The only way is forward:Įven in the most optimistic future available, we will profoundly reconfigure our fauna, flora, and genome. There is no going back to Eden, in other words. Wilson’s proposal to designate half of the world a nature preserve-necessitate extraordinary levels of human intervention. The most radical plans to curb humanity’s all-consuming effects on the planet-the rewilding movement, for instance, or the biologist E.O. “Almost no rock, leaf, or cubic foot of air on Earth has escaped our clumsy signature.” “What we still, in a flourish of misplaced nostalgia, call ‘the natural world’ is gone, if ever it existed,” Rich writes in the book’s introduction. What we think of as natural is often as manmade, and as newly constructed, as the concept of nature. The same can be said of so many of the animals we are most familiar with: cats, dogs, chickens, cows, and so forth. The phrase “genetically engineered rabbit” is itself a kind of pleonasm, he points out, because pet rabbits are already manmade creatures, domesticated through many centuries of breeding practices and consumption patterns. The subsequent media controversy, Rich argues, tended to miss the most interesting aspect of the work, which was that there was nothing particularly radical about what Kac had done.
Kac is best known for GFP Bunny (2000), a work that involved splicing an albino rabbit with a green fluorescent protein ( GFP) from a bioluminescent jellyfish, so that it appeared to glow bright green. To put it in biblical terms, the line between obeying God and playing God is as blurry as that between domesticating animals for agriculture and creating chimerical creatures in laboratories.
Rich’s premise, and Kac’s, is that this is an unsustainable distinction. “Visitors flashed the bacteria with ultraviolet light,” writes Rich, “introducing mutations, which were translated back into English.” Rich is interested in Kac’s work because it addresses the strained and complicated relationship between the natural and the unnatural.
#Jon stewart apocalypse cow code
It’s quoted in reference to a work by the Brazilian-American conceptual artist Eduardo Kac, in which he translated part of the verse first into Morse code and then into DNA base pairs, before finally inscribing them into a bacteria culture, displayed in a petri dish at an Austrian gallery. This fragment of Genesis appears in the final pages of Nathaniel Rich’s Second Nature: Scenes from a World Remade. Our adherence to this view of the world and our place within it, in other words, has amounted to its own kind of Fall. The attitude toward nature that He defines and sanctifies with those words is, after all, precisely the attitude that led human beings to exploit nature so ruthlessly, and for so long, that the planet is now in danger of becoming unlivable for vast numbers of its inhabitants, both human and nonhuman. The whole sorry business with the serpent, the forbidden fruit, and the banishment doesn’t come about for another two chapters, but if you were in the mood for a little heretical revisionism you might argue, just for fun, that the true original sin can be located not in man’s first disobedience, but in God’s first command. “Be fruitful, and multiply,” he tells them, “and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” God’s first, foundational decree explicitly casts the relationship between humanity and nature as one of separation and control. In the opening lines of the Bible, having brought forth the world and everything in it, God makes his inaugural address to Adam and Eve.
0 kommentar(er)
