Civilization is better than nature

A nice quote from Donna Ball (writing as Donna Boyd) in The Passion:

There are those among us – among you, too, I observe – who glorify the wonders of the natural world with a kind of glassy-eyed fanaticism and urge a return to that purer, more innocent state. This testifies to nothing other than the fact that those who recommend the satisfactions of living in harmony with nature have never had to do it. Nature is evil. Nature is conflict, violence, betrayal; worms that crawl through the skin and breed in the gut; thorns that poison; snakes that fight in writhing, heaving masses until all lie dead from one another’s poison. From nature we learned to tear the flesh off the bone and suck out the blood – and to enjoy it. Do you want to return to that state? I do not.

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I have known Nature. I have known Civilization. Civilization is better.

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