Technology and/or Nature?
—Texas A&M Univ 2016

Rolston - Technology and/or Nature: Denatured/Renatured/Engineered/Artifacted Life? 2016. Rolston gave this lecture at the Bovray Workhop on Engineering and Applied Ethics at Texas A&M University on February 15, 2016. His lecture is followed by critical commentary by Clare Palmer, Philosophy, Texas A&M.
Online at: http://hdl.handle.net/10217/172774

In our high-tech world, do we live at the end of nature? Is the technosphere replacing the biosphere? Can humans control their genetically inherited Pleistocene appetites in an Anthropocene Epoch? Is experience of the urban, rural, and wild a three-dimensional life, with life focused on fewer dimensions under-privileged? Do we, ought we, wish to live on an engineered planet? Would this fulfill human destiny or display human arrogance, failing to embrace our home planet in care and wonder? True, we must become civilized. Be a resident on your landscape. True, the future holds advancing technology. But equally: we do not want to live a de-natured life, on a de-natured planet.