Jim Otterstrom at Earth Home Garden has a delightful piece today. Here’s a snip:
Homo colossus – A colossal failure of values
A post-election rant…
At 8:30 this morning, during a 5-mile walk with Dallas, I found myself staring at this ad poster on the front of a gas station mini-mart.
It reminded me of television, of Capitalism and economic growth, of corporate mind-control, of the recent elections, and, of the colossal failure the human species faces.
As I stood there dwelling on thoughts of colossal import, pondering the species known as Homo sapiens, I remembered sociologist William R. Catton’s term for our species as it exists today, Homo colossus.
Catton wrote, in his groundbreaking 1980 book, ‘Overshoot-The Ecological Basis For Revolutionary Change’;
“The more potent human technology became, the more man turned into a colossus. Each human colossus required more resources and more space than each pre-colossal human. Contrast the environmental impact of the Central Ohio Coal Company and its huge machines with the environmental impact of the Stone Age people who inhabited the same area a few centuries before. The Indians had not necessarily possessed any more virtue; they simply used cruder tools. They were non-colossal.”
Read all of Jim’s post here.
