On 9 April 2014 13:21, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote: > On 4/8/2014 6:16 PM, LizR wrote: > > I was never too taken with the Gaia hypothesis - maybe because I didn't > really understand it. I seem to recall Lovelock saying the human race would > end up as a few people at the poles a while ago (I think that was him) with > the rest of the world uninhabitable, or at least incapable of supporting > agriculture. I'm not sure whether building "Climate controlled cities" is > more vainglorious than trying to "save the world" - which may just mean > putting a load of aerosol particles into the upper atmosphere, conceivably, > after all. Or it may mean a bigger effort, but perhaps no bigger than > winning a world war or putting people in space. > > "It sounds good to try to save the planet, but in reality we are not > thinking of saving Gaia, we are thinking of saving Earth for us, or for our > nation. > > "The idea of 'saving the planet' is a foolish extravagance of romantic > Northern ideologues and probably much beyond our ability." > > Well of course! He's made the mistake of believing what people say, rather > than what they mean. No one wants to "Save the planet" except insofar as > they want to save the human race. D'oh. > > But he seemed to use 'we' to mean people of the U.K. and suggests that > saving the planet is to big a job for that 'we' and should be left to the > U.S., China, and Japan (which is maybe why he thinks it won't get done). >
Yes, he does at that. I read the above quote as refering to the entire human race, because it's ridiculous to assume it only refers to the UK. If that's what he means his comments make no sense, because I doubt *anyone*is proposing that the UK should go it alone to save the world. If you're right (and it looks like you are, although he seems to me at least to be skipping nimbly between talking about humanity in general and the UK) then the "ideogogues" he is railing against almost certainly don't actually exist. Another straw man. -- 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.
