“For if you suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make thieves and then punish them.”
----- Thomas More, Utopia
The context of this quote still runs lived though my mind since I read Utopia as a child. I realize today that in many ways of course this quote within the context of education and crimes, is still very much present in society today, there is a strong correlation that can be compared to the context of how the environment is being treated today.
As a species we are embedded in the environment yet there is a lack of understanding as a species to the impacts we have on the environment, and the are relationships between one patch to another. The lack of understadning that the world is not a vacuum and we are connected, upon which every action has a reaction. This has left us to create a world where generalists thrive in the degraded and framented patches. What else at this point in conservation ecology can be concluded, that we first make the conflict and then punish the species that we have allowed to thrive in our domination of the land.
