Grizzly Man

I'm reading about Rational Choice theory at the moment, which of course led me to start thinking about a documentary I watched lately with my family, Grizzly Man. Grizzly man, Timothy Treadwell, devoted his life to living with grizzly bears in the summer and educating people about them in the rest of the year. The name of the group he founded, Grizzly People, gives you some indication of his feelings toward grizzly bears. He was like that Australian man who was always on tv for getting close to animals and filming himself doing it. He knew many grizzly bears pretty well before he and his girlfriend died at the hands of one particularly old, mean, and unfamiliar grizzly. The documentary was made by Werner Herzog, who has a very different view of nature and life from Timothy Treadwell's.

Timothy Treadwell's view of nature and humans and animals is that, first, there is little difference between man and animals; second, man and animals and nature are fundamentally good. Evil is the result of civilization, which corrupts. (So I guess it might be more accurate to say that animals and nature are fundamentally good and that man tends to get in the way of that, especially insofar as he develops and embraces civilization.) Warner Herzog's view is just the opposite: man and animals and nature are fundamentally evil: chaos and destruction reign. Good is more the exception than the rule.Timothy Treadwell's death didn't surprise Warner Herzog--this is exactly what he would expect to result from not avoiding the grizzly's destructive impulse. For Herzog, then, civilization would not be a corrupting force, but rather could help establish proper boundaries between man and animal; it might even restrain the destructive impulses within man. My position on human nature, of course, is different from both Treadwell's and Herzog's: I think that man has the capacity for both great good and great evil. Unlike animals, he has the ability to make moral choices. And should probably respect the fact that animals don't have the ability to make moral choices, but rather follow their inclinations and provide for their needs, especially their dietary needs, as best they can.