[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Personally, I also think it is deplorable that there are parents who are oblivious to raising children that never have the chance to see the miracle of a firefly. Truly tragic.
But wait a minute, Jed. There is an absurd aspect to what you're saying! Let me put it differently: That's just plain ridiculous! You tell us it's unhealthy to surround ourselves with an "artificial environment" every minute of our lives.
Really???? Forget the moon. Let's stay on Earth. I put it to you that most of us are ALWAYS in sight of (or at least being influenced by) some man-made structure every second of the day. How many individuals within Vortex-l have the privilege of being able to completely extricate themselves from an "artificial environment" . . . It would appear that in order to live up to your expectations we would have find a way to walk away from our computers, the Internet, our cars & transportation. Turn off the electricity.
This is a good example of the "slippery slope" logical fallacy. You have taken a reasonable, conventional, well-understood idea to an unwarranted extreme, to the point where it becomes a "red herring" fallacy -- something completely different from what I (obviously) had in mind. People have worn clothes and eaten cooked food for hundreds of thousands of years. There is no going back on that, and no survival without such things. Yet at the same time most people have lived reasonably close to nature, and our children have been exposed to things like clean running water in streams, trees, places to run and play during the summer, dark nights, clean air, fireflies and other benign wildlife. I think this is the most healthy way for most people to live. It is much better than living cheek-by-jowl with pachinko parlors, highways, concrete, and spending all day shut indoors playing video games. That is what I am trying to say. I doubt anyone here seriously disagrees.
As I said, if the solar towers produced 5,000 MW, instead of 200 MW, and we could limit the number of towers to maybe 5 or 10 in populous state, that would be reasonable. (Perhaps they could be made this large; I would not know.) That would not dominate the landscape everywhere. They would be no more disruptive than airports and large aircraft cruising overhead.
But if every single view, in every direction becomes cluttered up with wind turbines, solar towers, power lines, highways, or fast food joints that would be extreme visual pollution. It would be a tragic loss. Things like this matter more than people realize. Because we are so used to seeing this kind of clutter everywhere, we have forgotten how wonderful the world used to look. The painter Raphael Soyer grew up painting cityscapes in New York City and the surrounding areas -- a rich and vibrant landscape. After the 1950s, he saw that on every single street, lane and byway, and every town and village on Long Island, was cluttered with automobiles, either parked or stuck in traffic jams. Streets which had been filled with pedestrians and marketplaces on Saturday were surrendered to empty, dead, impassible lumps of steel. It sucked the life out of our communities, and destroyed our landscapes. He said you cannot paint outdoors anymore; the landscapes have all been obliterated. People nowadays never saw the landscape any other way so they have no idea what we have lost, and no notion that things might be different, or better. Cars, visual pollution, noise and filth not only destroy people's health, they gradually crush people's imaginations, too. Jared Diamond described this kind of gradual withering away in the book "Collapse."
- Jed
