to be blessed with choice in everything.

A: That is where we initially err –in imagining that because he can choose, he must be free. That is thought by those who rarely have choice in anything. It is a case of the grass seeming greener on the other side of the fence, or however that particular saying goes.

Since few have much choice, they think they would like more of it – it is the law of scarcity that informs them thus, rather than any real evidenced for their misguided convictions. That is the first thing to be said about an increasing of choice.

However, consider a person who must choose before doing anything. How do you think that person would feel?

RLF: Your choice of modal verb – must – points us in the direction of his discontent – his dilemma, no less.

A: Exactly, and he is on the horns of a dilemma in everything he does, is he not? He has to choose – there, does his fate sound any better differently worded?

RLF: Hardly. There is still the sound of him being obliged to make decisions.

A: Precisely, and it is in your own word – obliged – in which oppression comes. Doing something without obligation to return something sounds freer, does it not? And yet I think I can show you that in fact, obligations are what tie us to each other in society. The source of his oppression does not come just from being obliged, as you infer.

No, choice inhibits freedom in terms of the mind more than of the body. Freedom is not just the absence of fences and walls, or bars, if you prefer, but rather, freedom – real freedom, resides in the mind just as much as it does in the body. Were it not so, those imprisoned for some amount of time, having their liberty restricted – taken from them, would suffer indeed if it was not for the freedom of the mind to wander unrestricted. No man can stay another man’s ability to envision in his mind’s eye some glory that he once beheld without those prison walls.

Freedom from choice, in some respects, frees space to think of other things – to imagine, to ponder and weigh, to contemplate, to deliberate and muse – upon things of his own free choice, not being externally imposed. He is free to wander down roads entirely of his own volition and his own choosing.

RLF: So it is in that not having choice forced upon him that he finds himself free, is it not? That seems to make sense.

A: Would that it made sense to those who govern us. They imagine they are serving us well in giving us choice in all things, whereas what they are really doing is enslaving us.

RLF: Do you think they are aware they are creating chains to bin d is, by increasing our choice?

A: Yes and no. The people that purport to give us choice and hence, in their minds, more freedom, are themselves hoodwinked into thinking that more choice equates with more liberty. On the other hand, there are surely those among them that know that increasing choice lessens liberty.
Robert L. Fielding

The sleep of reason produces monsters – Goya

Goya
Francisco Goya, an Aragonese Spanish painter and printmaker, was born in 1746, and was a chronicler of history and court painter to the Spanish Crown.

In 'Talking to Pharaohs', Goya discusses the meaning of the word, reason, and how it can be subverted to act as an excuse.

The sleep of reason produces monsters – Goya

RLF: Why do you think that when reason sleeps monsters are produced, and what are these monsters?

G: In order to answer these questions more fully, or indeed, answer them at all, it is necessary to provide concrete examples and then to examine these so as to concur that when reason sleeps, monsters are produced.

Think of the monsters of the past – the witch hunts of Salem, the more recent witch hunts of McCarthy in the United States, the horrors of Belsen and Auschwitz and the like, and the genocide in Rwanda and in Sebrenice in Croatia. Are these not monsters?

RLF: They certainly are – monstrous crimes against humanity.

G: Man’s inhumanity to man, yes, and what prompted them – what made ordinary people perpetrate such crimes against other, ordinary people?

RFL: They had their reasons, I am sure.

G: Yes, that is true, they had their reasons. That is what we day, isn’t it? That people must have had their reasons for doing whatever it was they did.

But can you see that the plural ‘reasons’ – ‘their reasons’ in particular, are not the same as the singular noun ‘reason’?

RLF: That word would be synonymous with the word ‘logic’ wouldn’t it?

G: Yes, it would. We can also turn the word into a verb and talk of our ability to reason.

RLF: Which would mean our ability to think logically, I think.

G: Yes, so now do you see how all these words differ, and how the things they stand for differ? That the reasons people give for doing things, for taking certain actions, are not necessarily based upon this ‘reason’ that is synonymous with logic. One man’s reason may certainly turn out to be another man’s lack of reason, illogical reason, if that does not sound too contradictory.

And so reason is needed before action. It is common sense. If we do things for no reason, we are called irrational, impulsive, weird, or mad. And we do do things without reason, or so it seems, when we are acting without thinking. The things we do out of habit are those things we say we do almost without thinking, but is that true, I wonder.

RLF: What is a habit, if it is not something we do automatically?

G: I would say that it is something we do without calling on everything we are able to call upon when we think, and I would say that a habit is something we do without feeling it necessary to spend much time thinking before we do it.

RLF: What is an impulse, then?

G: Is it not something akin to a reaction – some action that we do with only the very least amount of thought – probably no thought at all. A reaction seems something like our inbuilt ability to save ourselves by acting without thinking.

How many of us act that way – without doing too much thinking, when we do something. Are we lazy in that – do we prefer not to think – acting without thinking things through?

RLF: I am sure that is exactly how we are, but acting quickly is a part of our lives. Driving a car involves taking actions without having the time to fully think them through, and doing it over and over in the course of any journey we take.

G: That is certainly true. But should we not deliberate more before we do something that affects others? And should we act merely by recourse to our own thoughts alone, or should we consult others?

RLF: Why should we do that?

G: To ensure that we are not acting on thoughts that are too subjective, and being so are the more probably erroneous or at least flawed.
Robert L. Fielding

Gabriel Oak – constancy

RLF: You have been constant throughout your life, Gabriel, haven’t you – even when it appeared not to be in your own best interest.

GO: I have, though it be in my nature to be so. I must take issue with you on that statement regarding acting towards my own welfare. What is in my own best interest is for me to know and pothers to guess at. What might appear as so much foolishness or naivete to a modern eye is nought to me. I only say that biding pays, an’ grabbin’ at something as it gnaws at a person’s greed does not pay.

There’s a long way to the finishin’ line o’ this life, an’ folks w’d do well to mind it afore they go rushin’ headlong for summat that mightn’t suit ‘em later on. Constancy I am charged wi’ and constancy I am guilty of, for my sins. That be my choice and my own philosophy, though I daresn’[t call it that by name, me not being too schooled in that soart o’ thing.

