What do you think?
Rate this book
224 pages, Paperback
First published February 8, 2005
We rangers have a fair amount of time to read and I'd been aware of these [postmodern] ideas for a while. They are merely a more fashionable version of traditional human-centred technological optimism. But seen from a boat on a regulated river that night, the claims of these postmodernists looked faulty. However poorly managed that day, the job of metering a single river to generate power without killing any whitewater rafters was far simpler than managing the climate that provided the river's water. If dams had many beneficial effects for civilisation - our late summer white water rafting season being one of them - they also had many unintentional outcomes. Coastal beaches were now deprived of their sand, for centuries replenished by rivers wearing down mountains. Some of the beaches would now grow rocky - and that change might have an effect on, say, the economy of a beach town or the nesting of plovers, and that change still another effect. [...] We humans were reductionists, and neither our brains nor our most powerful computers can begin to account for the complex web of interrelationships in a global ecosystem.
In the end much of what is seemingly known and tamed is in fact unknown, and untamed.