Saturday rush limbo10/29/2023 ![]() Crichton’s point, as seen through my head, is not that nature is fragile and therefore we should control our folly, but that nature is tough and therefore we should control our folly. ![]() It’s saying that humanity’s attempt to control nature is arrogant and futile. So the masters of industry, with firm jaws and dollar signs in their eyes, can shake off the nattering fears of the eco-wackos and stride ahead.Īs I read Jurassic Park, everything in it, including the overdone ambushes by velociraptors and disembowelments by dilophosauruses, is saying just the opposite. Bulldozing, plowing, mining, paving, burning, spraying, dumping, and bombing might knock life back to the bacteria, but it will evolve again. I guess that arch-conservatives of Limbaugh’s ilk want to believe that nature is tough so that business can go on as usual. What’s beyond me is why anyone thinks it’s a relief that we can only destroy the higher forms of life. That’s just a short-term setback in the life of a planet. What we threaten is our own civilization, and perhaps our species, plus a few million others. They know the species Homo sapiens couldn’t begin to threaten a planet. Why does Limbaugh like this quick paleontological summary? Because, I suppose, he thinks it makes environmentalists look silly when they talk of “saving the planet.” I agree with him about that, though in my experience it is not environmentalists, but the media who sling around the superdramatic saving-the-planet language. And of course it would be different from what it is now. It might take a few billion years for life to regain its present variety. The evolutionary process would begin again. And after all those years, when the planet was no longer inhospitable, life would again spread over the planet. “Let’s say we had a bad … and the earth was clicking hot for a hundred thousand years, life would survive somewhere - under the soil, or perhaps frozen in Arctic ice. The planet has survived everything, in its time. All this happening against a background of continuous and violent upheaval, mountain ranges thrust up and eroded away, cometary impacts, volcanic eruptions, oceans rising and falling, whole continents moving. Great dynasties of creatures arising, flourishing, dying away. Then the great sweeping ages of animals - the amphibians, the dinosaurs, the mammals, each lasting millions upon millions of years. And, later, the first multicellular animals, then the first complex creatures, in the sea, on the land. There has been life on this planet for nearly that long. “Our planet is four and half billion years old. Here’s the passage as Michael Crichton wrote it: Limbaugh got Heston to tape it as a “dramatic reading,” which Limbaugh now plays and replays on his radio show. ![]() ![]() He called Limbaugh to read the piece to him. One of the passages I chose also caught the attention of Heston. I scattered several paragraphs from Jurassic Park through a textbook I’m writing, because they get across some important bits of planetary science, and because young folks will pay attention to anything related to dinosaurs. Just goes to show, as if more showing were necessary, that we mortal fools can grab almost any signal from outside our own heads and twist it into conformity with what we want to believe. In fact all three of us picked out the same favorite passage in Jurassic Park, though we chose it for opposite reasons. You wouldn’t think Charlton Heston, Rush Limbaugh, and I would have anything in common, especially since Limbaugh likes to call people like me “long-hair, maggot-infested, FM-type environmentalist wackos.” But strangely enough, we all liked Jurassic Park - the book, which is better than the movie.
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