Remarks to the Commonwealth Club
by Michael Crichton San Francisco September 15, 2003
<snip>
I agree with a lot of what Crichton has to say, but have a few observations.
Even if all the non-religious (in the traditional sense) were the kind of religious environmentalists Crichton says they are, there wouldnât be very many of them, so I'm guessing many environmentalists are religious in the traditional sense. Further, there are many non religious people that arenât the type of ideo-environmentalists that he describes. Personally, my environmentalism is based on these tenets: 1. Clean air, earth and water is healthy for humans and other animals. 2. Natural beauty is precious and should, inasmuch as it is practical, be preserved for the enrichment of future generations. 3. Humans don't have the right to wipe out other species of animals, and should, in fact work to keep them from being wiped out.
I'm not sure that even a majority of environmentalists believe in the idea of a noble savage or that we need to save the planet (as if we could kill it).
The closest I get to "getting back to nature" is my yearly Sierra backpack trip, and I think that that is closer to nature than 98% of the people in the country get to it. And while I enjoy my time in the wild, and would like to do it even more often, after four or five days of it, I'm ready for a hamburger fresh off the grill, a shower, and a place where I can sit down to take a dump, thank you.
I challenge the idea that we live in a secular society. In a country where most people are aghast at the idea of removing religious references from the daily indoctrination of our children or from our legal tender; in a country wherein something like 80% of the people profess belief in a god, and most of those think that a judge shouldn't have to remove a religious sacrament from his courthouse; in a country where you have to sit though a hymn at a public sporting event*, the best that can be said is that we have aspirations for being secular. There are countries that have state religions that are more secular than we are.
Maybe second-hand smoke isn't as dangerous as professed, but I am sure as hell happy I don't have to breathe it anymore.
At least one of the reasons that the population explosion is no longer exploding is that we realized that it might be a problem and raised the alarm. A self negating prophesy.
It seems to me that the statement "Our record in the past, for example managing national parks, is humiliating. Our fifty-year effort at forest-fire suppression is a well-intentioned disaster from which our forests will never recover." is exactly the kind of rhetoric he's arguing against for most of the rest of the speech. Never?
Doug
*This is a pet peeve. If I were a religious person I would pray every night before I went to a game that it was going to be _Take Me Out to the Ball Game_ and not _God Bless America_ at the seventh inning stretch. 8^)
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