Replies Julien:
>What you said seems to imply that species are more
>sensible to the alteration of "just one more bit" of their territory than
>I've been
>taught.
I seem to be writing at cross purposes. I am saying something more
conservative that it appears. What I mean is that the threshold of
extinction is lower than what is generally regarded. I can't speak to what
you were taught.
>Right, but are we forced to deplete the plankton if we harvest a bit of it?
>Eating
>fish implies eating more plankton through the fishes than eating plankton
>directly, right?
The point I was trying to make is that I suspect we will not harvest
plankton responsibly but profligately, thus endangering the entire food
chain. This is alarmist, but I don't care.
>I said is that IF the highly
>unsustainable current trends are reversed in a matter of decades (or even
>years as Mark argued) and barring a systemic climate breakdown or
>something of the sort, we will not have killed most species. In other
>words,
>currently only a small (but significant! I don't challenge that) number of
>species
>are vulnerable to us and the other can hide where we are not planning to go
>kill them yet.
Ohhhhh ! Sorry I didn't understand that. Of course we agree.
>I hate to generalize, but when people like you and Mark speak about doom
>and how we should look at scientific sources about it, and when I do look
>at the
>sources you point at, it isn't as bad as you say. Of course, it's extremely
>serious, but it looks as if you were liking this doom idea and willing to
>imagine
>something worse than your own sources say.
Yes. I thank you for pointing this out. I am not used to writing for the
critical eye, but rather used to preaching to the choir. I assume a lot of
agreement and subtext understanding which is not available to me here on
crashlist. I would do well to refine my approaches and arguments in this
light. The assumption about doom that is unspoken in my words are that the
trends will worsen and deepen, but I did not state that, did I? In defense
of "willing something worse than my sources", I would say that if one pieces
together all the sources (as I have) one begins to see a kind of synergy and
Gestalt (if you will) that indeed makes things look worse than individual
sources. I plead guilty to promoting that view.
>No debate here, only poor Julien not understanding something you said
>because of the lack of common vocabulary. I swear I tried to understand.
>Semantics are clearly unimportant when you talk to yourself but if you talk
>to
>someone with a different background living in another country...
Yes, we all struggle with this, as I have just struggled with assuming facts
not in evidence. I am sorry for being obscure, and furthermore I am sorry
the world doesn't have some kind of second language like esperanto or some
such thing that we all understand equally and implicitly. I was not trying
to put you down, my friend.
>This looks like one more example of this useless mania of crudely
>monetizing
>everything ... [snip for brevity].... Yes, nature gave us many gifts but
>how can we pay it for those gifts? Is it even
>a sane mentality to try to pay everything?
Of course not. What is even more insane is the requirement of economists
that we must do exactly that to penetrate their obtuse skulls. One is faced
with the two horns of a dilemma: either the insanity of monetizing the
earth's resources, or the impossible task of arguing "intrinsic value".
Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
The point about natural debt is that our whole economic system is based upon
the falsity that these "gifts" as you call them may be exploited with
impunity. Economists need monetizing in order to identify consequences, as
obscene as this is. Unfortunately the world listens to economists, and not
poor chicken little alarmists with meager footnotes. Nevertheless, the
consequences occur ... to the surprise of too many capitalists.
thanks, Julien
Tom
"The Earth is not dying - she is being killed. And those who are killing her
have names and addresses." -Utah Phillips
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