What if we had the Land's gift of sight here in our world?

[The na-Mhoram]

Can you imagine how horrible everything would look? How disgusting and unhealthy most of us are? How polluted the land and bodies of water are becoming? The air? All the pollution spewing forth from our cars and other modes of transportation?

Thinking about it, I wonder if Linden would have prefered our world or the Sunbane, or what she would do if she brought the Earthsight back with her.

[emotional leper]

I think nearly all of us would be 'closed' to each other. And suicide rates would go up.

[iQuestor]

Can you imagine how horrible everything would look? How disgusting and unhealthy most of us are? How polluted the land and bodies of water are becoming? The air? All the pollution spewing forth from our cars and other modes of transportation?

Thinking about it, I wonder if Linden would have prefered our world or the Sunbane, or what she would do if she brought the Earthsight back with her.

yikes. and I was disgusted at what the sunbane had done to the Land. I guess it would be like the rose colored glasses Piers Anthony had in "On a Pale Horse" . I think Linden would have run back to the sunbane.

[CovenantJr]

Heh. I'd be inclined to think our world is less like the Sunbane and more like Foul's winter, from The Power That Preserves.

[dlbpharmd]

Can you imagine how horrible everything would look? How disgusting and unhealthy most of us are? How polluted the land and bodies of water are becoming? The air? All the pollution spewing forth from our cars and other modes of transportation?

Thinking about it, I wonder if Linden would have prefered our world or the Sunbane, or what she would do if she brought the Earthsight back with her.

She'd be one helluva doctor.

[matrixman]

Yes she would!

The flipside of seeing all the pollution is perceiving with greater clarity all the beauty and good there still is in the world.

For me, one of the most powerful "lessons" I got from the Chronicles was seeing that the world - our world - was still worth saving, despite the litany of horrors that afflict us and the horrors we've inflicted on the Earth.

Of course, it's possible that now with the Last Chrons SRD is saying "to hell with it all" and blows up everything.

In which case, yes, Mr. President, feel free to push the button...

[Menolly]

The flipside of seeing all the pollution is perceiving with greater clarity all the beauty and good there still is in the world.

For me, one of the most powerful "lessons" I got from the Chronicles was seeing that the world - our world - was still worth saving, despite the litany of horrors that afflict us and the horrors we've inflicted on the Earth.

*nodding*

There is also Love in the world...

Of course, it's possible that now with the Last Chrons SRD is saying "to hell with it all" and blows up everything.

In which case, yes, Mr. President, feel free to push the button...

*stubbornly shaking head*

...no, no, no, no, no...

[The na-Mhoram]

Runes spoiler:

Spoiler

Linden's trip through a caesure to secure the Staff of Law kind of proves that good CAN be accomplished through evil means, so I ask:

Would it be evil to possess bush and make him throw himself off the grand canyon? And then make Cheney turn his own shotgun on himself?

Or is that going too far?

[CovenantJr]

Of course, it's possible that now with the Last Chrons SRD is saying "to hell with it all" and blows up everything.

In which case, yes, Mr. President, feel free to push the button...

Are you suggesting global policy should be decided in accordance with the themes of SRD's novels?

I really don't want to see what happens when someone applies the Gap to their policy decisions...

[hierachy]

Well the sunbane would obviously be much, much, much worse than our world. Yeah, so we can't compete with the pureness and serenity of the first chrons land... but our world isn't that bad. In fact, I like it a lot.

[Zarathustra]

Well the sunbane would obviously be much, much, much worse than our world. Yeah, so we can't compete with the pureness and serenity of the first chrons land... but our world isn't that bad. In fact, I like it a lot.

James, you don't post often enough. We need more common sense like this. I like this world, too. A lot.

I think many of us would be surprised if we were granted Healthsense. I don't think that burning fossil fuels, for instance, would look "sick" or "evil." It's a natural chemical reaction. Nothing evil or sick about it. You might as well say a volcano is evil.

[Edit: In fact, we might sense the carbon atoms' joy as they are released back into the atmosphere from whence they came, liberated from their earthly prisons in the ground after they were captured by living, breathing plants and animals, and then sealed in their corpses. The earth doesn't care how warm and cold it is. It naturally cycles through temperature extremes, and has been doing so long before we got here.]

