The Dominion Mandate

And God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing upon the earth."

The Mandate applied.

"Resolved, that none of us know, or care to know, anything about grasses, native or otherwise, outside the fact that for the present there are lots of them, the best on record, and we are after getting the most out of them while they last."

~ unanimous declaration ~
1898 cattlemen's meeting

stewards of the earth

People with good intentions often tell me we have an obligation to be "good stewards" of the earth.

I must ask, who gave us this stewardship?

Those who believe Genesis contains actual words spoken by God will say He gave us this stewardship when the earth was created, and I wouldn't dream of arguing with them.

But people who know that the earth got along just fine without man for three billion years have no such excuse for believing in our stewardship, which is again nothing but arrogance and vanity and anthropocentric tomfoolery.

We have as much business being stewards of the world as infants have being stewards of the nursery.

It's we who are dependant on the world, not the other way round.

Providence
Daniel Quinn

the paradigm

"There's nothing fundamentally wrong with people.

Given a story to enact that puts them in accord with the world,
they will live in accord with the world.

Given a story to enact that puts them at odds with the world,
they will live at odds with the world.

Given a story to enact, in which they are the lords of the world,
they will act as the lords of the world.

Given a story to enact in which the world is a foe to be conquered
they will conquer it like a foe, and one day, inevitably,
their foe will lie bleeding to death at their feet,

as the world is now."