On 7 April 2014 05:18, Stephen Paul King <[email protected]> wrote:
> Dear Friends, > > Is there a single objective definition of "damage to the environment"? > > Given the complexity of the environment, I very much doubt it. There are some proxies for it, of course, e.g. rate of species extinctions, amount of ice cap melting, proportion of rainforest cut down, amount of plastic floating in the ocean, amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, etc... All of these are certainly *part* of the damage to the environment, but they can't be said to constitute a "single objective definition". And of course our environmental damage goes back thousands of years. We don't necessarily know what constitutes a natural pre-human environment, and it may not be something we'd want in any case. Personally I doubt it. (What we *do* want is an environment that won't kill most of us, which is what we've had in the recent historical past, i.e. one that supports agriculture and keeps some of the sea locked up in ice, but not so much that the ice caps start covering half the planet. A human-friendly environment, in other words - which is what we appear to be in danger of throwing away.) Of course if we were stupid enough to wait around for a "single objective definition" before we tried to do anything about preventing environmental destruction, by the time we get one we wouldn't have much of an environment to apply it to. -- 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.
