Contemplative Monday

"What now remains, compared with what then existed, is like the skeleton of a sick man, all the fat and soft earth having wasted away......Mountains which now have nothing but food for bees......had trees not very long ago. [The land] was enriched by the yearly rains, which were not lost to it, as now, by flowing from the bare land into the sea; but the soil was deep, and therein received the water, and kept it in the loamy earth......feeding springs and streams running everywhere. Now only abandoned shrines remain to show where the springs once flowed."


This was written by Plato in his unfinished dialogue Critias in the year 400 B.C.

I got this quote from a book I am presently reading, A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright.

The above quote is particularly appropriate, I feel, in light of the devastating floods in Pakistan. Will we humans ever learn from the past?