Re: Teaching enviromentalism "indoctrination"?
That's usually when the flying spaghetti monster rears its head.
For my part, I'm sure humans have a big effect on their environment. Almost all we do is dedicated to making our local areas safe and comfortable, and we populate a fair bit of the land mass. If other beings thrive in the same environment we call them a pest to be exterminated, and otherwise creatures are welcome to live in a small patch of designated land or find shelter in a zoo so we can look at them when it pleases us. No different for plants and weeds, though smaller life is often overlooked.
On a more global scale we're all for letting nature run wild, mostly because that's far enough distant that it won't affect our lives unless we choose to go out and experience it. Of course, that's where other local people have their own terraforming plans.
I think it's evident that pollution is something undesirable, and re-using old junk is not as wasteful as making everything disposable, expecting it to go away and get some replacement.
As climate change goes, though, I'm not convinced it's all that disastrous. Nature is largely self-regulating and the world will always keep changing. At a risk of sounding uncaring, if hundreds of millions lose their homes or die, and thousands of species disappear forever, there will still be humans and other life. It won't be the same, and it won't be the end.
What gets me concerned are the scientists planning to slow or halt the climate change with experimental designs as in Discovery's Project Earth for instance. Whether it's wrapping our glaciers in canvas, putting thousands of lenses between the earth and the sun to dim the lights, making masses of artificial clouds or pumping the colder ocean water up to the surface, they strike me as dreadful gambles as likely to disrupt the planet as they are to stabilize it.
It's the scale of geo-engineering you need to make nature and weather as predictable and suitable as possible I'm sure, but I don't believe that's what I want.
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Last edited by Legolas; 02-11-2009 at 09:12 AM.
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