RLF: You loved Bathsheba – that was the start of it, wasn’t it?

GO: Aye, if ye take the beginning o’ that story for the beginning o’ my own life – it were not, o’ course. Man lives a score of years afore it takes a man like a writer o’ stories to in clued en in one o’ ‘em. But I take your meaning – my travails in the direction o’ love started as I saw her goin’ about her business tending to t’ lambs over yonder.

An’ my travails will end I’ that direction when one o’ us is under the clod – not e’en endin’ then fer we love each other beyond mortal calling.

RLF: But Bathsheba refused you at first, didn’t she?

GO: Baint a woman got the choice o’ goin’ one road or another w'out us chastising ‘er for ‘t? What she did was fright an’ proper in refusin’ me - I see it now. I seed it then, but I must admit to bein’ fearful ‘urt and disappointed by her refusal.

RLF: Most young men so refused would not have given her a second glance after that, but you remained in love with her, didn’t you?

GO: That I did. I am not as others merely for bein’ liked or cause of some such thing as to court the popularity of those I grew up with and went to school with.
Robert L. Fielding

"What we do to the earth and to the animals, we do to ourselves" - Chief Seattle

Chief Seattle
Chief Seattle was leader of the Suquamish and Duwamish Native American tribes. He was born in 1786, and espoused policies of ‘accommodation’ to white settlers.

In ‘Talking to Pharaohs’, Chief Seattle begins with his famous with his Treaty Oration to the President of the United States, urging him and his people to respect the land and revere it as his own people do. From there, he goes on to give his views and beliefs regarding the world of spirit - the change of worlds.

"CHIEF SEATTLE'S 1854 ORATION"
AUTHENTIC TEXT OF CHIEF SEATTLE'S TREATY ORATION 1854
Yonder sky that has wept tears of compassion upon my people for centuries untold, and which to us appears changeless and eternal, may change. Today is fair. Tomorrow it may be overcast with clouds. My words are like the stars that never change. Whatever Seattle says, the great chief at Washington can rely upon with as much certainty as he can upon the return of the sun or the seasons.


The white chief says that Big Chief at Washington sends us greetings of friendship and goodwill. This is kind of him for we know he has little need of our friendship in return. His people are many. They are like the grass that covers vast prairies. My people are few. They resemble the scattering trees of a storm-swept plain. The great, and I presume -- good, White Chief sends us word that he wishes to buy our land but is willing to allow us enough to live comfortably. This indeed appears just, even generous, for the Red Man no longer has rights that he need respect, and the offer may be wise, also, as we are no longer in need of an extensive country.

There was a time when our people covered the land as the waves of a wind-ruffled sea cover its shell-paved floor, but that time long since passed away with the greatness of tribes that are now but a mournful memory. I will not dwell on, nor mourn over, our untimely decay, nor reproach my paleface brothers with hastening it, as we too may have been somewhat to blame.


Youth is impulsive. When our young men grow angry at some real or imaginary wrong, and disfigure their faces with black paint, it denotes that their hearts are black, and that they are often cruel and relentless, and our old men and old women are unable to restrain them. Thus it has ever been. Thus it was when the white man began to push our forefathers ever westward. But let us hope that the hostilities between us may never return. We would have everything to lose and nothing to gain. Revenge by young men is considered gain, even at the cost of their own lives, but old men who stay at home in times of war, and mothers who have sons to lose, know better.


Our good father in Washington--for I presume he is now our father as well as yours, since King George has moved his boundaries further north--our great and good father, I say, sends us word that if we do as he desires he will protect us. His brave warriors will be to us a bristling wall of strength, and his wonderful ships of war will fill our harbors, so that our ancient enemies far to the northward -- the Haidas and Tsimshians -- will cease to frighten our women, children, and old men. Then in reality he will be our father and we his children. But can that ever be? Your God is not our God! Your God loves your people and hates mine! He folds his strong protecting arms lovingly about the paleface and leads him by the hand as a father leads an infant son. But, He has forsaken His Red children, if they really are His. Our God, the Great Spirit, seems also to have forsaken us. Your God makes your people wax stronger every day.



Soon they will fill all the land. Our people are ebbing away like a rapidly receding tide that will never return. The white man's God cannot love our people or He would protect them. They seem to be orphans who can look nowhere for help. How then can we be brothers? How can your God become our God and renew our prosperity and awaken in us dreams of returning greatness? If we have a common Heavenly Father He must be partial, for He came to His paleface children. We never saw Him. He gave you laws but had no word for His red children whose teeming multitudes once filled this vast continent as stars fill the firmament. No; we are two distinct races with separate origins and separate destinies. There is little in common between us.


To us the ashes of our ancestors are sacred and their resting place is hallowed ground. You wander far from the graves of your ancestors and seemingly without regret. Your religion was written upon tablets of stone by the iron finger of your God so that you could not forget. The Red Man could never comprehend or remember it. Our religion is the traditions of our ancestors -- the dreams of our old men, given them in solemn hours of the night by the Great Spirit; and the visions of our sachems, and is written in the hearts of our people.


Your dead cease to love you and the land of their nativity as soon as they pass the portals of the tomb and wander away beyond the stars. They are soon forgotten and never return. Our dead never forget this beautiful world that gave them being. They still love its verdant valleys, its murmuring rivers, its magnificent mountains, sequestered vales and verdant lined lakes and bays, and ever yearn in tender fond affection over the lonely hearted living, and often return from the happy hunting ground to visit, guide, console, and comfort them.


Day and night cannot dwell together. The Red Man has ever fled the approach of the White Man, as the morning mist flees before the morning sun. However, your proposition seems fair and I think that my people will accept it and will retire to the reservation you offer them. Then we will dwell apart in peace, for the words of the Great White Chief seem to be the words of nature speaking to my people out of dense darkness.


It matters little where we pass the remnant of our days. They will not be many. The Indian's night promises to be dark. Not a single star of hope hovers above his horizon. Sad-voiced winds moan in the distance. Grim fate seems to be on the Red Man's trail, and wherever he will hear the approaching footsteps of his fell destroyer and prepare stolidly to meet his doom, as does the wounded doe that hears the approaching footsteps of the hunter.


