Lack of Respect: Results.

Igniting the Southwest.

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Igniting-the-Southwest-by-Paul-Torrence-100629-694.html?

This link will take you to OpEd News. That site published an opinion piece I wrote after the Fathers’ Day Inferno that burned the forests northeast of Flagstaff, just a bit north of where I used to live and where I hiked hundreds of miles. At first glance, this editorial doesn’t seem to address the topic of this blog. In fact it does, for it is just another example of the human-centered, human-dominated thinking and action that is consuming Nature.

Save the Peaks

Think of the hundreds of different world views and cultures that modern dominant society has trampled. Think of the loss of hundreds of different ways of seeing the Earth and the human relation to it. Think of the alternative worlds that could have arisen if greed and violence were not the main tenets of our society. The destruction of Nature is closely tied to the extirpation of native cultures.

I wrote an op-ed about what is happening in Flagstaff, Arizona as another example in the long sad tragic story of our treatment of native peoples everywhere.

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Save-The-Peaks-by-Paul-Torrence-100710-499.html

A great honor was that several First Nation sites posted it:

IndianZ.com     http://64.38.12.138/News/2010/020653.asp

IDRS, Inc     http://indiandevelopment.wordpress.com/IDRS, Inc    

http://www.idrsinc.org/?s=save+peaks

and Indian Country Today.

http://www.indiancountrytoday.com/yourict/98236594.html

Open Letter To President Obama: re America's Great Outdoors

Here is one way to help stem the further dismemberment of Nature.

President Obama has launched a national dialogue about conservation in America to learn about some of the smart, creative ways communities are conserving outdoor spaces.

The voting tool is available to encourage interaction among those interested in America's Great Outdoors. All comments submitted will be considered.

Go to: http://www.greatoutdoorsamerica.org/

Meanwhile you can also send a comment to the President by email
ago@ios.doi.gov

Here are my opinions as submitted.

President Barack Obama
The Whitehouse
Washington, D. C.


Dear Mr. President:

Thank you Mr. President, for making America's Great Outdoors a priority. Thank you too for this chance to comment on what I believe to be of enormous value to this nation, the world, and most certainly the future of our species.

My comments are based on my professional knowledge, training, and experience that spans over four decades. I have a Ph.D. in chemistry that allowed me to pursue 30 years of biomedical research, drug discovery, and medicinal chemistry at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda where I ended my time as a section chief in 1999. I then became Professor and Chair of Chemistry at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff where I served for eight years. During that time I was also appointed a Full Investigator at the University of Arizona Cancer Center and also appointed as Professor of Medicine at the University of Arizona Medical School. I have published over 200 scientific papers, edited four books on drug discovery and medicine, been granted several patents, and was the co-founding scientist of a start-up company.

My concern expressed here is about the dependence of the drug discovery process on products of the natural world. Fully half of the medicines in use today arose from plant, microorganism, or animals. In the case of anticancer therapeutics, that number approaches 70% or more. The 1990’s saw big pharma turn away from natural product drug discovery efforts in favor of what appeared to be less expensive, more productive means of discovery. The tough lesson learned is that our science is not advanced enough for that, and a path is being beaten back to the natural world as a source of novel medicines as well as clues on what artificial molecules could be of medical use. While the challenges poised by common infectious diseases, metabolic and genetic diseases, and cancer are mind numbing, we must also bear in mind the growing threat of emerging infectious diseases, bacterial resistance to antibiotics, and bioterrorism. We will never run out of the need for novel medicinals.

However, even though we are faced with medical problems as great as any in history, we will-nilly continue to impoverish the natural cornucopia that has given the best medicine in history. I refer here to the present human-induced extinction crisis. I hope you have had time to read the writing of Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson, as well as such pre-eminent authorities as Stuart Pimm, Michael Soulé, John Terborgh, to name a few. I trust you are familiar with the findings of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and related scientific organizations. The message from all these sources is the same. We are destroying the fabric of life on this planet. Humans are causing extinctions at a rate approaching that at the end of the age of dinosaurs (Cretaceous), the one initiated by a massive asteroid impact. And perhaps we are going to compete with the one at the end of the Permian (250 million yrs ago) when life itself nearly disappeared from Earth. We also KNOW that at least 20% of mammals, 30% of amphibians, and 12% of birds, 30% of flowering plants, 20% of reptiles, 40% of freshwater fishes, and 70% of freshwater mussels, and 20% of ferns, currently are threatened with extinction. And that's just a few examples. The scientific fact is that humans use over 40% of the primary productivity of this planet! That is 40% of the products of photosynthesis every year go to human use, directly or indirectly. We are only one species out of millions, and we depend on all the others for our food, clean water, clean air, pollination, medicines, wood and fiber, recreation, and many more services.

Do You Know What We Are Losing?

This is a blog on what I consider to be the most important environmental problem of our time, perhaps of all time. I refer to what has been called the Sixth Great Extinction, or the Anthropozoic, or the Catastrophozoic. Humans are erasing the work of millions of years of evolution, sending thousands of species into an early oblivion, and unraveling the Web of Life. In doing so, humans are imperiling their own future, and making certain a bleaker, darker, leaden, sterile, lonely existence for subsequent members of their species.

This is no “feel good”, “touch-feely” enterprise I am about. This is about the cold, hard, sobering, unattractive, depressing facts that entail what we are doing to this planet and its tapestry of life. Don’t come here if you can’t look reality in the face. I always thought that Stephen Jay Gould chose the perfect name for one of his books when he harked back to the earlier movie with Jimmy Stewart and named it “Wonderful Life.” I cannot fathom that this Wonderful Life is slip sliding away through our fingers. Yet we as a species do not so much as acknowledge it, much less forcibly act to stop the hemorrhage.

The last Thylacine Wolf or Tasmanian
 Tiger died on 7 September 1936

. 

Why are we blind to this crisis?

Perhaps it is as suggested by my friend Michael Soulé:
“We are wired for bombshells, not decay...We are like the proverbial frog in the beaker of gradually warming water that passively boils before jumping.”

But he also acknowledges:
“We have many other neural anachronisms, and a lot of them have been mapped in the last decade or so by functional magnetic resonance brain scans. Some of these primitive patterns of thought have been recognized by sages for millennia. They include spontaneous, reactive thoughts that cram our consciousness with self-centered, distorted thinking. The Greeks and early Christians categorized them as the seven deadly sins or vices; the Buddha called them the unwholesome roots. These ancient impulses morbidly undermine our inclinations to be kind, cooperative, patient, and persevering.”

Eastern Elk - last one shot in Pa. in 1877.

My mission here is not to change human wiring– or human nature. Outside of an imposed, draconian, totalitarian solution, that problem lies with the individual. I instead appeal to the unwholesome roots (vide supra) dimension; namely, obvious personal and societal benefit. I want to relate my perspective on the contribution of the natural world to medicine. I argue that for our own benefit and for the benefit of those who bear our genes, we should take care to preserve this fountain of well-being. I’m by no means the first to try to accomplish this, nor the first to make the foregoing argument for preservation of species. I believe that the message needs repeating. Furthermore, I hope to show that the drug discovery process, as it occurs from natural products, is deeply entwined with our (Western) culture. On this path, I’ll also review the scientific basis for this Sixth Great Extinction. From time to time, I'll digress somewhat to threads that seem distant, but in fact bear mightily on our mistreatment of Pachamama.

This is a work in progress. Time will tell…