It’s time once again for the Shell/Economist Essay Contest, in whichyou can win vast sums of money by reusing those high-school expository writing skills. The question last year was “How much freedom should we trade for security?” The winning answer was “none,” and boiled down to the old saw, “boats in a harbor are safe, but that is not what boats are for,” complete with sailing metaphor.
This year’s theme is “Do we need nature?” which has, more or less, the same set of answers: Yes, no, and “trick question.”
Yes, we should give up the liberties a, b, and c in order to maintain safety from dangers d, e, and f. No, no amount of security is worth trading away one iota of our precious freedom. Yes, we need nature for air and warmth and undiscovered plant remedies. No, we don’t need nature, unless you mean some subset of it for raw materials from which we can synthesize everything else.
The third kind of answer argues against the question rather than for the answers it suggests most readily. It says that freedom cannot be traded for security as though they were fungible commodities, or that humanity is part of nature, everything is part of nature, there isn’t any question about needing it or not.
I can think of a dozen reasons why humanity needs nature, and I can certainly support the assertion that the question is unanswerable because humanity and nature are one. But since at least the early 1960s, I don’t think anyone with any serious intellectual ability has actually argued that humanity and nature are not only distinct, but separable, and that humanity controls nature or does not need it.
Although I normally gravitate toward “trick question” type answers, since those are the best way to show off my cleverness, I think that a “no” is probably the more difficult to argue.
Early reviews of Silent Spring accused Carson of alarmism, and stated that “man controls nature.” But that argument, along with the gender bias in its phrasing, has gone the way of the dodo, and for about the same reasons: it’s just too stupid to survive.
Today, there are throwbacks, living in special preserves of political isolation, like giant pandas in a zoo, too ineffectual to breed and preserve their species. For example, Secretary of the Interior James Watt thought conservation was a sin because God had given us just enough resources to last until the End Times, and that those dirty hippies were delaying the return of Christ by trying to save the forests.
I’m sure a “no” answer won’t win the contest– Shell is sponsoring, and they’ll want to burnish their environmentalist credentials. But is there anything even close to a legitimate or defensible “no” answer?
Secretly Ironic 