A few more moons, a few more winters, and not one of the descendants of the mighty hosts that once moved over this broad land or lived in happy homes, protected by the Great Spirit, will remain to mourn over the graves of a people once more powerful and hopeful than yours. But why should I mourn at the untimely fate of my people? Tribe follows tribe, and nation follows nation, like the waves of the sea. It is the order of nature, and regret is useless. Your time of decay may be distant, but it will surely come, for even the White Man whose God walked and talked with him as friend to friend, cannot be exempt from the common destiny. We may be brothers after all. We will see.


We will ponder your proposition and when we decide we will let you know. But should we accept it, I here and now make this condition that we will not be denied the privilege without molestation of visiting at any time the tombs of our ancestors, friends, and children. Every part of this soil is sacred in the estimation of my people. Every hillside, every valley, every plain and grove, has been hallowed by some sad or happy event in days long vanished. Even the rocks, which seem to be dumb and dead as the swelter in the sun along the silent shore, thrill with memories of stirring events connected with the lives of my people, and the very dust upon which you now stand responds more lovingly to their footsteps than yours, because it is rich with the blood of our ancestors, and our bare feet are conscious of the sympathetic touch. Our departed braves, fond mothers, glad, happy hearted maidens, and even the little children who lived here and rejoiced here for a brief season, will love these somber solitudes and at eventide they greet shadowy returning spirits. And when the last Red



Man shall have perished, and the memory of my tribe shall have become a myth among the White Men, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe, and when your children's children think themselves alone in the field, the store, the shop, upon the highway, or in the silence of the pathless woods, they will not be alone. In all the earth there is no place dedicated to solitude. At night when the streets of your cities and villages are silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled them and still love this beautiful land. The White Man will never be alone.


Let him be just and deal kindly with my people, for the dead are not powerless. Dead, did I say? There is no death, only a change of worlds.



Chief Seattle – you will never walk alone

RLF: How do you view mortal man, roaming the Earth, trying to find his way?

CS: Did I not end my letter to the great chief in Washington by saying that there is no death, only a change of worlds.

Is it not written elsewhere that man can neither create nor destroy – fully, though he kills the buffalo and the deer, and my people, yet is it still not true that even in killing, he does not destroy.

RLF: You mean that the spirit lives on?

CS: Of course, but there is more than that to be said, though perhaps there are few to say it these days, in which the transient is the most permanent, and the permanent is overlooked and forgotten.

If matter cannot be destroyed or created, then my people are still all around us, even as their spirits are, so are their flesh and their blood, their bones and their hair, sinew and tendon – all is here in altered form but here nevertheless.

I have said that a rock, which you might call barren and lifeless, even a rock thrills with memories of children at their play, of braves playing at being great warriors, rushing headlong past on horses they would have breathe fire to paralyze their foes in their tracks. All this the rocks have seen, even though you call them dumb and unloving.

The dust of roads and tracks across our plains responds more lovingly to footfall that it knows than to those it has never felt. The land reverberates with the noises of our ancestors, who took time to feel the land beneath their feet, feel every undulation and pebble, every hollow and bump in what you think of as merely featureless plains to be used up by your highways and your attendant parking lots, that you may hurl yourself across it, thinking only of your destination, caring but little for your journey.

As it is in your movements across this earth, so it is with your life. It is as if the journey of life means nothing to you, as though the end of becoming rich is that point on which your mind focuses – that and no other, as if that end justifies treating everything on the way as a means to that point.

The transient nature of wealth of money is as everything – it is an ideal that you will not allow to be tarnished, even though it tarnishes all it touches, leaving you at the end of your journey unable to recall the details of a life that is only given once. Yet it is squandered for a sweet taste in the mouth, the moment of pleasure that, while being intense in the minute, leaves with no remnant of joy.

Man cannot create or destroy, all he can do is lose what he has, either through its changing form or through its being forsaken and ignored as not worthy of a moment’s delay or hesitation. What he loses, he can never retrieve – time. It is the one thing that can be lost forever and being lost is so destroyed.

And so, because of man’s propensity to fling himself through it as through a void, he overturns the laws of the Earth I had enunciated at the first – that man can neither create nor destroy. It is true, but only to the extent of matter, being but made of atoms of substance. It is not true to the extent that he can destroy time, by flinging it away like so much flotsam, as if his own time on Earth were somehow unimportant to him.

What has made him act in this way, wasting what is in short supply and cherishing only what is transient. How does man live his life by one law while disregarding that same law when applied to himself? In your laws, so called laws, of economics, that which is scarce has value, and that which is common and unlimited is worth nought. So, diamond and gold are precious under that law, while time is worth less, or worthless, even as it has a scarcity that may not be adapted or changed.

In a similar way, though more dominated by pure physical laws, the land of my fathers is valued only so far as it can be made to reap something that has a lesser value. Buying dear and selling cheap goes against those same laws you hold dear and allow to restrain your lives, and yet it is done every time land goes under a cover of concrete or stone, never to breathe again and provide sustenance to those living creatures with which you share your time on Earth. Depriving them of their habitat is depriving yourself of yours, is it not?

And this is the ultimate transgression of your kin, to lose that which should not be lost, and is not yours to lose. Ownership carries with it obligations. To lose it knowingly is surely the folly of committing yourself to a slow death every day of your short lives.
Robert L. Fielding

Kindred Spirits

Kindred Spirit"

I am the spirit that walks with you through this arduous path, where the streams are fast and the waters are deep.

I am the spirit that will be with you at the end of this journey, when the sacred winds will lift you to the heavens.

I am the spirit that willingly came here just for you: to accompany you, to love you and to guide you in your old age.

I am the spirit that will never leave your side and be forever with you.

"I AM YOUR KINDRED SPIRIT.""

From the diary of Alexey Ilyushin Berardi

Black Elk's vision

Black Elk speaks

RLF: How old were you when you had your first vision?

BE: I was a boy of nine summers. My vision took in all that had passed and what was to come – foretelling difficulties for my tribe and for all that sustains. My vision took in four horses- the blacks, the whites, the sorrels and the buckskins from the four points of the compass. My grandfathers had many hills to climb, after which more became clear. My vision encompassed all. I saw that the circle of all was made of many intertwined hoops, of which one was the sacred hoop of my people, and the shapes of all things that must live together. The circle was wide as daylight and indeed as wide as starlight. In the center grew the one tree, flowering and sheltering all beneath its outspreading branches.

