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There are elements, which seem to mock all human control: the earth, which quakes and is torn apart and buries all human life and its works; water, which deluges and drowns everything in a turmoil storms which blow everything before them; there are diseases, which we have only recently recognized as attacks by other organisms; and finally there is the painful riddle of death
The Future of an Illusion
One of the heroes of the Indian epic Mahabharata faced with the riddle: “What is the most perplexing thing in the world?” responded: “Man's unaltering belief in immortality, ignoring the inevitability and omnipresence of death.” This is an answer we could expect from a legendary hero; common mortals usually do act differently and are less heroic in appraising reality. Whatever the moral of this riddle, it is a reminder of man's ambivalent attitude toward death. Not only do we regard the idea of our own personal death with a great deal of apprehension, but our view of death is on a larger, less personal, environmental scale.
To suppress and deny unpleasant premonitions has always been one of man's most futile but persistent endeavors and the initial attitude toward ecological issues has been no exception. However, we have surpassed the preliminary stage of rejecting the view that our actions may endanger the environment. We can now safely say that