From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Fri May 16 2003 - 23:10:23 MDT
Damien writes
> > when I was in junior high school, I supposed that leftists were to
> > the left of liberals, and rightists to the right of conservatives.
>
> More than one axis, remember?
Of course. But then Eternal Truth #2 is "every statement
must be further modified". The first axis grabs a huge
percentage of the truth; each additional axis adds more.
Finally, each separate person at each separate moment in
his or her life demands an "axis" or account. Everything
that we are going to say, or even conceive of, outside of
mathematics is an approximation.
Switching over to the environment, Lee Daniel Crocker wrote
Let's not forget our history: the EPA was created by a Republican
congress under a Republican president, and was an outgrowth of
the "conservation" movement that was decidedly conservative (in
the dictionary sense of the word). What happened is that later
administrations seized its power and used it to regulate big
business to death, and spun the rhetoric that industry and
technology were anti-environment, and the public bought it.
Conservatives are against what it became, not what it was.
Yes, but as for me (Lee Corbin), well, I'm the baby-eating type
of anti-environmentalist, and could give a bad name to other
libertarians or conservatives like Lee Daniel, or those Republicans.
Damien now writes
> The historical roots of environmentalism are about not poisoning our ecosystem
> and about not making valuable or interesting species extinct. About
> preventing damage. Think _Silent Spring_. Yes, there's a Gaia-worshipping
> strand around these days too, and it can be vocal, but it's a mistake to focus
> too much on it. For me environmentalism is about whether I can see mountains
> which are six miles away. (In Pasadena you often can't, due to smog.) Clean
> air, clean water. Not fouling our cage like rats.
I just don't care. It has never mattered to me whether the air
is dirty or clean (although when I do want to use a telescope,
yeah, it's annoying). Maybe it's because I grew up in Riverside,
the smog capital of the west coast, and thought it was natural
that your eyes would sting if you were outside very long (which
I tried to avoid anyway, for other reasons), or that your lungs
would hurt in a peculiar fashion after you ran a ways.
> > I've known nature lovers who would hate a desert area
> > to become forested "because all the desert life would die",
> > (showing that the increase in total life didn't appeal that
> > much to them).
>
> Desert life has appeal of its own. There're value in diversity, in
> avoiding monocultures. Deserts are rarely dead, although some may be.
Yes. But on a volume per volume basis, how do you rank 10^6 cubic
meters of
A. Desert ecology
B. Coral
C. Forest ecology
D. Human habitation
E. Human brains
F. Uploaded humans with 10^8 times the density?
Doesn't the use of 3D space get better the further down on
this list we go?
I'm afraid that with such choices both current and in sight,
I just don't care about nature.
> > What is "ecological capital", in economic terms?
>
> The economic services provided by nature, like oxygen, or regulating
> floods. Or the cost of replacing those services with technology.
Okay, thanks. I understand. But do recall that if nature stopped
producing oxygen, we'd still have enough in our atmosphere for
another 50,000 years at current human and animal consumption.
As for the rest of nature, as soon as we can use the raw material
to support intelligence instead, the better.
> And how would you characterize acid rain, or loss of life due to
> smog, or having to avoid eating too much otherwise-healthy fish
> because of mercury buildup, or loss of life or having to be more
> careful outside because of ozone layer damage and increase in skin
> cancer?
Well, I don't think of acid rain as inconveniencing humans
at all (and weren't the reports of damage overblown anyway?).
Does smog really kill people? I didn't know. Or is this one
of those cases where extremely old people live a few days
less when viewed with very large numbers? Also, I don't
think that danger to the ozone layer is real; do you think
that it has been definitely concluded that it is?
Lee
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