Nature is violent, destructive, and deadly. Donaldson's Land in the LFB is a fiction. No place in reality is like that. If we used Healthsense as a means to see things truly, we'd find the inferno of our sun to be too deadly to look at--something so vast and unfriendly to life, it would make our pollution here on earth seem like a mere trifle. It would look even MORE deadly than the Sunbane. All that perceived radiation would turn a sunny day at the beach into a horrifying experience of watching our skin slowly "bake"--our cells being altered to form the precursors of cancer--in the small fraction of radiation which penetrates our atmosphere. But we'd still be able to see all that radiation hitting the atmosphere, getting absorbed and blocked just in time before it incinerated our bodies.


And that's just our sun. If we turned our healthsense to the rest of the night sky, we'd see a horrific graveyard of dying stars, surrounded by the dust of those that have already torn themselves asunder by their own glut of matter and expended energy.

Nature is not a friendly place. The world doesn't give a damn about you. These brute facts would more than outweigh any pollution or small damage we've done to the earth. It would be like a messy room in a home about to be destroyed by Katrina. Compared to the vast, impersonal destructiveness going on all around us on a cosmic scale, this tiny island of life would still look like a paradise, even if a little messy.

A sense of proportion is important to have in the universe. So is a bit of common sense, and not basing your appraisal of reality upon a book of fantasy. If we could see the world how it really is--and how it would be even if we weren't here to pollute it--we'd realize that this place is a "miracle" even with all the pollution. Like James said, it's really not that bad. I like it a lot.

[CovenantJr]

I hadn't thought of it that way.

I do tend to scoff, just a little at the "OMG!1 Gloobal warmingz!1!" attitude to the world getting hotter. As you mentioned, the world has been undergoing cycles of extreme (by our standards) heat and cold for much longer than the human race has existed. The earth's last extreme of temperature was cold, so it's now heating up again. I think when we panic about global warming we're overestimating our impact.

But I do often think of the world as a fairly tainted place, on the whole. I find it difficult, after spending a day in London and leaving with my nostrils full of unidentified black residue, to imagine that the 'civilised' areas of the earth are not just awash with grime. You shed an interesting new light on this perspective. Nature is hostile and dangerous.

[Menolly]

*sigh*

Malik, this is not the place for me to argue this. Suffice it to say that I believe "fossil fuels" are concentrated, manipulated, and burned by man at a much higher yield than nature can deal with. Nature can respond and attempt to heal to a single volcanic eruption. How is nature counteracting the affect of the continuous mass burning of "fossil fuels?"

I do agree with your point regarding global warming. The Earth has cycled between heat and Ice Ages for millenia. But I do think it is possible we may be prompting it along its course a little bit. And I think earthsight would reveal such to us.

[Zarathustra]

Don't get me wrong, I'm not arguing that we shouldn't do something about global warming (if the science actually backs up the danger to us)--any more than I'm arguing we shouldn't use sunblock. Just because these things are natural doesn't mean that they're not dangerous. So I'm not trying to advocate complacency, but rather a sense of proportion. Healthsense doesn't merely pick out what is good for humans. It picks out "goodness" in general, as well as inherent "evil" and "wrongness." But there's nothing inherently evil or wrong about out world. Some things are just dangerous or harmful to us. I think it is a mistake to equate these two, when "evil" and "wrong" are abstractions derived from our own personal wellbeing.

And it would be inappropriate to interpret our burning of fossil fuels as inherently evil--something that would scream out "wrongness" in our healthsense--when all that carbon was originally in the atmosphere to begin with. The only way it can get turned into a fossil fuel in the first place is if an animal or plant absorbs it out of its environment and stores it up in a useful form. So why wouldn't Healthsense see the released CO2 molecules as joyful liberation? To say that this is something we'd see as "evil" with Healthsense is to put our own personal, political, human perspective on it, rather than nature's--which is completely different from how Healthsense works. Healthsense in the Land doesn't merely pick out your personal likes and dislikes about the world. It picks out inherent good and evil, which doesn't really exist in a CO2 molecule, no matter where it's at.

