Louis Lapham

In the May HARPER'S, Louis Lapham has an excellent essay on climate change and human nature. He employs the famous scorpion/frog tale. A scorpion, which can't swim, asks a frog to ferry him across a river. Halfway across the scorpion stings the frog. As the frog is dying and sinking in the water, he asks the scorpion, now about to drown, why he stung him. "It's what I do," the scorpion explains.

What humans do is eat all the sushi they can find (until the ocean is empty), use all the oil they can find (raising the sea level 8 feet in the last 140 years) and so on. It's what we do. But I don't mean to be hard on our species. It is the nature of animals to eat as much as possible and expand as much as possible. It's just that our technology has made us more destructive and more capable in ways that other animals are not. In fact, some few of us are capable of restraint. . . .