Explore "Time and Change" by John Burroughs on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The hazards of the future of the race must be quite different from those I have been considering. They are the hazards incident to an exceptional being upon this earth -- a being that takes his fate in his own hands in a sense that no other creature does.
Man has partaken of the fruit of the Tree of Good and Evil, which all the lower orders have escaped. He knows, and knows that he knows. Will this knowledge, through the opposition in which it places him to elemental nature and the vast system of artificial things with which it has enabled him to surround himself, cut short his history upon this planet? Will Nature in the end be avenged for the secrets he has forced from her? His civilization has doubtless made him the victim of diseases to which the lower orders, and even savage man, are strangers. Will not these diseases increase as his life becomes more and more complex and artificial? Will he go on extending his mastery over Nature and refining or suppressing his natural appetites till his original hold upon life is fatally enfeebled?