Chapter 2 "The Obligation to Endure" Summary

Throughout earth's history, living things have interacted with their environment but not changed it. In fact, the environment has often played an important role in forming the different kinds of life - plants and animals specifically adapted to live in whatever their environments are. Only human beings have gained the ability to reverse the roles and actually change the environment they live in, and this power has become disturbingly great only over the past 25 years (the book was first published in 1962). Now humanity has irreversibly polluted the earth's air, water, and animal life (including human life). The combination of radiation (released through nuclear explosions) and toxic chemicals (purposely distributed as insecticides, herbicides, etc.) produces chemical deposits in the earth, water, and living tissues of everything on earth. Life, which took hundreds of millions...