[[Syl]]

On one hand, I don't think the world is all that bad. But on the other, think about the wrongness that Covenant felt when he saw Nassic burning wood. I can't imagine he would have felt any better seeing them burn coal.

It's too bad it didn't give it from Linden's perspective. His outrage is from what he knew, but he couldn't 'see' it.

[Menolly]

It's too bad it didn't give it from Linden's perspective. His outrage is from what he knew, but he couldn't 'see' it.

Hmm...

Has this ever been addressed in the GI?

[Zarathustra]

On one hand, I don't think the world is all that bad. But on the other, think about the wrongness that Covenant felt when he saw Nassic burning wood. I can't imagine he would have felt any better seeing them burn coal.

I think you're right to note "on one hand" and "on the other." These are two separate issues, and their only linkage is symbolic. In the Land, destruction of the environment is evil. But here on earth, the planet doesn't care if we burn coal any more than if we build campfires.

The Land is a place that cares about life. It is a place which can be perverted. But the earth cannot be perverted. It can be destroyed, but that is its "fate" anyway. It's "doomed" to burn up when the sun goes red giant. So we cannot pervert it any more than we can save it. It's eventual "death" is something entirely natural and not a perversion at all.

But from our perspective, it would indeed suck.

This is actually a really interesting question, which lays out the differences between myth worlds and this world. Under healthsense, our world would look a lot more like Sunbane Land than 1st Chrons Land: a place rampant with death, decay, and disease--and yet a place in which life developed nonetheless. In this light, I think it makes life even more precious than if the earth were a gigantic garden which took care of us purposefully, full of forestals and earthpower that cares about human affairs. The fact that we have the "power to preserve" even in our mundane world shows where the real magic exists. It isn't the power to make forests pretty, but the power to love and respect oneself and others. And out of this love and respect, if we can find a way to fight against entropy and create meaning in an indifferent universe, we will have achieved something more magnificent than anything in the Land. It's easy to work miracles when you've got rings, Staffs, and krills. But we also have the counterparts to those symbols: passion, control, and tools with which to focus those powers (technology?). We have the same magic.

Ok, rambling soap box time over.

[iQuestor]

Nature can respond and attempt to heal to a single volcanic eruption.

Well, one thing I want to point out is that there is nothing inherently wrong about a volcano erupting, or a flood, or a star exploding that needs healing. That is the way the universe is, and was designed to be. As humans we tend to see things ethnocentrically, like any thinking creature would. SO if a flood or tornado rips through our town and kills a lot of people, then we tend to think of the catastrophe as bad, but in fact, its just a part of nature. Yes, its bad to us when people die, but death like that is natural, even though sad.

Likewise, if Linden were to see a natural catastrophe in the Land, like a volcano or tornado or flood, it wouldnt appear wrong to her sight because its a natural part of the world.

In the Land the sunbane was an unnatural corruption of earthpower and affected and corrupted the normal seasons. Therefore this is different. It seems to be an analog to how we have polluted (corrupted) some of our resources. (Now, I am not in the global warming camp that believes man has caused this great catastrophe, because I dont. I feel we may have had some small influence, but I dont think we are causing or triggering it. )

that being said, I guess I retract what I said earlier. I think healthsense might show the pollution and other things we have affected negatively about our environment much like what the sunbane was to Lindens senses, but the sunbane was a corruption of the fundamental nature of the land it would be everywhere, and hence would be worse that pollution, etc in our world.

[High Lord Tolkien]

I'm going to give some praise to our Earth.
It's a beautiful place!
Name me another planet where you can throw some seed down on the ground and expect something will grow.
And it has a molten iron core not some curled up wormy thing!

But in answer to the question, we'd all be spending a lot of time cleaning up the pollution we've made.

[matrixman]

Of course, it's possible that now with the Last Chrons SRD is saying "to hell with it all" and blows up everything.

In which case, yes, Mr. President, feel free to push the button...

Are you suggesting global policy should be decided in accordance with the themes of SRD's novels?

I really don't want to see what happens when someone applies the Gap to their policy decisions...

I haven't read the Gap, but I'll take your word for it that it's not a pretty picture.

And I was being very tongue-in-cheek about the Last Chrons comment.