From David Orr's "Ecological Literacy: Education and the Transition to the Postmodern World"
"The tragic sense of life, however, is neither resigned or long-faced. It locates the sources of our suffering in ourselves, in human decisions, institutions, and above all in the pretense that we are beyond the laws of ecology, thermodynamics, or even morality.
"A closer reading of Homo sapiens would suggest that at best we are a spindly legged, upstart, disruptive species whose intellect exceeds its wisdom.... our major accomplishment in the larger scheme of things might be only that we recirculated massive amounts of stored carbon in the final moments of our evolutionary career.
"For all of our puffed-up, self-serving talk about the "ascent of man," we have truly no idea whether it is an ascent or a descent, or, if the former, what its destination might be. If our rational consciousness is our crowning glory, we are still unable to say why, or even to explain what it is or why it has occurred.
"On such unstable turf we best tread lightly, without the baggage of pretense, overblown pride, or as the Greeks called it, hubris. Prudence would lead us to take our esteemed rationality, which may serve ascent or descent equally well, with a large dose of skepticism."
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