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Re: Brashears on Hanson



On Fri, 06 Dec 1996 16:22:20 -0700, Jim <msteitz@xmission.com> wrote:

>I would submit that environmental problems are not sufficiently
>described by "some animals being inconvienced". Although knowledge of
>global biodiversity is sketchy, virtually all biologists are in
>agreement that mankind is causing what would be the sixth mass
>extinction the earth has experienced, and may cause a majority of the
>world's species to go extinct.

I don't believe that this is true.  The "million species extinct by
the year 2000" ads that you used to see in the hyper-literate press
have stopped appearing, and my imporession is that biologists have
come to believe that the meanings given to the word "species" are
entirely arbitrary.
 
We seem to have killed off the wooly mammoth, the dodo, the carrier
pigeon and a few hundred of their variants.  In the same time frame we
have brought the pig, horse, cow, dog and cat into existence.
 
The top twenty breeds of cattle in Ontario have all been introduced
here in my lifetime, and the old standards of my childhood, Holsteins,
Guernseys, Jerseys, have been reduced to decorative collectors' items.
The Charolais, which was a bizarre experiment in the 1950's, is now
the oldest of the old standards in commercial production.
 
No doubt there is even faster turnover going on amongst the bugs we
try to slaughter, and faster still among the bacteria.  It does seem a
Usenet constant that we are threatened with the Scylla of vast
extinctions on one side, while on the other we have the Charybdis of
newly bred homophages in countless array.
 
Could it just possibly be that both predictions are rash?  Even
fantastic?

>I also assert that most of this destruction is unnecessary and
>unjustified. When we throw away as much usable materials as we do, and
>use as much land as we do, that our lifestyle could indeed be described
>as wasteful, and far, far more than needed to support even a luxurious
>lifestyle, let alone "the bare minimum necassary for surviaval."

If it were true that we threw away useable material in any large
quantity, then it would certainly follow that were were wasteful.
What useable material do you see being thrown away where?

>                                                                                                      I
>believe we could do many things to counter the destructive tendencies of
>society and reduce our impact on the biosphere, and still not 'live as
>animals' as charliew says it would require. 

These "destructive tendencies" are a pure litmus of your own
attitudes.  There are costs, as when harvesting trees causes the
silting of rivers.  Everywhere you look you will find smart people
working to reduce or eliminate such costs.  _Reducing and eliminating
costs is the fundamental activity of human societies at present_.
 
"Destructive tendencies," if they existed, would be an illness, but
they don't exist.  Our tendencies are overwhelmingly procreative,
constructive, creative, and conservational.

>          Because so much
>environmental damage is done by western civilization's wastefulness,
>much improvement could be made at a rather low economic cost. And I am
>firmly convinced that a healthy biosphere is very necassary to
>humanity's survival, and thus is more important than the relatively
>small amount of economic wealth we would have to relinquish. 
>
>I also believe we have become hipersensitive to our own material wants.
>When people support extravagant ecnomic growth, even when it requires
>that our planet face biological meltdown, something is wrong. I think it
>is clear that our priorities must be reordered to reflect the relative
>imporantance of things. On both utilitarian and ethical grounds, the
>environmental agenda, is the logically justified one.
 
Oddly, the premises here are all false, but there is some truth the
the conclusion claimed to come from them.  _An_ environmental agenda
is logically justified; it would have to be one coming from truer
premises, both about human nature and about what is actually happening
inn the world, than those presented here.
 
I think that such an agenda would run along the lines of refining and
deepening our waste reduction programs, a process which is already
under way everywhere.  It would involve making it profitable to
preserve endangered species, another process which is well under way
in Africa, though in North America the administrative route still
seems to be preferred.  It would involve limiting our numbers, and we
have just passed a historic watershed, the time of lessened numbers of
births.
 
Population will continue to increase for some time, because death
rates are still dropping and the number of old people continues to
increase.  The number of potential mothers in the world will start to
drop within the next three years, and the number of old people dying
will increase sharply about twenty-five or thirty years from now
because there will be so many of them.
 
All of these seem to me to be evidence of both individual and
collective intelligence on the part of the human race; they suggest
that many of us will continue to live well, and most of us will
continue to live better.
 
                                                          -dlj.
 





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