Latest Breaking News
In reply to the discussion: Grizzly bear kills guide just outside Yellowstone National Park [View all]Straw Man
(6,623 posts)But that havoc involves a whole lot more than our ability to "coexist" with apex predators, which in essence means that sometimes they kill us and sometimes we kill them. In fact, that coexistence, or the lack of it, is little more than a sideshow in the wholesale ecological nightmare that we are visiting on this planet, mainly through the toxic byproducts of our lifestyle and through our overuse of limited resources. We have much bigger problems.
Morality is a human invention. It evolved to facilitate the social constructs that have enabled us to survive thus far. There is absolutely nothing "moral" about the world of nature. Ask Darwin.
The whole notion of our making "choices" to enable our coexistence with apex predators suggests a sort of stewardship over the natural world, in which we make so-called "rational" choices in order to achieve a desired end. This has nothing to do with the observable principles that govern the natural world. Again, see Darwin.
The world of nature is driven by survival and nothing else. By that standard, mankind is the most successful species the world has ever seen. But we are victims of our own success, driving other species into extinction and outstripping the resources that have enabled us to thrive. We have developed rational principles that allow us to function in intraspecies encounters, but they don't apply in any meaningful way to interspecies encounters, in which we are thrown back to survival mode.
Human stewardship over animal life isn't the natural order; it's a manmade construct, a global petting zoo. That might be what it takes to avoid mass extinctions, but you can be sure that we as a species will never voluntarily take a few steps back down the food chain and abandon the apex position. It just isn't "natural."