RLF: And how do you interpret this vision?

BE: That the great provider shall be in danger as we in turn shall, but that all will be well if we see. That we must take account of all things under the arch of the sky; not as the wasichus do, only thinking and caring for their own immediate needs, not looking beyond their own means. That is not the way of the Oglala Sioux.

We have a saying;

‘Sometimes dreams are wiser than waking.’

Merely to use conscious rationality is to miss the wisdom of ages that runs in our veins. Are not our dreams a connection with all we are; flesh and blood, skin and bone, but also water too, and a thousand other elements that make us a living part of a whole – coming from the ground which fed our grandfathers and their grandfathers?
Robert L. Fielding

Aldo Leopold - relating stories of the land ethic

Aldo Leopold

Aldo Leopold was an American ecologist, forester and environmentalist, who was influential in the forming of modern environmental ethics and wilderness preservation.

In 'Talking to Pharaohs' Leopold relates various stories to illustrate what he terms the land ethic.

Killing the wolf

AL: Looking out across a wilderness – a wild place full of animals, birds, insects, fish in its rivers and plant-life as the first rung up the food-chain, I came to realize that it exists in a sort of balance, a precarious one, I grant you, but a balance nevertheless.

First of all, the vegetable matter is food for the deer, which in turn are the prey of wolves. The land can support only as much as it can support and no more. Man steps into this wild place and shoots a few wolves and a few deer. Nothing much changes – at first. It’s only when more hunters come and the fun begins – shooting wolves because they are wolves – an animal to be feared – why not shoot the blasted things – they prey on the deer and that aint good. No deer, no hunting, so kill the wolf and the deer lives.

But the wolves placed limits on the number of deer in the wilderness – without that limit, deer proliferate, increase in numbers, and something happens – the vegetable cover starts to look a bit thin. Even the hunters notice how the juniper saplings are bitten almost down to the ground by the hungry deer. With no natural prey, the deer thrive, until they hit a ceiling – the amount of vegetation will not support the numbers of deer. Something has to give – plant-life becomes scarce – the deer get thin and some die. Plant cover becomes threadbare, the howling winds, violent storms and rushing streams take the bared earth away to silt up an ox-bow down the river a ways.

With the demise of the plant-life, everything starts to run out – topsoil that once was home to that most unassuming of creatures, the earthworm, is now bereft of any. Birds fly to pastures new or die on the fields as winter sets in.

Frost comes and does for what is left of that thin layer of humous that has supported life way back through time. The snow melts and rivulets of dirty brown water flow helter-skelter into a river that natives lower down have begun to nickname, ‘Old Muddy’.

The hunters move on to where they know the deer thrive – they have fun killing wolves on days when deer are few, and the whole thing starts over.

Left alone, the wild places survive, along with every living creature – flora and fauna to the zoologist and the botanist. Let man once walk across it with some design on it and the cycles of life and death, birth and rebirth become disrupted. Such men once called native Indians ignorant and primitive.

Buffalo and deer roamed across this country where none exist today. Ignorance dressed up in all the frippery of civilization has done for them, without it even being aware that it happened because of something done in its name.

The death of a species

AL: For one species to mourn the death of another is a new thing under the sun. The Cro-Magnon who slew the last mammoth thought only of a loss of meat; the sportsman who shot the last pheasant thought only of the loss of sport; the sailor who fished the last whale out of the ocean thought of his lost livelihood. If we were to die, would the mammoth, the pheasant or the mighty whale mourn us.

RLF: But did not Cro-Magnon hunt the mammoth for food to feed his tribe? The trouble seems to have begun with those of us who kill for no other reason than we can, to show our prowess over the birds and beasts of the field. If we only killed to eat, and slew only what we could eat, the extinct would still be running about.

AL: Think of that great necessity, the fridge-freezer, full to its iced up lid with pieces of fish and meat - deep frozen to keep until we are ready to eat them. That is surely a symbol of what we have become, though it looks as normal to us as a carpet under our feet, or the table surrounded by chairs at which we sit down to eat.

In the time before refrigeration, man placed taboos on foodstuff that couldn’t well survive as something to be eaten more than a day or two after it had been hunted and killed. In climates hotter than this, the meat of the wild boar, while delicious if cooked and eaten immediately, was found to be full of canker and worm if left till the morrow.

The fridge shows our life for what it is. No longer hunter-gatherers, cropsharers, but industrialists with no time to do our killing, we employ others to do it in factory like repetition, the better to keep costs down. We treat our foodstuffs with preservatives and dyes that we may eat it wholly out of season, imagining its bright hues of red and yellow, green and purple to be natural, to look delicious, whatever it may taste like.

The fridge shows us up for what we really are and have become – accumulators, stockpilers rooted to that ‘science’ of artificial shortages and gluts, economics with its price elasticity to account for why people continue to buy something though its price has gone through the roof; with its laws of supply and demand – self-fulfilling prophecies by which we live and breathe, and by which we may one day die.

The forming of a land ethic

RLF: What do you mean by the term ‘land-ethic’ and why do we need one?

AL: As you know, land is designated chiefly as property, owned by someone, with a price on it. Up until now, owning property entails privileges but no obligations. A man’s land is there to do with as he sees fit. There are some limits on what he may do in some cases, but much land lies unprotected, particularly in those places whose laws are not fully developed, operational and enforceable.

RLF: But surely, even if so much land is under the law, limited as to its use, we would do well to adopt an ethic towards it as we have towards each other, if we are to save ourselves and the Earth that is our home and ultimate provider.

AL: That is precisely my point; that in the absence of any overall control of how land is misused and abused, what we need is a sort of charter of human rights, applied to land rather than people.

If destroying land becomes as unthinkable, for the many, as destroying human life, then we could be content that these abuses would cease. Do not forget that although temporary measures can be put in place to protect the integrity of the land and everything that lives on it, once the ecological threat ceases or is seen to have reduced, there are many who would go back to the old ways to make the cycle of destruction begin again.

If we come to see man, not as conquering Nature, but as cohabiting with it, living in peace with it, not placing it under duress, then our future would not look so dim.

