Quote:
Originally Posted by ak_aramis
The sign alone: Offensive, but not racist. Most persons of faith object to references that equate H. sapiens with "animals"... I'd have complained via email if I'd seen it.
If the population of the student body was notably ethnic, it's only a small step from there to seeing it as racist.
Your "explanation," however, has a subtle and racist innuendo.
The implications:
1) that Africans have had less impact
2) That Africans still largely live a "natural" lifestyle
3) that non-Africans are a plague
4) that Africa isn't worth protecting from Human-caused ecological damage.
The two together? yes, it comes across as potentially racist, and definitely offensive, especially if the religious makeup of the community is racially divided.
Especially since the Out of Africa theory is not universally held within academia, and that the human cause of the various prehistoric extinctions is neither proven nor provable. We can squarely be blamed for Dodos, Thylacine (Marsupial Wolf), and passenger pigeon. The mass extinction 10KYA and 18KYA are clearly periods of climate change, at a point when human worldwide numbers weren't even enough to fill a modern major city.
Plus, there's the huge logical fallacy that species ranges are immutable without human interference. Or that climate is stable over species-time.
And, by 10KYA, no continent was human free save Antarctica. We really don't know the ecology of that time; we make educated guesses. We know that the climate changed, because ranges for various plants changed. We know that several hundred species died out, and thousands more changed ranges.... but we cannot prove (and it's grossly arrogant to presume) Humans did it all.
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Actually, the point of debate is humans as an invasive species. I don't see how you get the four points, but I will try to address them.
1)Not sure where you get this - I'm fully aware of the ecological impact of humans (and elephants) in Africa. It's one of the things I have to deal with in my Ubantu setting - what is the landscape of Africa like without thousands of years of exploitation and ecological engineering. Could you point out what I said?
2)That's silly. Perhaps in the Kalihari.
3)That comes back to humans as an invasive species that cause massive ecological change and damage. Do you argue against this? I'm guess you do not believe that humans were responsible for the megafauna extinctions in the Americas and Australia, on which we will have to agree to disagree. In any case, almost all invasive species were introduced by humans, obviously.
4)Where does that come from? Of course it is.
On the point that the world has long since been disturbed by humans, this is central to my way of looking at environmentalism. To my thinking, the 'hands off nature park' idea is not really the right way to go. I believe in the garden world model, where humans take control of and manage the biosphere.