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Re: conservation hypocrits

Hi,

Just got back from an awesome, wondrous, delightful Dar Williams concert!

Amy wrote:
> um. I think you misunderstood my point just a tad.

Perhaps just a tad.  But it was the line that went "I don't think that I have
anything to be concerned about" that cause all the alarm bells to go off.  What
you seem to be saying *now* "God gave us the resources we need, so we need to
make sure not to waste them", which is a sentiment I would never argue with, 
but what you seemed to be saying then was "God will provide, so we don't
need to worry about it."  If, as you say, "ideas have consequences", the
consequences of those two ideas are diametrically opposed.

> My generation was taught that...

Just for reference, which generation is that?  Hard to know how to respond
without knowing that.  :-)

>  personally don't buy into the resources are running out routine

We are running out of resources.  That's an incontrovertible fact.  We live on
a planet of finite size, with a finite mass, with a finite fraction of usable
resources.  Some of them are renewable, some of them are not.  How fast we are
using them up is debatable and variable, but the fact that we are using them up
at *some* rate is undeniable.  Trees will grow new trees in a few years if you
give them a chance; fossil fuel takes millions of years to produce.  In
practice, it's a non-renewable resource, and instead of trying to patch small
holes on the sinking ship by finding new drilling sites, we should be looking
more closely at the lifeboats.  And then, of course, there's the over-
exploitation of the oceans, which a scientific american article I read (sorry,
can't remember the reference) predicted would result in exhaustion of the
oceans in less than 20 years, if unchecked.  Of course, the problem with
doomsday predictions is that if you're right, it's disaster, and if people do
follow your advice and avoid it, they can always claim you were exaggerating.
The Titanic, just in the relatively few years since its discovery, is being
covered in the sunken bodies of upper level plankton because the fish that
usually eat that plankton are gone.  Nearer to shore, trawlers are bulldozing
the ocean floor just to get fish up near the surface.  Between this and
pollution, the algae populations are in trouble, and since ocean algae provide
the bulk of the oxygen in the atmosphere (and remove most of the CO2, which is
a greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming), you'd think people would
want to tread very, very carefully.  Doesn't seem so.

Personally, I don't think we're going to seriously look at alternatives until
the oil is just plain gone, and I think there are going to be wars then that
will make WWII look like kids in a sandbox.  I mean, the Gulf War was fought
over a relatively small amount of oil, on a global scale.  What do you think
will happen when the supply is *really* threatened?  My (totally amatuer)
prediction is that as cheap oil gets scarcer, all the petroleum products we
take for granted (i.e. plastics) will start to get prohibitively expensive,
making the rich/poor gulf even more extreme and obvious than it is now.  The
third world will climb into modernity and find out that we got all the toys
before they got there.  Already they are destroying rainforests and important
ecosystems like Madagascar (goodbye, lemurs), and when first world liberals try
to stop them, they say "hey, *you* guys exploited your resources to get rich,
who are you to tell us we can't do the same thing?"  Maybe some really bright
people will come up with alternate solutions before it all flies apart, but I
have a pessimistic feeling that people will be complacent until absolutely
forced to be otherwise, at which point it will be too late.  We'll see.

Sorry to get so bleak on y'all.  I'm not usually this pessimistic.  This is way
off-topic.  I'll shut up now.  
--
Don Smith                    Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment
dasmith at rotse2_physics.lsa.umich.edu        http://xte.mit.edu/~dasmith/

"Am I gentrifying my inner neighborhood?"		- Dar Williams


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