As it is, we view land purely as economic units to be harvested, as so much space to be covered in concrete or worse, as a place to dump refuse, to despoil without a second thought.

RLF: That is surely not true of the land in national parks, protected by statute.

AL: That is true, there are pockets of land that have some significance to us and where exploitation is minimal, but what of the land that lies unprotected, demeaned and disrespected, what of that land? Does that land have any right to not be destroyed; I think not!

RLF: Which land are you thinking of?

AL: Land is land, is it not? All land is but a piece of the surface of the planet and as such is deserving of our respect, and yet much of it still goes without regard.

Take those parcels of land between the railway and the siding, or land that adjoins the highway in grassy banking and side of deep cuttings – how is that regarded? Is such land not regarded as unable to be saved, as passed its best, as so much detritus from our economic activity – it has paid the ultimate price, devoid of any fertility, stained beyond use.

RLF: But what use is such land to anyone?

AL: That is the question I want most earnestly to remove from people’s lips, not just from their lips but from their minds also. Any land, all land is the base of the pyramid of life, from its soil which gives plants sustenance, fixing nitrogen from the air we breathe, into a form that can be used to create cells of living vegetation. Insects feed upon plants and fertilise them, animals – herbivores live on the plant life and carnivores and omnivores feed on those animals and plants that are edible, by taste or taboo.

Yet we undermine the construction of that pyramid at its base level, toppling each until we achieve our own undoing.

This we do to accumulate – chattels, goods and of course, the money to purchase them beyond what we could possibly need. And to top it off, to stand up and speak against this wanton disregard of the pyramidal structure of life on Earth is to commit the sin of sins, to utter ideals that seem only to appeal to the deranged, dangerous or deluded.

RLF: But man has got to live, to survive, not to freeze in the dark.

AL: Have we not outgrown that old chestnut – in the manufacturing of want, not based upon need of any kind but rather upon what we think we need, looking over our shoulders at someone who has more. We were told not to covet and yet our every move is made in that direction, to feed a desire that is unworthy of us.

RLF: You should add, then, an ethic of how to live in accordance with the needs of the land beneath our feet, for it seems to me, now, that what is really needed is a land ethic and an ethic to accompany it, an ethic of the self-worth of man devoid of any measures of his worth that stem from how much he has, be it of money, land or chattels, as you call them.

AL: That is well said, my friend, for are not the two intertwined? And if they are, it is as much an admittance that something is amiss with us, if we place value on something that can be bought with money. We had better return to the thoughts of Henry David Thoreau – not placing his tenets in ridicule but seeing the truth of them and the effects they would bring to both our way of life, I might say, our quality of life, and the consideration we afford that from which all life springs – land.

RLF: Returning to our newly formed and accepted obligations stemming from ownership of land, is it not the case that such have no meaning without conscience, and that in consequence, what we must do is to extend our social conscience – well developed as it is, to a conscience that includes land as well as human beings, all living creatures – flora and fauna, right down the vertices of that pyramid of which you spoke earlier, right down to the soil that feeds each of us in its way.

AL: Exactly, and that means moving away from only accepting evidence that is economic in nature as valid in any argument. This is no more or less than a revamping of a theory of value that includes more of what has traditionally been omitted and less of what has been included – a balance sheet that does not just include numbers.

Land such as marsh, bog, dune, desert, and, as I have said, those marginal places that have almost had the title of ‘land’ taken away – all those places must be weighed as having value.

RLF: But who can lead us out of this morass of ignorance in which we are habitually used to viewing all things, organic or inorganic, as merely a provider of honey to be dropped into our mouths?

AL: We must look to where we have traditionally been used to looking for such a lead; from our belief systems – their creators and the myths that sustain them, and to education, from day one until the final day.

The land ethic

AL: The problem with ethics is that we only seem to be able to hold them and be directed by them with something we can understand, or feel, love or have faith in. If the land is largely not consciously considered by the majority of us, how are we to be guided by anything. I think that is half the problem; that apart from our basic religious beliefs, which those lacking in any devotion take for granted, or at most hardly consider, we are left with the myths of Pometheus and the like to explain our stance towards it.

Since the Enclosure Acts, rendering most people cut off from it by wall and fence, land has come to be looked upon as an economic entity only, with minor recreational uses to afford it some respect and protection.

Bodies such as The National Trust have made it their business to build up the notion that the land, as well as those historic sites upon it are in some way worthy of our time and our charity.

RLF: Except in cases in which a conflict of interests is perceived – a motorway runs through fine arable land or divides some ancient tumuli, then the land and anything upon it inevitably lose out to the urban sprawl and the town and country planner’s deadly eye. Some of our best known dams and reservoirs, arterial highways and new green field industrial sites have cost us dear. The lost villages of Derwent and Ashopton in the valley that is now flooded by the Derwent and Ladybower reservoirs, were both submerged that the cities have their supply of drinking water.

AL: What passes for expediency and necessity at the time, can often be seen, with hindsight, to have been a waste of a natural habitat – for what cannot later be considered so, if we think in terms of that pyramid structure of living, we spoke of earlier.

How to mediate between the two conflicting claims on a piece of land is the chief difficulty here; one man’s viable alternative is another’s home, one habitat here is no less a one yonder, and so on.

But to return to our main focus; we must not assume, though we generally have done, that because a particular increase in density enriched human life, that any future indefinite increase will enrich our lives corrspondingly. We are habitually used to depending upon extrapolations that while looking logical on paper, take into account only the smallest handful of variables, chief among these the effects, as we have said, that militate against economic forecasts, and that inconvenience the least number of people.

A land ethic would have us confront what is ethically and esthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient, before we moved in with bulldozers to revamp whole areas and lose what cannot ever be replaced.

I can imagine the arguments that will be ranged against objections of this sort – ethical and esthetic. They will be based upon the assumption that we cannot afford those luxuries – that what matters is livelihoods, economic growth in perpetuity, as if we can have that without paying a high price – the highest.

We need to say that land development is right when it preserves the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community – the pyramid. If it does not then it is wrong. The difficulty lies in getting social approbation for actions that correspond with ethical and esthetic considerations, and social disapproval for actions that do not correspond with them, and to obtain those, people need to be educated in ways that allow them to see through the economist's fallacies to those factors that are detrimental to our lives on Earth.

