On Tuesday, March 18, 2014 2:36:25 AM UTC+11, [email protected] wrote: > > At some point, Pierz, one has to use one's senses. >
Quite so, but you were making a completely invalid leap of reasoning from your sense data - something along the lines of "I see birds singing in the trees, so mass species extinction is humbug". That is obviously fallacious. The species extinction rate is estimated at 0.01% per annum by the WWF, so of course there is still a vast majority of species left, including those starlings out your window. 1-10K times background does not translate necessarily to a large proportion of observed species, especially in the near-monoculture inhabited by urban humans. That is just so blindingly clear and indisputable that you should really just retract that remark. > This is part or the scientific endeavor as well. Observe, record, and > measure, hopefully in common units, milibars, meters, kilograms, parsecs. > But one must observe and try to make sense of things. Just as the oil > companies say no, no, no, we pollute nothing, the environmentalists push > for a common goal as well. One is driven by greed to lie, the other by a > hunger for power-to save the world. Of the two sets of bastards, I have > learned to mistrust the environmentalist even more so than the petro kings. > > Environmentalists get things wrong due to knee-jerk, party-line responses to issues - the objection to all nuclear power may be an example. But the motivation to preserve the life of all beings on this planet is always going to trump naked, short-term greed in my book when it comes to which "bastard" I trust. > On another note, I think you have probably heard of the physical > anthropological papers indicating that the paleo-south americans, did an > excellent job of sustaining the rain forests, by simply doing what was in > their interests. Damming streams using logs and boulders, and mud, removing > natural dams in the uplands by digging using tree branches, crude shovels, > their hands. > I hear the (not-so) faint background anthem of right-wing ideology. Self-interest can be trusted to bring us all the best possible result. Let's all get out of the way and let the market save us all. You can bet the corporations will be building sea-walls if the ocean does start to rise dramatically, but the fact is the interests of corporations are way too short-term. CEOs care about this year's balance sheet, next year's, and maybe, just maybe the balance sheet in five years' time. Beyond their own retirement horizon they couldn't give a damn (or a dam). And corporations are enmeshed in the inertia of how things have always been done. Finally, with regard to "saving the planet even at the expense of humanity", that's like talking about "saving the ocean even at the expense of the fish". We are utterly dependent on the health of this planet. Certainly there are real tensions between environmental and human concerns - do we let community X clear-fell a certain forest? If we don't the community will suffer economically. But ultimately if we let every community log every forest at will, we will end up with an atmosphere that can't regenerate its own oxygen supply. Those Amerindians couldn't do too much damage through their self-interested actions precisely because they only had their hands and a few primitive tools. It's the power of modern technology that is the game changer. We can't be one-sidedly environmentalist and just ban all logging. Rather we need to work with the tension of these competing concerns and use all our human ingenuity to find technical and social solutions to these immensely challenging problems. The world is complex - no simple-minded ideology like "trust the market" is likely to hold the answer. > Remember Paul Ehrlich the population biologist who wrote The Population > Bomb, and made dramatic extinction scenarios? His scenarios seem to be > stimulus-response in their inception/purpose. Get the lemmings to jump to > the > ... -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
