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Daniel Quinn, prize-winning author of Ishmael and several other novels and nonfiction works and Distinguished Lecturer for the Center for Humanities and Arts this semester, delivered a slide-illustrated lecture Oct. 14. He warned his standing-room-only audience to think about what the Earth will be like at the end of the next millennium:
“If there are still people here in a thousand years, they won’t still be thinking that they belong to a higher order of being than the rest of the living community, and that they are able to rule the Earth as they see fit. I can predict that confidently, because if people continue to think that way there will be no people in a thousand years. Humanity will be extinct.”
“A great change in the stewardship of the Earth and the life on it is required. Humanity is a biological population like all other biological populations and tracks directly food availability. . . . Global famine is not, in reality, the peril we face. The biomass of the planet is being converted into human mass. . . . If this trend were to continue for another 200 years we would end up with a planetary biomass consisting of humans and their food--humans and rice. But the planetary dynamics necessary for life would fail before it reached that point. The crash is very likely to occur in your lifetime, or that of your children. The more we convert the biomass to human food, the more we destroy the biodiversity that makes human life possible.”
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