Education – trading awareness for things of lesser value, or striving to see the whole

RLF: The problem, as I see it, with the ‘land-ethic’ is how to regard non-human organisms as ends in themselves, and not merely as means to our own ends – how to relinquish the hold instrumentality has on our minds.

AL: The answer lies in education – and in ways that you might not readily see. Let me start by asking you why a subject like geography is taught in schools. Is it taught so that we may have mapmakers, geologists, surveyors, or is it taught for some other reason?

RLF: I would say that the answer is Yes to both, although I am not fully aware why the answer should be yes to the second part; that it is taught for some other reason.

AL: Well, first of all, let me say that you are correct; we are taught geography so that we may have some scholars in that discipline – to practice cartography, geology or surveying, as well as some to teach geography in our schools and universities, but geography is also included in our educational curriculums because were it not to be we would have gaps in our view of how our world is.

I used the example of geography, but I may equally have used the subject areas of Physics, Chemistry, English Literature, History or any of our academic disciplines at present taught in schools and later at colleges and universities.

The reason is that it is the role of education, not merely to fit us for a particular way of earning a living – a purely a vocational matter, but rather education is a way of making us fit for life in all its varied aspects and hues. If it were not, we should have dispensed with most subjects.

The fact of the matter is that in learning about the geography of our world, or in learning of its history if you prefer, we come to see how the sum of its parts fits into a whole, and in so doing find out where we dovetail into the arrangement, for we are as integral a part of Earth as any mountain, stream, ant or eagle. And it is in our education that we find that out.

Of course, we do not stop learning when we graduate - leave those buildings – schools, colleges and universities – when we vacate those classrooms, lecture theatres and laboratories and libraries – at least we should not. On the contrary, it is usually when our formal education ends that we are trained to earn our living, and come to realize that all we were taught in school informs us later as citizens.

I remember the British Prime Minister of the day, Margaret Thatcher, while visiting a university campus somewhere in England, asking a young woman what she was doing. The post-graduate student replied that she was taking Elizabethan Studies. Mrs. Thatcher smiled in her distinctive way, and made the comment, “What a luxury!”

I thought then, as I still do, how trite and condescending that comment was, and how indicative it was of her ignorance of the world and how it turns on its axis. She undoubtedly meant that another expert on Elizabethan times was something we could well do without; that the taxpayers’ money could have been better spent training an engineer of some kind.

How wrong of her, I thought. If we lack awareness of our own history, with all its colours, its pitfalls, mistakes and triumphs, how are we to manage to avoid repeating the same mistakes of the past, or omitting to include those triumphal acts in the ways we live today.

The whole is the sum of its parts, and it is something much more; our education tells us that. And, as it is with us, so it is with the natural world that surrounds us and of which we are a part. If we discard as trivial to our interests things like mountains, streams, ants or eagles, we do ourselves the same disservice as we would if we discarded a subject like geography from our national curriculum.

The whole picture is not ours to know fully, but it is ours to strive to learn about. An ethic of the land would be invaluable in that respect – who knows, it may even find its way onto our educational syllabus before very long.

RLF: That it isn’t at present a subject of study at any level other than in higher education suggests it is either in its infancy as a field of study, or not deemed worthy to be studied.

AL: I would say that both are not far from the truth, although I would expect your latter explanation to not be the case for very much longer. It seems to me that the part played by every organism as a subject area ready to be studied, particularly in terms of the ethical perspective we have spoken of is probably still a long way off becoming a mainstream subject, particularly in schools.

This should not deter us from constructing an ethical framework on which to hang, as it were, several important concepts.

RLF: What would those be?

AL: Things like the relationship between those species traditionally regarded as pests. We refer to species of plants that proliferate without cultivation as weeds, do we not? And that informs us of their value to us, but more needs to be done to use such fecund species to colonise those pieces of land sorely in need of cover of vegetation.

Our prejudice towards certain species of both flora and fauna needs to be re-examined to determine if we are not biased against them for no other reason than they figure in what used to be called ‘old wives’ tales’ and such superstitions.

And we should look critically at all forms of what is euphemistically referred to as sport that involves the slaying of animals. Those species regarded as almost surplus to our requirements – pests, nuisances, predators, should be studied along with the niches that support them.

Similarly, we would do well to attempt to utilize those areas of land not normally thought of as being of any use. I spoke earlier of grass verges and embankments along highways and railways, introducing species of plants, for example, that will support other species so that they too can be viewed as useful, instead of as merely waste land.

Even that term – waste land, should be discarded as a misnomer; no land being thought of as a waste of anything. Gradations of usefulness, not necessarily to man, you understand, could be constructed on the basis of the bio-mass that can be supported on any particular piece of land.

And finally, we must re-examine those assumptions so commonly used in economics to ascertain whether there could not be ways of factoring in what have been regarded as unwanted qualities, while allotting a lesser proportion to those parts of the equation that only regard the value or property advantageous to man as worthy of consideration.

RLF: Doing that would have repercussions in all sorts of fields and disciplines, I think.

AL: And would be long overdue, knocking some off the complacent perch they are so comfortably sat on.
Robert L. Fielding

Ralph Waldo Emerson - Nature

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Born in 1803 in Boston, Emerson’s father called him ‘a rather dull scholar’. He was a leader of the Transcendental movement in the 19th Century and also an essayist and poet.

In ‘Talking to Pharaohs’ he instructs us to change; to conider the land we use and sometimes abuse as something more worthy of our consideration, as an end in itself, rather than merely a means to an end, as we do at present.


RWE: Why should we not have a philosophy of insight, instead of one of tradition? Instead of delving into the sepulchres of our fathers, valuable as that can be, cannot we try to look forward, building from those tombs not constructing them over and over.

It is Nature that informs us, and yet we ignore it – to our cost. Rather we find our maturity a cloak ill-fitted to incredulity. We outgrow our infancy taking the least we can from it, or so we think. Our notions are garments woven on the loom of youth, yet we discard them as if they are threadbare or out of any fashion we care about.

The lover of Nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood, as I have said more than once. What we see in the forest, our forefathers saw, and theirs, back into the darkest mists of time. Now, we come with axes and hatchets to destroy what was and is.

