Joseph Wood Krutch

Seldom indeed under natural conditions does one species threaten the existence of another. Genocide is a human invention, and only man commonly wages wars of extermination. Moreover, though to eat and be eaten is certainly a law of nature, we are learning that it is neither the only law nor alone responsible for the maintenance of the balance.

—Joseph Wood Krutch. "The balance of nature." The Grand Canyon: Today and All Its Yesterdays.

Nature, unlike man, is too "wise" to permit a species to become so "successful" as to endanger its own existence by destroying the environment upon which its life depends.

—Joseph Wood Krutch. "The balance of nature." The Grand Canyon: Today and All Its Yesterdays.

Most of man's ignorant and disastrous interventions in nature's far from simple plan have been in his own supposed interest, but his disinterested attempts to improve upon the existing situation from the standpoint of the flora and fauna themselves have often been worse than unsuccessful.

—Joseph Wood Krutch. "The balance of nature." The Grand Canyon: Today and All Its Yesterdays.

But our civilization is rapidly becoming one in which only two values are recognized: power and amusement.

—Joseph Wood Krutch. "The north rim world." The Grand Canyon: Today and All Its Yesterdays.

Someday, I regret to say, progress may gratify their desire to see as little as possible as quickly as possible.

—Joseph Wood Krutch. "The longest ten miles." The Grand Canyon: Today and All Its Yesterdays.

The fact that the slowest growing trees of the bristlecone species live longest suggests that the more rapidly a certain potentiality is used up, the sooner it is irreparably exhausted.

—Joseph Wood Krutch. "The paradox of a lava flow." The Grand Canyon: Today and All Its Yesterdays.

If trilobites could have thought at all, they would probably have wondered, as foolish men still sometimes do, just which of their special needs this or that other living thing had been created to supply.

—Joseph Wood Krutch. "Farther journey in more time." The Grand Canyon: Today and All Its Yesterdays.

The explanation would never have been accepted by, and would probably never have occurred to anyone two centuries ago. Like all the explanations offered by geology today, it assumes vast stretches of time and assumes that the earth has existed for very much longer than anyone formerly dreamed it had. The belief that its age was measured in a few thousands, not in many millions of years, was supported by the Biblical story. But even without that, the assumption was almost inevitable to a creature who instinctively measures things on a scale related to his own experience.

No age before would have made such an assumption. Man has always before thought of himself as puny by comparison with natural forces, and he was humble before them. But we have been so impressed by the achievements of technology that we are likely to think we can do more than nature herself. We dug the Panama Canal, didn't we? Why not the Grand Canyon? Actually we are suffering from delusions of grandeur, from a state of hubris which may bring about a tragic catastrophe in the end.

I am no ascetic and, so at least I believe, no fanatic of any other sort. I am not praising want and I have no romantic notion that distresses should not be relieved. But I do, in all seriousness, question the assumption that endless progress implies the endless multiplication of goods and gadgets, even that "real wages" and "production per man hour" are necessarily an approximate index of welfare.