In a letter to Jay W. Richards, co-author of The Privileged Planet, William Burger, a curator at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, writes:

One of the things missing in your book [The Privileged Planet] … is the devastation humans are currently imposing upon our planet. Still adding over seventy million new humans to the planet each year, the future looks pretty bleak to me. Surely, the Black Death was one of the best things that ever happened to Europe: elevating the worth of human labor, reducing environmental degradation, and, rather promptly, producing the Renaissance. From where I sit, Planet Earth could use another major human pandemic, and pronto! [My emphasis in bold.]

This statement may be somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but Burger's conception of humans as a blight on the planet is shared by many of his fellow academics. As David Graber, a research biologist with the National Park Service, wrote in the Los Angeles Times: "We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the earth… Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along."

Now, while it would be fun to discuss Burger's beliefs on human sustainability and basic facts of economics, I'm afraid that is outside the scope of this blog. So let me just remark on the curious "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situtation this puts supporters of inteligent design in: Either humans die from diseases, in which case it's bad design, or they don't die, in which case that's bad design.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 1st, 2006 at 10:44 am and is filed under Friday Quote, Intelligent Design, The Critics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. The trackback link is: http://telicthoughts.com/friday-quote-hooray-for-the-black-death/trackback/