Science Quote by Lewis Thomas

The wince in Thomas's sentence comes from a scientist who hears a moral failure hiding inside a technical plural. "Environment" once suggested a single, enveloping world: the air you breathe, the soil underfoot, the web of life you can damage but not replace. "Environments", by contrast, sounds like a product line. The word tilts nature toward consumer choice - a shelf of options to browse, compare, and discard - and Thomas is allergic to the quiet ideology embedded in that grammar.

He’s writing against a late-20th-century habit of managerial thinking: if something can be itemized, it can be optimized; if it can be compared, it can be priced; if it can be priced, it can be voted on. That last phrase is the sting. Voting is supposed to be democratic, but Thomas suggests it can also be a way of laundering responsibility. A "market" of environments implies that losing one is acceptable if the majority prefers another, as if ecosystems were interchangeable models rather than singular histories.

The intent is not anti-democratic so much as anti-reductionist. Thomas is defending the feeling - the "spirit" - that certain things should not be treated as preferences. His tone is deliberately restrained ("somehow"), which makes the critique sharper: he’s pointing to the creeping language of policy memos and corporate reports, where pluralization becomes a permission slip. The subtext is a warning about how vocabulary can pre-arrange the outcome: once you talk like there are many environments, you’ve already accepted that some can be sacrificed.