The argument of the 'long view' may be correct in some meaninglessly abstract sense, but it represents a fundamental mistake in categories and time scales. Our only legitimate long view extends to our children and our children's children's children-hundreds or a few thousands of years down the road. If we let the slaughter continue, they will share a bleak world with rats, dogs, cockroaches, pigeons, and mosquitoes. A potential recovery millions of years later has no meaning at our appropriate scale.

There are no shortcuts to moral insight. Nature is not intrinsically anything that can offer comfort or solace in human terms-if only because our species is su…

Lavoisier was right in the deepest, almost holy, way. His passion harnessed feeling to the service of reason; another kind of passion was the price. Reason can…

The facts of nature are what they are, but we can only view them through the spectacles of our mind. Our mind works largely by metaphor and comparison, not alw…

When you look closely it is a question whether that which is a wrong to the present community may not prove to have been a right to the interests of posterity.…

each generation wastes a little more of the future with greed and lust for riches

He seems to think that posterity is a pack-horse, always ready to be loaded.