Jaume Terradas talks about the fight between humans and Evil, represented by the figures of the white whale, in Moby Dick, and the white shark in Jaws. However, it's possible that humans should think about if we are our own evil.
In this post-Sant Jordi commentary, I should like to refer to just a few books of great quality and interest on some perhaps less well-known traveler scientists.
In 1966, the USA’s President is Lyndon Johnson, in the USSR it is Brezhnev, in France de Gaulle, in India Indira Gandhi. There is an increasing US involvement in Vietnam’s war (and an increasing refuse of war inside the US).
Let's come back to 1916. The World War I is raging (Battle of Verdun and the Somme). Germany is in search of its ‘lebensraum’, an empire like that England and France already have. We recall the Great War today with the terrible images of Kubrick’s Paths of Glory, Monicelli’s The Great War, Losey’s King and country, Renoir’s La grande illusion, and many other films.
We cannot remain indifferent to the intriguing and risky world of possibilities that opens up as a result of biology merging with technology, evolution and culture, a combination that ultimately poses serious environmental problems.
This phrase is often repeated among biologists, but it is time for non-biologists to recognize the truth of this statement. In the opening session of this year's course at the Institute of Catalan Studies, Jordi Casanova explained that in the light of modern knowledge, we humans are animals, considering not only in our biology (an obvious fact) but also our behavior. Many studies, mostly on apes, have shown the existence of feelings such as jealousy, envy, a sense of for injustice, rebellion; to these I would add empathy, defense of hierarchy, and a wish power.
When I studied the subject of ecology at the University of Barcelona, about the years 1964-65 (fifty years ago!), Margalef was our teacher. Even though he was still not a university professor but the director of the Fisheries Research Institute of the CSIC (now Institute of Marine Sciences) where he concentrated his research. The ecology classes were at the building of the University Square, the practices at the Institute. There was by then only a book on ecology, by G.L.
Ecologists have talked and written a lot about how human activities change ecosystems or living conditions, at the local or global scales. We also claim about the need to abolish the persistent gap between human society and Nature in thinking, because humans are a part of Nature. Yet, curiously, we have not much worked in clarifying what is our role or place in ecosystems.
In the year 1970, an international meeting was held, organized by IUCN and UNESCO, on Environmental Education in the School Curriculum, at the Foresta Institute of Carson City, Nevada. One of the results of that meeting was the first largely accepted definition of environmental education, a concept born perhaps a couple of years before and mainly developed at the United Kingdom.
