Northern Arizona University/Environmental Ethics/Journals/What is Fate?

What is fate?

Is it a coincidence of occurrences that we humans attempt to add some sort of significance to or is there some kind of blueprint that connects life to the universe and fate is simply the universe filling gaps where necessary for life to continue, perhaps through some method of odds or probability (after all, was Edison not the only person inventing the lightbulb?). I think of John Muir's life and I imagine what shape our world would have had he not have gone blind. Would someone else have come to fill that evolutionary niche and preservation as we know it would exist or would we have turned this great nation into an exacerbated Easter Island? Would Theodore Roosevelt still have enacted the Antiquities Act of 1906 were it not for the advice and dialogue with John Muir? Would Gifford Pinchot have exercised his concept of conservation to "conservatively" timber old growth forests from the northern mountaintops of California? Would we have national parks today?