Introduction

The major question considered in this chapter is whether we can develop a civilization that allows wildness to persist. By this I do not mean the wildness that sends big city teenagers on a rampage mutilating and sometimes murdering innocent persons nearby. I am using wildness in the sense that Thoreau used it; a natural system unadjusted by nature trails, parking lots, and concession stands to satisfy the needs of human society. Environmentalists have often been accused of not being open to compromise that is so characteristic of reasonable people. Unfortunately, all the major environmental compromises possible have been made. These have resulted in less than 3% of the globe's land mass remaining in what Thoreau would have accepted in his most charitable mood as wildness. A world that runs itself is fading from memory. In its place is a “managed” environment supervised by governments that cannot balance budgets. If technology and biodiversity are to coexist, it must be a technology that wildness can endure. Ecologists perpetually talk about the interdependence of things and lip service is given to this notion on Earth Day, but, in practice, we approach environmental problems one fragment at a time, not as a complex, multivariate, interdependent landscape. The coexistence of technology and biodiversity depends on switching from a fragmented to a landscape view.