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#+TITLE: Once and Future World

- tags :: [[id:53094c43-ee60-4ae3-828e-5e4e3320ea79][Books]] [[id:6a2c962c-03e5-4d6c-8822-356437f4967b][Non-Fiction]] [[id:1b9c0e12-e425-4b14-8b1a-f2f2d915a1ee][Ecology]]

* Nature changed

- [[id:c3d1a627-9591-4d93-9415-10141cd09ad6][George Perkins Marsh]] wrote /Man and Nature/ in 1864 and already had found much
  about nature changed. **Most of the planet was not a threatened wilderness, but
  had already been 'much modified in form and product'**
- Papyrus used by the Egyptians had nearly vanished from the Nile region by 1864.
- Marsh asked whether we were changing nature itself into something new,
  something lesser, **something our ancestors might not even recognize.**
- He had written the first principle of [[id:fb1de9d9-86cb-4a89-afef-ffffd86873e0][Historical Ecology]]: **To know what is,
  you must know what was**

* Eye of the beholder

- Child psychology study in 1995 by Peter H. Kahn and Batya Friedman from Colby
  College found that only a third of kids in Houston, a very polluted Gulf Coast
  city, felt environmental problems affected them.
- Study outlines: "what we perceive in the children we interviewed might well be
  the same sort of psychological phenomenon that affects us all."
- "People may take the natural [[id:0aba55ce-2727-42ac-a087-a0aeed027a60][Environment]] they encounter during childhood as
  the norm against which to measure pollution later in life"
- [[id:d50aee19-846d-4b75-abc9-1e83986357df][Memory]] conspires against Nature. The [[id:303fbba7-a706-483c-be9b-66e662492625][Forgetting]] can begin in the instant that
  a change takes place: the human mind did not evolve to see its surroundings as
  the focus of our attention