What's So Great About Ushas?

Dave Tallman · 05 Jun 2008, 19:03 · from 2008-June.txt.gz

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From: davetallman at msn.com (Dave Tallman)
Date: Thu, 5 Jun 2008 13:03:04 -0600
Subject: (urth) What's So Great About Ushas?
Message-ID: <1bf4dd40806051203ne80adf4j5286cf3e0a07faab at mail.gmail.com>

*
*thalassocrat wrote:

> I've argued at length previously for just that inversion. Was it
> worth killing almost everybody on Urth to restore the Sun, just one
> star among many with human-populated worlds?
>
>
b sharp wrote:

> For me, it is clear that Wolfe means to depict Urth as populated by a flawed
> race of people.  For the universes to have a better future, this flawed race needs
> to be wiped out, starting over from scratch.
>
>
Both of these moral arguments are missing something, in my view. They are
only concerned with what happens to the human race. Environmentalists call
this anthropocentrism, and they consider it a serious moral flaw. The whole
Urth and its ecosystem was at stake, not just humanity. Typhon's empire
started an interstellar war, and as a side effect the Sun was damaged. The
whole Urth would lose millions of years of life, for countless species and
new ones yet to evolve. Is it a good and just solution for the human race to
jet off into space and leave Urth to freeze? I don't think Wolfe would
agree, based on his short stories like "Beautyland." Shouldn't humanity pay
some price to put things right? (That's an argument that has some
application today, too).

What's so great about Ushas?  It might be awesome in the long run. When Sev
asked to find the garden, the Autarch opened a way to the Garden (though he
thought Sev wouldn't be permitted to enter, and he was right). It might be
the Edenic future of humanity in harmony with nature (as the Green Man also
indicated).
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