Impermanence and Conservation

A while back Kevin Driedger showed me an essay he’d written, entitled “No thing is permanent” and I found it really interesting, I’m glad to see that PCAN have published it on their blog. 

“We human beings are destined to decay. The books we work on are destined to decay.  The 2^nd law of thermodynamics tells us that over time these systems – us, our books – will become increasingly disorganized, will decay. (3) No dictums of “first do no harm” or principles of “reversibility” will overturn this law. It is in the destiny of us and our materials to return to the dust from whence we came – to be impermanent.” (extract… READ WHOLE POST)

Since this was published Kevin has relaunched his blog, and has included a post that contains our email discussions concerning this article. Despite their somewhat rambling nature, off-hand jokes, and partial references to other unrelated conversations, we both felt they were interesting enough to post.

Dan: “I was interested in your reference to Buddhism. You mention in the same space about ‘western conservation’, and I think that’s an interesting juxtaposition of ideas. Basically I immediately wonder how the central issue of this essay (impermanence/permanence) is considered within an Eastern Buddhist context? In other words maybe it’s not only that Buddhist ideas have no place in western conservation, but, maybe western conservation has no place in Buddhism? And what does that mean for our assumption of universal importance?”

Kevin: “I’m very interested in understanding/uncovering the western, Enlightenment ideology that underlies our current ideas of conservation. I don’t get the impression that the conservation world thinks there is an ideology/worldview underlying their work.”

(extract…. READ WHOLE POST )

What I realized in reading this article is that a lot of the Buddhist ideas I have recently been reading have something of significant interest to say on the idea of impermanence, and that I really want to learn more about these ideas and their deeper meaning, and of course potential analogies and means of thinking about conservation from a ‘non-western’ perspective, with a different set of ideological constructs. This is an issue I fully expect to come back to when I’m further along my learning path of Buddhism.

I hope you find both the original article, and the extracted discussions, useful, and I know both Kevin and I would appreciate hearing your thoughts on these posts… so please leave comments on the relative blogs.

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