There is an article at
http://www.newscientist.com/ns/19991225/drtruth.html
that started me thinking. The discussion here about
nuclear power seems to have confirmed part of what I thought.
I think it's time we all stop reacting with knee-jerk reactions
and actually learn what the real impacts of our choices are.
The above article is an interview with Patrick Moore, one of
the founders of Greenpeace. He says logging can be OK and that
genetically modified foods aren't automatically harmful. Those
ideas are rather radicle for one of the founders of the
environmental movement.
His point is that at the start of Greenpeace nobody was paying
much attention to the impact industry and the government had on
the environment, but almost all of the things they first fought
for they have won. That left the people who were used to
fighting for the environment to look for more and more radicle
things to fight for�and they aren't above stretching the truth
to find things to fight for.
It's easy to see his point. Nature is very resilient and will
revive from anything we do to it. We only have to recognize
when we have made a major mistake and back up so nature can
reclaim it's own.
We watch as nature recovers from a Mount St. Helens or a major
fire like Yellow Stone had a few years ago, but we seem to be
willing to believe people when they claim nature will never recover
from a clear cutting in any form.
I'm not trying to say that we can run ahead with total abandonment
of our senses. We do need to take care in what we do. But let us
look at the facts and not react with parroted fears.
We humans made a mistake long ago in thinking we could and should
conquer nature. There are a lot of people now who seem to think
we can and should somehow live without touching nature at all: a
complete hands-off policy.
What both sides need to see is that we _are_ nature. Nature made
us. Nothing we do is more unnatural than the acts of any other
animal. What we must also forget is nature has a way of dealing
with species that don't cooperate. In short, we can not hurt
nature, but nature can hurt us.
What we, as a part of nature, must do, is learn to find the
Middle Way. We cannot use nature without knowing the facts, but
we cannot live without using nature at all.
There are times when commercial synthetic fertilizers are more
ecologically sound than shipping seaweed extract half-way around
the planet or shipping rock dust with low levels of fertility.
There are times when an herbicide will have less impact than
repeated cultivation. There is a good argument that nuclear
plants could be built that have a lower impact than coal and oil
fired plants. We cannot afford to let mistakes of the past and
rumors and speculation scare us into rejecting a possible solution
without looking at the facts.
==>paul
