Cyberterra, 4 June 2010 — The
Royal Library of Alexandria, the first known library to gather a
significant and diverse collection of books (papyrus scrolls), was
charged with collecting and preserving all the world's knowledge
through an aggressive and well-funded royal mandate.
This royal mandate involved acquisitions during trips to book fairs in
Rhodes
and Athens, and it may have involved an actual policy of pulling books
off every ship that came into the port of Alexandria. In the latter
case, the library
kept the original texts, and made copies to send back to the original
book owners.
However, over time the library itself provided little or no protection
for its hundreds of thousands of books from the ravages of imperial
armies and lunatic mobs.
In a similar way, protected areas or nature preserves may keep human
beings out in a not entirely rational effort to preserve the natural
environment, but they genuinely offer no ecosystem protection from
greedy corporations and the environmentally-destructive reach of their
economic tentacles.
Clearly, had the full or partial content of the Royal Library of
Alexandria been spread out among many different libraries, and in many
different countries, its massive collection would have not been
completely lost to antiquity.
It also makes sense to get human beings
directly involved in the preservation of the natural environment by
enabling them to create, or foster, multiple natural oases that do not
necessarily keep humans out, but do nonetheless help spread natural
preserves to many different regions and countries, in order to
significantly limit the effects of any particular environmental
disaster.
The antidote to cataclismic cultural loss is mass education, which is
possible only when multiple book copies exist, housed in multiple
libraries.
The antidote to cataclismic environmental loss is mass environmental
education, which is possible only when people are allowed to visit
sanctuaries, not kept out, and this, in turn, makes a more resilient
environment possible, and multiple, user-friendly natural sanctuaries
are also
more likely.
