How Did They Know? Before Earth Day?

“One can look at history from two sides and divide it into the history of nature and the history of men. The two sides are, however, inseparable; the history of nature and the history of men are dependent on each other …Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature…like someone standing outside of it-but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly.”

Marx Engels 1847 German ideology

This quote from 170 years ago clearly indicates that some people fully understood humanity’s relationship to nature as being familial rather than a visiting tourist exploiter long before “climate change” became a brand name at the market. Their political economic criticism of industrial capitalism was also years ahead of its time and made the connections between the anti-nature and anti-democratic tendencies of that system clear enough to still cause some to wonder at how they were able to analyze what some of us still haven’t learned to even acknowledge.

But far more important than who might have lead in pointing out that fire burns and water is wet is how much longer humanity can afford to accept the fanatic opposite notion, that fire is really cold and water is how we get dry. Which would approximate the idiocy of teaching that cancer, war and pets are privately profitable investments and that a healthy population, living in peace and not needing but simply enjoying animals would not represent private failure but public success.