Humans have lost the capacity to foresee and forestall damage

Evidence

A foreshortened perspective in a disastrous ecological course calls to mind the apocryphal story that Donald Collins (2007) tells about the person who jumps off the Empire State Building. As he passes the 68th floor, he thinks to himself, “So far, so good.” Rachel Carson dedicated Silent Spring (1962) to Albert Schweitzer and quoted the alarm he sounded over the grave consequences of an unremitting foreshortened perspective: “Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth.” — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2549

Categorization

• CANDY: The ‘so far, so good’ jumping man is an immediately tweetable image for piecewise rationality running into a cliff.
• DEEPTHINKING: The juxtaposition of piecewise optimism against an assured terminal outcome captures moral disengagement’s whole temporal structure — worth sitting with, though brief.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 2549
• XREF: connects to: Erosion and drainage threaten plover habitat, foreshadowing human harm from the same — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: With Other…, 136; Ecological imagination shrinks with the land’s impoverishment — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 34