The Two-in-One problem

we are all interconnected.
We are the cause and we are also the effect. As I said before we are both but not at the same time. We create progress and does it not run on the ruins of what went before? The first man who was footloose and fancy free called himself a nomad and did he not thumb noses at his ancestors who were content to their arboreal existence? A nomadic life came unfashionable as soon as man invented agriculture. Progress is a kind of monster that eats its own kind.
Progress at any given point of time and space is only as good as what is yet to come.
We all arrived the moment we cultivated crops and owned a piece of land. That joy was short lived as soon as some discovered they were too late to claim lands for themselves and instead must work on the lands of others and be bonded to serve. Well progress sounds good on paper and in working it is only designated to undo all that advantages some tout as fruits of progress. The landed gentry who were called to pay up for the right to own lands to the nobles must have soon realized progress is merely a catch- all for both good and bad. We are connected to both good and evil. We are important enough to lay down rules for who are below us in station but not worth sitting down with those who are above us.
So those who escaped servitude and slow death in the monotony of agriculture went over to cities. Of course progress they called in their ability to choose their own trade or make a living. How good was it anyway?
From the above it is clear we create conditions for escape while we shut out ourselves in some manner or other.
You and I are equally responsible for this whether we took sides in any part of the problem.
The two in one problem explains the basic dilemma of being material being with an abstract dimension attached to every element that makes a man.
benny

Multiple Choices

What is ice? You will say it is frozen water.
Suppose I say it is rock? Do you think I am wrong?
The wind sculpts ice and the Sun melts it. It however can be as hard as rock. Ice in the Alps demonstrates this fact. Soft freshly falling snow builds up shelves of ice over the time and the process may go on for millennia. Each layer of snow freshly falling at any given time compacts what has gone before by expelling air trapped in layers accumulated earlier. The character of water is not what the ice exhibits and it calls on air and the gravity to give the ice its rock hardness. Thus an answer one may give to explain the nature of ice does not state the full facts.
Coming back to the my premise at the outset, man is both cause and effect. Only that he is not both at the same time.
benny

"A Plague On Your Both Houses..."

Plagues and pandemics of virus are of course calamities that denote symptoms rather than a natural course of life forms coexisting. Were not the killer viruses around from time immemorial? Did they pose the kind of threat in the dawn of time as they pose at present? If looked closely into the constant outbreaks of plagues, so would I assume, owe to our own kind for the root cause: we have interfered and impoverished the environment, in order to maintain our civilization. The appetite of the North or South is made all the more acute. Wisdom has become so altered in human kind that it is not reason but greed that dictates power.
Civilization requires large resources to maintain: large population essential to keep the fruits of civilization to themselves so many would also invite still more influx of labor. Clearing of woodlands, forests and changing the course of running streams are all for catering to the ever growing needs of civilizations on the march. In its wake comes the alterations to the environment: delicate balance of habitats are upset; levels of microclimate swing to extremes. Flora and fauna native to its natural habitats must take their chances. Under such uncontrolled changes the viruses also will find their way out.
(For further reading:
NEWS RELEASE FROM THE
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF TROPICAL MEDICINE AND HYGIENE
Date: December 30, 2005
Link Between Malaria Epidemics and Rainforest Destruction in the Peruvian Amazon
Amy Vittor, a Johns Hopkins graduate student and currently a medical student at Stanford University, under the supervision of Jonathan Patz, now at the University of Wisconsin, and other collaborators, carried out a field study in the Amazon region in northeastern Peru to examine the question whether the epidemic reappearance of malaria in the Peruvian Amazon in the 1990s was related to destruction of rainforest.
Over one year, the investigators collected mosquitoes at sites with varying amounts of deforestation and other anthropogenically-driven changes along a newly constructed road. The authors found that the abundance of a particularly dangerous mosquito, Anopheles darlingi, was over 200-fold higher in deforested locations compared to more pristine rainforest sites: a relationship that held up even after considering human population density. This mosquito species is the major vector of malaria in the Amazon basin and is particularly dangerous since, similar to its cousin in sub-Saharan Africa An. gambiae, An. darlingi is highly attracted to people. These results indicate that this major mosquito vector of malaria in the Amazon is significantly affected by habitat and land cover change due to deforestation.
Anopheles darlingi had not existed in western Amazonia as of the late 1980s, and had only moved westward across the Amazon basic from Brazil since that time. Rapid development, accompanied by deforestation brought humans into increased contact with a variety of emerging infectious diseases in the region including yellow fever, leishmaniasis, and leptospirosis, with the constant potential for new, previously unidentified diseases emerging such as mosquito and rodent borne hemorrhagic fevers. Man’s alteration of local landscape may now explain the parallel rapid rise of malaria cases in the Amazon region.
According to the senior author of this paper, Patz, accompanying analyses on mosquito-larval habitat and human epidemiology are forthcoming; he says that preliminary results confirm this link between deforestation and malaria risk in the Amazon.)
benny