> The very fact that more efforts and dollars are
> spent preserving
> a limited lifespan for other species while avoiding
> or ignoring
> the individual extinction of our own species, person
> by person
> by death, is deplorable.
True-
but the kind of problem that concerns me is not so
much that many of these species are dying out from,
say, overhunting, but that the deaths of many are
caused indirectly by us- like the Golden Toad of South
America, whose numbers mysteriously began dropping
until 1989, when they were no longer seen. They
occupied an extremely small niche in the rainforest,
true, and they would probably have died out eventually
anyways, but it's a disheartening thing to watch it
happen, as due to our presence it's happening far
faster than normal. The biome as a whole has survived
far greater extinctions, and humans have an amazing
edge on other creatures as far as survival is
concerned, but nonetheless it should be a cause for
some concern that we are poisoning our environment in
ways that are irrevocable.
A somewhat crude but workable thought experiment is
this:
Say you are in a room with five other people. Every
once in a while, gunfire rings out from across the
street, and kills one of the people in your room. You
don't necessarily need the other people, but it's nice
to have them around, and some of them you care deeply
about. Now, say (for some reason, maybe there are no
police) the only way to stop the gunfire was to shoot
the person across the way who was firing, or to pay
them to go away. If any other people in your
apartment leave, they might be shot, and you are the
only person allowed to escape from this place. Though
buying a gun costs money, and so does payment, these
are both worthwhile considerations.
If you think of the environment in terms of the
economic value it provides, as well as the aesthetic
value, along with any other intrinsic properties it
may have, this provides the population for the room of
this thought experiment. If you think of the value of
the gunner across the street as the value of our
industrial factories- and this works well, as there
are better ways of doing these things, just as there
are better ways of having a good time than shooting
people in your apartment, though they may be somewhat
less fun to this gunner. The gunner is still
essentially usefull... but their existence is in its
current form parasitic, which, as a primate of sorts
myself, I find the concept of parasites of any kind
intolerable, unless they serve as a symbiote on some
larger scale. It's simply that I have trouble
thinking that life will effectively adapt to the
outpouring of hundreds of gallons of toxins every year
into it's system. It may adapt somewhat, but we as
well should be a part of that adaption, by slowing or
even reversing the process as much as possible.
We should, of course, consider our own quality of life
as well as a major area of concern, but stating that
the environment is the source of the money loss is
being untruthfull when regarded in terms of so many
other wastes which we quite often blithely ignore,
such as keeping over 1.7 million prisoners (1 out of
every 54 people) in jail fed, cared for, and housed.
Other examples of waste are our continued spending
(the pentagon actually got 8 billion dollars they
didn't need recently) on offensive weapons when what
we truly need is the development of a strong defense
network of some kind, so that we don't have to be as
reliant on nuclear weaponry. There are countless
examples of this sort. We need, most certainly, to
focus on the human standard of living worldwide, or at
the very least in our own nation, but I consider a
good secondary cause that of our environment.
-Skye
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Oct 02 2000 - 17:37:55 MDT