We can learn a lot from the big picture perspective from a professor who helped found and direct the environmental studies program at the University of Oregon. He has many decades of experience in the study of environmentalism and culture. The new article below will also provide many new insights into the challenging polycrisis which humanity now faces.

To help set the stage for this amazing big picture overview and article, a famous quote is needed. What is honored in a culture will grow there." Plato.  The emotionally and scientifically powerful article by Emeritus Professor Alvin Urquhart will illuminate what our culture has honored and allowed to grow, and that is now threatening our environment.

Here's what Professor Alvin Urquhart says about the information in his new article, The Environmental Predicament: Culture vs. Nature, linked below:

"With this essay, I show how, in my lifetime, we have created a predicament that defies human solutions.  In the last 150 years, we have released energy that had accumulated and been stored geologically for millions of years. As cultural creatures, we have ignored our evolutionary background as we increasingly rely on fossil-fuel energy to extend life and produce more goods and services. 

In the process, we have permanently destabilized long-term evolutionary and ecological systems.  A disturbed Nature is more powerful than a self-centered Culture. Thus, humans find themselves, unthinkingly, in an existential predicament of their own making. But we are creatures who glory in culture. As such, we want to live the best lives possible during the environmental predicament that we have caused. This essay concludes with a few suggestions as to how to understand and prepare to live with the oncoming environmental crises."

Click here for a link to this new article.

As a teacher, Professor Alvin Urquhart developed courses in the ways in which cultural landscapes were created, the disruption of ecological systems in the building of these landscapes, and the history of environmental ideas. Many of his thoughts were published in Nature & Culture: Culture & Nature- A Personal Crisis, available on his environmental blog, alurquhart.com. His Nature & Culture: A Personal Crisis presents the timely ideas underlying his thinking, an extensive autobiography, and reflections on the predicament in which humanity now finds itself. 

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