It’s hard not to root for Henrik Lundqvist, he’s practically perfect.
Nature favors those organisms which leave the environment in better shape for their progeny to survive.
I suspect any worries about genetic engineering may be unnecessary. Genetic mutations have always happened naturally, anyway.
We are the intelligent elite among animal life on earth and whatever our mistakes, [Earth] needs us. This may seem an odd statement after all that I have said about the way 20th century humans became almost a planetary disease organism. But it has taken [Earth] 2. 5 billion years to evolve an animal that can think and communicate its thoughts. If we become extinct she has little chance of evolving another.
There is no clear distinction anywhere on the Earth's surface between living and nonliving matter. There is merely a hierarchy of intensity going from the 'material' environment of the rocks and the atmosphere to the living cells.
The big threat to the planet is people: there are too many, doing too well economically and burning too much oil.
Only rarely do we see beyond the needs of humanity, and he linked this blindness to our Christian and humanist infrastructure. It arose 2,000 years ago and was then benign, and we were no significant threat to Gaia. Now that we are over six billion hungry and greedy individuals, all aspiring to a first-world lifestyle, our urban way of life encroaches upon the domain of the living Earth.
Britten's opera tends to see things in simpler terms. It portrays an Aschenbach who wants a richer form of sexual fulfillment, and who is hemmed in by the social conventions to which he subscribes. But Visconti's use of the Mahler Adagietto is perfect for what I take to be Aschenbach's sexual desire.
To be a complete victim may be another source of power.
There are enough fossils showing distinctive features to rule out the possibility these are unusual or aberrant modern humans
I don't want to send my money to a bunch of Hugo Chavez-loving, Ivy League ideologically educated, politically opportunistic careerist in Washington, D. C.