For years now, I have been cheered when recalling how eagerly so many in my generation (the postwar boomers) marched in the streets to promote human diversity and variety.
But for just as many years, I have been mystified why they then remain so silent - like bystanders at a schoolyard bully beating - as Nature's diversity and variety faces mass extinction by human actions ... and inactions.
It is not that they don't regret the lessening of diversity and variety as human actions result in the loss of species and habitats - they do ; but it is a shoulder shrugging ,'what can one do ?!' sort of regret.
It is as if they have all internalized the visual motif of the 1939-1940 new York World's Fair : Eugenic Progress consists of evermore streamlining of human artifacts (skyscrapers, airliners, cars) , humans and Nature itself.
Less is more : plenticide is good.
Showing posts with label new york world's fair 1939-1940. Show all posts
Showing posts with label new york world's fair 1939-1940. Show all posts
Friday, March 6, 2015
Thursday, February 26, 2015
Salon des Refuses, NYC 1940 : Columbia Presbyterian Medical provides home for fungal slime, unwanted inside the World's Fair's synthetic autarky
Mother Nature was not wanted, more accurately, not needed , inside the 'World of the Future' so rhapsodized by the infamous 1939-1940 New York World's Fair.
The Fair planners had seen the future and the future , in 'just one word', was plastics : "get into nylon, Ben."
Nylon- through the alchemy of modern scientism - was made solely out of air, water and a carbon source.
Almost as in in response, a few kind souls (Dawson, Meyer, Hobby & Chaffee) arranged for M. Nature to have a sort of Salon des Refuses.
It happened - very sotto voce - in two small labs on Floor G of the Columbia Presbyterian Medical, about eleven mile to the north west of the Fair site at Flushing Meadows , Queens.
There trillions of tiny, primitive, ancient penicillium cells were set to work at the bottom of two litre Erlenmeyer flasks , happily spinning out the life-saving molecules of penicillin (penicillin G) from nothing more than ...air, water and a carbon source !
It was a pioneering example of postmodern commensal science at its best - and it all happened 75 years ago this Fall....
The Fair planners had seen the future and the future , in 'just one word', was plastics : "get into nylon, Ben."
Nylon- through the alchemy of modern scientism - was made solely out of air, water and a carbon source.
Almost as in in response, a few kind souls (Dawson, Meyer, Hobby & Chaffee) arranged for M. Nature to have a sort of Salon des Refuses.
It happened - very sotto voce - in two small labs on Floor G of the Columbia Presbyterian Medical, about eleven mile to the north west of the Fair site at Flushing Meadows , Queens.
There trillions of tiny, primitive, ancient penicillium cells were set to work at the bottom of two litre Erlenmeyer flasks , happily spinning out the life-saving molecules of penicillin (penicillin G) from nothing more than ...air, water and a carbon source !
It was a pioneering example of postmodern commensal science at its best - and it all happened 75 years ago this Fall....
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