ABSTRACT
Aristotle gave a definition of tragedy that eerily fits the catastrophe humankind now faces. Tragedy must portray a man of high renown “whose misfortune is brought about not by vice or depravity but by some error or frailty of character” he said in his Poetics and he cited Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex as an example. Our species resembles Oedipus so closely that our own looming tragedy might well be called Homo Sapiens Rex. Like Oedipus, we are highly renowned and prosperous. Oedipus does not want to commit patricide, does not mean to commit patricide, and does not know he is committing patricide when he does so. We humans do not want to commit matricide, do not mean to commit matricide, and do not yet recognize that this is what we are doing. But just as the man Oedipus kills at the crossroads is his father, the natural environment that our species is in the process of destroying is the very thing that for millennia our species has called “Mother Nature.”
