what about "omigawd what a beautiful room" and "I have a collect call for Mrs Floyd from Mr Floyd"? again, it was those elements on The Wall that got me listening to the Floyd in the first place, so obviously I like it
a whole area of ecology there: all species influnce their environment to some degree, by excreting waste and often by modifying their surroundings to create more advantageous conditionsZack wrote:"give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up." What, the rope? (This stolen from Q magazine). What species besides us ever had any "rope" anyway? (Original thought).
humans just do it more than any other
think about beavers and their dams, the whole northern Ontario landscape has been rebuilt by those furry critters
E O Wilson claims there are species of ants that practice agriculture, by farming fungi within their nests and "domesticating" other smaller weaker species of ants
and animals in the wild dont know any restraint, they just keep consuming until their food source is exhausted
a classic ecological model tracks the populations of predators and prey: as the predator population peaks, the prey population crashes, causes the predator population to crash also, allowing the prey a chance to recover, ad infinitum
we now figure, very early in the history of life on earth, early microorganisms in the ocean expelling 02 caused the whole atmosphere to change composition, making conditions unsuitable for the critters that lived before and creating the basic climate for all that came after
humans have more "rope" mostly because of their big brains, and thus have altered the climate across more of the planet than any other critter, but also because of their big brains can make choices regarding their future, which dumber animals cannot do
I think Roger is playing with these ideas amongst others on his album: humanity as a species that is bound by the rules of ecology but has the brains to make a choice should it choose