Понеже днес е денят на героите, нещо по темата (сори за английския, но Earth не е бил превеждан на бг):

Цитирай Първоначално написано от Дейвид Брин в Earth
While it is romantic to imagine that tribal peoples—either ancient or in today's retreating rain forests—were at harmony with nature, living happy, egalitarian lives, current research shows this to be far from uniformly true, and more often just plain false. Despite a fervent desire to believe otherwise, evidence now reveals that members of nearly every "natural" society have committed depredations on their environment and each other. The harm they did was limited mostly by low technology and modest numbers.

The same goes for beating up on the human race as a whole. Oh, we have much to atone for, but the case isn't strengthened by exaggerations that are just plain wrong. Stephen Jay Gould has condemned "… as romantic twaddle the common litany that 'man alone kills for sport, but other animals [kill] only for food or in defense.'" Anyone who has watched a common housecat with a mouse—or stallions battling over dominance—knows that humans aren't so destructive because of anything fundamentally wrong about human nature. It's our power that amplifies the harm we do until it threatens the entire world.

My purpose in saying this isn't to insult other cultures or species. Rather, I am trying to argue that the problems we face are deep-seated, with a long history. The irony of these myths of the noble tribesman, or noble animal, is that they are most fervently held by pampered Westerners whose well-cushioned culture is the first ever to feel comfortable enough to promote a new tradition of self-criticism. And it is this very habit of criticism —even self-reproach—that makes ours the first human society with a chance to avoid the mistakes of our ancestors.

Indeed, the race between our growing awareness and the momentum of our greed may make the next half century the greatest dramatic interlude of all time.

In that vein, I might have written a purely cautionary tale, like John Brunner's novel The Sheep Look Up, which depicts Earth's environmental collapse with terrifying vividness. But tales of unalloyed doom have never seemed realistic to me. Like the mechanistic scenarios of Marxism, they seem to assume people will be too stupid to notice looming calamities or try to prevent them.

Instead, I see all around me millions of people who actively worry about dangers and trends… even something as far away as a patch of missing gas over the south pole. Countless people write letters and march to save species of no possible benefit to themselves.

Oh, surely, a good dose of guilt now and then can help motivate us to do better. But I see nothing useful coming out of looking backward for salvation or modeling ourselves after ancient tribes. We are the generation—here and now—that must pick up a truly daunting burden, to tend and keep a planetary oasis, in all its delicacy and diversity, for future millennia and beyond. Those who claim to find answers to such complex dilemmas in the sagas of olden days only trivialize the awesome magnitude of our task.