In countering the notion that man is “the aim and climax of the whole creation,” John A. Livingston wrote in his book, One Cosmic Instant; Man’s Fleeting Supremacy:
“Anyone who has spent the greater part of a lifetime enjoying and attempting to understand and preserve wild nature will have had the experience of witnessing his own species drift lower and lower on his personal scale of perfection. All the magnificence and nobility of our creativity cannot begin to compensate me for what my species has cost me. Shakespeare cannot compensate me for toxic pesticides, Bach cannot compensate me for Hiroshima, nor Michelangelo for the [loss of the] blue whale. Jesus Christ cannot compensate me for the brutal imposition of human power over non-human nature. Yet, the total destruction of blue Earth may well precede any diminishment of human pride.
“Misanthropy is probably the inevitable (or at least occasional) companion of the man who values unspoiled nature, natural systems, and their individual components.”
Wildlife Photography ©Jim Robertson
Exposing the Big Game 
Well put. I don’t consider myself a misanthropist, I do love my fellow humans. I’m more of a disappointed-thropist (and pissed). Why can’t we behave and do the right thing, and think of other living beings?
So so true! So well said! Nature and wildlife are PERFECT , incomparable.
One of my favorite quotes of Livingston catalogs why he and other people (including me) who care about animals can be misanthropic:
“In the alchemist’s dungeon that is almost any well-appointed shopping center in the “developed” world, you can buy cosmetics, transmission fluid, and pet food made from whales; you can buy the hide of lynx in the form of a hat, or gloves made from the skin of an unborn lamb; you can buy a coat made from seal whelps; you can buy a tropical finch in a metal cage and a Siamese fighting fish in a plastic bag; you can buy firearms and whammo ammunition and multiple hooks with barbs on them; you can buy sharkskin shoes and the unspawned eggs of a sturgeon; you can buy the pulverized enlarged liver of a force-fed goose and the testicles of a bull and the brain of a calf . . . . You can buy the sterile eggs of an untrod chicken and the tongue of a feed-lot steer that spent its last weeks hock-deep in its own manure; you can buy medicines made from the blood and viscera of living laboratory animals . . . . You can also buy the Holy Bible and the Declaration of Human Rights.” The John Livingston Reader (2007), p. 149.
Amen.
*faints* We are not just flawed – but totally out of control.
Great quote from him, thanks!
Reblogged this on Voices and Visions.