It is in destroying Nature that we destroy ourselves – quicker than we can know. Land is viewed merely as property, so many farms across the landscape of my country – this bit owned by Miller, this by Locke, that by Manning – so much property and theirs to do with as they please. But there is a property in the landscape that none can own, save he who can bring together all of the parts – an artist; painter or poet. Goodman Miller farms his land, only considering it as yielding something to him to spend later on commodities. He puts back only so much as will help it yield the same the next year, or worse, will help it yield more, and more and more, until he lets it lie fallow perforce, to recuperate some of its yielding power, and that over and over until it yields only dust.

Never considering himself a part of that which he daily tills, but rather like an artifact to be used until it rusts uselessly and is discarded. Yet if he once became part of it, as a whole, taking only from it that which it would freely yield, then he would find his life so much enriched as so much fertile loam, enjoying his companionship with the Earth as the infant does before he is tainted by urges to command and will.

RLF: Put into plainer language, we should respect the land and consider it not just as property to do with as we like?

RWE: Yes, our position to it should be relational, not distant. We should start to view Nature as an end in itself, rather than as we do now, merely as a means, as ours to use as we alone see fit.
Robert L. Fielding

Emily Dickinson - finding the Archemedeian point

ED: To find a point from which to look at the Earth and everything on it, and that includes us, we must do as Archimedes stated, when he said that if he could find a place to stand, he could lever the Earth and move it. Of course, he wasn’t talking literally, but metaphorically. To find what is referred to as the Archimedian point from which to start, we must be objective, first and foremost.

RLF: Some hold that effective social criticism must derive from and resonate with the habits and traditions of actual people living in a specific time and place.

ED: That is undoubtedly true, but if we use the views of the many, for no more reason that they are the many and not the few, then we err.

‘Much madness is divinest sense
to the discerning eye;
Much sense the darkest madness.
‘Tis the majority
In this, as all, prevails.
Assent, and you are sane;
Demur, – you’re straightway dangerous,
And handled with a chain.

These are my words, I penned them, and I believe them to contain a truth about men and women, educated or otherwise, primitive or modern, conservative or radical – that what the many believe, passes for truth, even though it may go without critical reflection being leveled at it.

RLF: What mechanism operates to make it so? Is there such a thing as the collective will?

ED: I believe there is, but that does not mean necessarily that it contains anything amounting to true consideration. It is a brave man indeed, most would say a fool, who goes against the general consensus on how life should be lived, for example.

Let us look at an example: how many have to voice the same opinion before it is noticed and taken as the way forward? We are either told outright what to do, say and think, by politicians, or it is suggested in strong terms in the popular press. We have no voice to be heard in other ways, or at least not in any way that could be considered effective in initiating a groundswell of change in outlook or opinion. It is as my few lines above suggest – that what goes for madness is often divinest sense and vice versa.

To step outside the box is to either invite ridicule or be ignored. Yet, as Archimedes pointed out, albeit metaphorically, we need to somewhere to stand from which to view things as they really are.

Normality is particular in its weight and direction; what is normal for us would not be so for a people dwelling in another place at another time. The here and now particularizes and specifies that weight and that direction, and yet how often are we told that human nature is this way and no other, that what we do, say, believe, and act upon is constant. The sad part is that it is taken in the same spirit and token as something akin to a law of physics – water boiling at 100 Centigrade, whereas even that old chestnut of a scientific fact is only consistently true if we take pure water and heat it at sea level. One grain of salt or one foot of elevation renders a different result.

So it is with the human race, though what go for facts are no more than a propaganda crafted onto an observation. We can change if we will it. One man can alter his beliefs, his way of living, and although he may start out at variance with his neighbours, our gregarious nature ensures that it is not long before many more act in the same way as that brave and forthright individual.

Like sheep we can be led by charismatic individualism – if this were not so, we would have difficulty explaining the trends and fashions that colour our lives. One man says it loud enough and often enough, and from some elevated pulpit and we take it up in our cries. Assent and you are sane, I said before.

We must find that point that our old friend who was wont to shout, “Eureka!” spoke of before we are able to change in ways that greater than us demand.

RLF: What or who is greater than us?

ED: Earth, our home, is greater than all of us, and, since she is commanded by laws that are absolute rather than relative, we would do well to listen and change. Taking up that point removed from our present position to look at what we have become would aid us in our quest to find a different way to the one we are habitually used to viewing as unchangeable.
Robert L. Fielding

Rachel Carson - environmental ethics

Rachel Carson

Rachel Carson, an American marine biologist and writer, was born in 1907. Her book, ‘Silent Spring’ was extremely influential and is often credited with beginning the global environment movement.

In ‘Talking to Pharaohs’, Carson first defines what is meant by the term, environmental ethics; rethinking the relationship between man and the natural environment.

RLF: Could you define environmental ethics?

RC: Yes. Environmental ethics concerns itself with the answers to questions such as the following. Should we continue to clear cut forests for the sake of human consumption, should we continue to make gasoline powered vehicles, depleting fossil fuel resources while the technology exists to create zero-emission vehicles, what environmental obligations do we need to keep for future generations, and finally whether it is right for humans to knowingly cause the extinction of a species for the (perceived or real) convenience of humanity.

I believe that the more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe around us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.

Environmental ethics is that part of environmental philosophy which considers the ethical relationship between man and the natural environment. It is influenced by a large range of disciplines: law, sociology, theology, economics, ecology and geography; there are so many ethical choices and decisions that we make concerning our environment.

RLF: Really? How can theology, for example, have any connection whatsoever to issues related to the environment? Surely those are scientific issues rather than moral ones, aren’t they?

RC: On the face of it, yes, but if you consider the Earth, the whole of our environment, and that includes the envelope of gases and vapour that we are used to calling our atmosphere, if you consider it as something of which we are a part, then why should not theological points of view be discussed in the same breath as scientific ones.

Are not the physical sciences something that connects us with our environment – we cannot survive without oxygen and water, which are but chemical substances – an element and a compound, to be exact. Do not the sciences of medicine, the science of biology, anatomy and physiology concur on this?

