Parrots, the Universe, and the Bioregional State and All That

I post this "last will and testament" of author Douglas Adams (d. 2001) particularly for the summation from 1:07:00 minutes into his talk. Paraphrasing him: we are caught up in our seemingly successful short-term thinking that most use to judge how successful we are based on how well we adapt the world to us, instead of how well we adapt ourselves to the world's ecology. The former myopically seems to serve us well as we pretend that the world was made for us to manipulate right up to when we pass a point of our own ecological self-destruction or self-poisioning. However, with our chosen ongoing ecological destruction, if this attitude is kept we may be soon as extinct or near extinct as the kakapo, or the aye-aye, or the baiji. We are required to radically rethink the way we do things to integrate ourselves with the environment and its particular regions, to socially relate ourselves to our environments varieties because we have been for a long time destroying the basic ecological premise of our own lives on this planet as we continued to adapt the world to us instead of adapt ourselves to the world. To continue without changing is to leave ourselves feeling smug though truly unadapted to solve our mounting self-destruction. The bioregional state is an answer to solving this process of ecological self-destruction.


Douglas Adams: Parrots the Universe and Everything
From: UCtelevision | May 22, 2008 | 254,251 views
1:27:37 min



Douglas Adams was the best-selling British author and satirist who created The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. In this talk at UCSB recorded shortly before his death, Adams shares hilarious accounts of some of the apparently absurd lifestyles of the world's creatures, and gleans from them extraordinary perceptions about the future of humanity. Series: Voices [5/2001] [Douglas Adams died of a heart attack a few days after this presentation. It makes a good, poignant last testament I think.]