The Most Elaborate Treehouse There Ever Was
When we created hypothetical new homes in the Adirondacks
this week, it added a new level to something I have been thinking more and more
about lately. I have been having a much harder time defining the
word progress. This is mostly due to the fact that I am having trouble putting value on the major gains and losses that our species has made over time. Medicine, for example, has become more advanced than the average person can understand in the last few decades alone. Part of me is in awe of the
fact that we now know enough about the brain to consider neuroscience its own field
– and an ever-growing one at that. However, I am disappointed at the same time
at the seemingly endless and ongoing destruction of the natural world around
us. To anyone who bothers to investigate them, environmental issues are
glaringly obvious. Looking at our fantasy ‘wilderness’ homes, it’s hard to say
which aspects of them represent progress and which ones don’t. Is progress the
alternative energy we hypothetically powered them with? Or is the fact that we
are adding homes to the park (“green” or not) the exact opposite regardless of what type of energy we used? It doesn’t seem to be doing the park any good either way, so does that mean progress is only ever defined from the point of view of humans? It seems to me that we try to quantify and measure progress when it exists in a totally separate sphere from the environment's perspective than from ours.
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