RLF: That is true, they do. But how is philosophy with its roots in the forest of ethics come to be so connected? Surely philosophy is the study of man’s more cerebral dimensions than simply his physical ones, is it not?

RC: So many would have us believe, at the cost to both branches of thought, and to our own cost. Does treating man and the world in which he exists and survives as if he were two totally distinct and different entities help us to make the right decisions to ensure the survival of both?

Are not both the Earth and we who live on its surface intertwined in ways that make us bound to consider both when making decisions that affect both? And, I must include all who live on its surface in any equation I would formulate where we and our planet home are concerned.

RLF: But it has been that way for so long, has it not? The physical sciences have traditionally been considered remote from the humanities – from philosophy, religion, sociology, economics, and even more distant from the arts – visual and otherwise, have they not?

RC: They have, and that, in my opinion, and in the opinion of a growing number of people, is at the root of all our problems today as we seem to near the apocalypse, the one of our own making.

If you think of the equations and assumptions of that most man-made, most synthetic of all philosophies – economics, land and labour are added as ingredients more or less with as much impartiality as plant and machinery. To our cost, we are still thinking of flesh and blood in those terms, even as we ourselves are nothing more nor less than flesh and blood.

RLF: And you draw from such treatment of man and land that neither is taken in to any more account than stone, than steel and water?

RC: No more than anything that appears one the one side of an equation, even forgetting, in the logic of its values that inorganic and organic stem from below our feet.

RLF: It is as if we must go back to a sort of initial position in which everything comes from below our feet, as you put it, that what is called man-made – synthetic is ultimately natural in its origins.

RC: And it is that going back to an initial position, that we see that it is right there where our faults are initiated, that nothing is synthetic – that everything comes from Earth – everything, and that includes us, all of us, as I have said.

We must not forget our first laws – that we can neither create matter, nor destroy it. What was here a millennia ago is still here – in a greatly altered form, no doubt, but nevertheless still here. The great oaks that saw Shakespeare write his first play, and were cut down before he penned his final triumph are still here, in the humus of our soil, feeding and replenishing all that grows and is harvested to feed us.

You have a famous song that follows similar lines, do you not? ‘On Ilkley Moor baht ‘at’, is it not called?

RLF: Why yes, we do.

RC: How does that last line go again, after the friend whose health suffered from his going without a hat on that moor, and who then died and later was eaten by worms, who were then eaten by ducks to feed us at our tables?

RLF: ‘Then we shall all have eaten thee!’

RC: Tell me that is not so.

RLF: Well, a lot of processes have to pass before it can be really said to have happened, but yes, it is so.

RC: Now tell me that some vestige of our dead friend does not inhabit us in some molecular scale?

RLF: That is probably also true. But how can it be helped? And how are we affected by it?

RC: Who can say? Science has a long way to go, has it not before it can say with any certainty that body and soul are as distinct as night and day.

RLF: But we must utilize scientific knowledge to advance, surely, even as it is, imperfect as you say.

RC: Of course, but any progress we make should have a broader remit of accountability than previously.

Whereas progress has always been viewed almost uncritically, in as much as the only real questions confronting its advances have been ones concerned with the financial and economic aspects, now we are obliged to consider variables that include many more sides. Principally, we should be looking at the effects of any progress on the environment.

RLF: But surely that is already the case. Companies cannot just steamroller ahead regardless of the impact of any planned development.

RC: That is true, but in cases where an overwhelming financial advantage is assured, concerns about environmental issues become at best only secondary considerations.

I am not just talking about our own countries, where regulations are in place to prevent much damage taking place; all nation states, traditionally hermetically sealed, as we might say, in terms of what goes on within their borders, must subject themselves to the scrutiny of those bodies formed by the international community with the responsibility to ensure environmental damage is minimal or non-existent.

For what happens inside one national border affects us all. We are seeing the result of carbon emissions from all points on the surface of the globe – from countries with stringent regulations and from those with hardly any.

Corruption does not always take the form of bribery, though that is what is usually thought of when that word is mentioned. Turning a blind eye, ensuring that certain regulatory laws do not appear on the statute books are two of the more odious forms of that cancer that affects both developing and developed countries these days.

In those countries that have yet to reach a level of development which ensures adequate standards of living for their citizens, the pressure to overlook environmental concerns in favour of financial benefits must be great. And condemning countries for their being remiss in that respect begins to sound like so much hypocrisy from governments of countries who have contributed and still contribute much to environmental pollution.

RLF: But how can we expect to maintain our present standards of living and yet tone down, as it were, our manufacturing and primary industries to come closer to meeting the pressing needs of the planet?

JC: That is a question that has dogged many, and been overlooked by most. Many choose to disregard measures and agreements when they seem to threaten economic interests at home. The man in the street is never consulted and that despite his being affected just as much by pollution as the next man. Democracy rarely stretches into the realm of the economic, except to ensure a population's compliance in making it all work.

Systems that inhibit growth, be they political or philosophical, scientific or moral become marginalized in importance, at least in the public’s eyes. However, most political systems, while they eschew some things and adopt others, and seem ostensibly at variance with one another, invariably have economic growth via rapid industrialization as common ground. The Soviet Union, while appearing to offer a vastly different system of governance, was in fact not at all unlike the West in terms of its economic goals and the means of achieving them.

What is needed now is a political system that is as responsive to environmental needs as it espouses to be towards the needs of its subjects. Rarely does that dimension – the environmental one, achieve any real prominence in policy making, and that despite the warnings of universal bodies charged with watching for potential environmental catastrophe.

RLF: President Carter, when in office, commissioned a study entitled ‘The Global 2000 Report to the President’. This detailed thousands of factors in a trail of environmental destruction, both retrospective and extrapolated. It made chilling reading, but when the next incumbent took office – President Reagan, it was rubbished, virtually disowned and totally ignored by the incoming administration, despite its dire and urgent prognostications.

The will to change is what is most required, and what is least probable. Science and technology have advanced our capabilities to the extent that great and far reaching developments are possible. The fact that they do not come to anything like fruition is due to the economic impact upon, for instance, automobile manufacturers, exporters of fossil fuels and the like. We could have vehicles with zero-emissions, but we do not. Ask yourself why when the world is crying out for them.
Robert L. Fielding