Leave Well enough alone

Ok, so I'm the first to admit that sometimes things NEED to be fixed or helped along or tampered with... but I recently was reading an article in a Yellowstone Park publication, and there was the following quote from a man who gave a presentation at their Scientific conference last year.
"Today we are both burdened and invigorated by a powerful sense of crisis, and I can tell you that in the history of the national parks, crisis is the highest form of peril."

He goes on to offer several "sweeping generalities that historians are so fond of". The first two are: "Pretty much every generation of us since Comstock's time has contained a majority of people, even among the scientists, who were absolutely convinced that they kneww all they needed to know in order to do right by Yellowstone. Second, they were always wrong."

The writer notes that he doesn't mean they always did the wrong thing, but "their confidence in doing whatever they did was rarely as warranted as they imagined."

I find it refreshing that ANYONE admits to those two truths, especially a scientist. But, what struck me, is how those two statements could be applied to many, if not all, aspects of our current society. Science especially seems inclined (to me) to make certain absolute statements, with no indication that the scientists recognize that they are human and fallible and that scientists across the ages have thought they had "the answer" only to have it disproven later.

And, what about politics or civil issues such as our military or our citizens needs / problems? Each area has it's "experts" who announce they've got "The Solution" if we'd all just listen to them.

What is my point? Not sure I have one, except that I'm not sure that we always need "The Solution". One other point the speaker in the above article made was this: "... we have sold nature short, underestimating its power, its resilience, its complexity, and its capacity to surprise us with unimagined consequences of our well-intentioned attempts to care for it." We have a tendency to feel a need to "fix" everything, when often the best option is to back off & let it fix itself. No, I don't think that's ALWAYS the answer, I just think it's the answer more often than we'll admit.