6 ms·

No, at the risk of "getting you started", I'm not "horrified" at the loss of 70% of the North American forest over the past 500+ years, if that is, in fact, the

by SiVal 13y ago

No, at the risk of "getting you started", I'm not "horrified" at the loss of 70% of the North American forest over the past 500+ years, if that is, in fact, the correct statistic. Try running the film in reverse, regrowing the lost forest at the cost of 95+% of the people. Would that be an absolute delight, the undoing of the horror, the horror? Clearly it would be to some people, but not to me. I'm hardly arguing in favor of eliminating the remaining 30% of the forest and adding another billion or so North Americans. Being okay with some change doesn't mean I prefer the maximum amount of change. It's just that as I drive from coast to coast, as I have done more than once, I'm not overwhelmed with the horror of the landscape. I am willing to work to clean up the mess we humans so often make and to take steps to avoid ruining things we can't fix. I don't want to live on a pile of garbage, and it does take constant effort to avoid letting garbage of various sorts (trash dumps, dirty water, smoggy air) get out of control. Sometimes we fail, and we need to do something about it. I'm especially worried about damage that is not obvious---the oceans come to mind. But no, I'm not horrified at the thought of North America having 70% fewer trees than we had 500 years ago, if that's the real number. I want to take proper safeguards with respect to the environment, human health, human living standards, crime, political and economic freedoms, education, and numerous other important issues, but sometimes I think that some people get uncomfortably "religious" about the environment in particular. I'm not one of them.

johnchristopher 13y ago
> [...] but sometimes I think that some people get uncomfortably "religious" about the environment in particular. I'm not one of them. [...] Could it be, maybe, that your statements reflect the thought of some people that might be denying ecological disasters ? What's religious about being horrified at the loss of 70% of the North American Forest ? If that is indeed the correct number (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_in_the_United_Sta... : a 25% loss for the US with a stabilized 20th century but this here http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange2/current/lectures/deforest/deforest.html http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange2/current/lect... hints that primary forest area aren't counted the same way http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange2/current/lectures/deforest/defores9.JPG http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange2/current/lect...)... What's wrong with being religious, anyway ? > It's just that as I drive from coast to coast, as I have done more than once, I'm not overwhelmed with the horror of the landscape. May it be because you can't compare to the same ride 500 years ago and so the impact doesn't sink in ?
- jerf 13y ago
  "Could it be, maybe, that your statements reflect the thought of some people that might be denying ecological disasters ?" That is a nakedly emotionally manipulative reply with no substance. I mean this judgment to apply to your entire post, just quoted the worst part.
  - johnchristopher 13y ago
    > That is a nakedly emotionally manipulative reply with no substance. That is the effect I wanted to achieve in order to better parody and criticize parent's own manipulative wording: "some" people, "sometimes", veiled attempt to accuse opponents of being "religious", etc. I thought it was more obvious, sorry. Next time I'll just state it plainly like you did (no irony). For what it's worth I couldn't find any numbers regarding the 70% loss and what it really refers to.
    - jerf 13y ago
      Heh, yes, that never works. To be clearly a parody one must post something that would "obviously" never be posted seriously by someone. This turns out to be a high bar. Especially in emotional areas like environmentalism.
- sageikosa 13y ago
  Maybe because 5 billion years ago there wasn't anything life-like going on around these parts. Many changes have occurred since then, and many will occur yet again. Not every genetic sequence is sacred, and the vast majority that modern taxonomy would consider "species" have come and gone without me shedding a tear.
  - enraged_camel 13y ago
    That is correct, but which species before humans has caused so much change to the environment in such a short time? Sure, there's the natural eb and flow of the environment. But that tends to happen over very long periods of time. When you're talking about 70% of forests being destroyed within 500 years though, that's something else entirely. Make no mistake: the change our planet has gone through over that short time period is unprecedented.
api 13y ago
As George Carlin said: "Stop talking about saving the Earth. The Earth is fine. We're fucked." One of the things I hate about green ideology is that it frames this issue in selfless religious moralistic terms when it's really all about pure self-interest. To what extent can we continue doing this? For how long? We depend on these ecological systems, and the economic cost of replacing them would be far beyond our capacity to invest (if it's even within our technical capability). We depend on many, many resources that are presently being extracted far faster than their rate of formation, with fossil fuels being chief among these. Couriscant in Star Wars is fiction, and is likely impossible even with imaginary post-singularity-level technology. Its climate would have little or nothing to regulate it, and its atmosphere would revert to pre-photosynthesis reducing composition. Less than a thousand years after mass die-off and the collapse of global civilization into a new dark age, most of the "damage" will be gone. This is less than a microsecond on geological timescales. The planet will be fine. Such brutal die-offs have occurred before many times in geological history, and it's absurdly naive to think that it couldn't happen to us. Nature doesn't care about us. It doesn't care how much we suffer or how many of us die. We have to worry about that, or nothing will. And even if it doesn't happen suddenly, there's the whole quality of life issue. Do we really want to live in a b-grade cyberpunk dystopia of endless ugly sprawl, routine Fukushima/BP Macondo type industrial disasters, increasing pollution, commodity hyperinflation, and unattainably distant gaps between the rich and everyone else? Because that might be what an ecologically depleted world looks like: a few super-rich demigods presiding over massive seething ghettoes policed by drones. That would also be a new dark age. Edit: it might help people understand if we tried to estimate the cost of replacing these ecological systems with artificial industrial replacements. I'm gonna guesstimate somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000X current world GDP. You could probably arrive at an estimate by working backwards and assuming thermodynamic efficiencies at reconstructing the biosphere in the 10-15% neighborhood. So SUM(GDP,1012AD,2012AD) / 0.15?
ChrisNorstrom 13y ago
Do you live in the USA? Do you know how notorious we are for paving over land with strip mall parking lots that will never be anywhere near full? How we run from our problems rather than solving them? How we move further and further away from the city, create massive traffic from the long commutes, and in turn move further and further away again? How county folks strike down and red tape high density apartments anywhere near their neighborhood, even vote against light rail and trollies because they're afraid the overhead wires will "lower their property value". We create neighborhoods that require a 3 mile drive just to get to your neighbors house a few yards away: http://www.chrisnorstrom.com/2011/10/the-great-cul-de-sac-problem-and-how-to-fix-alleviate-it/ http://www.chrisnorstrom.com/2011/10/the-great-cul-de-sac-pr... We're really bad at city planning.

by SiVal 13y ago

johnchristopher 13y ago

> [...] but sometimes I think that some people get uncomfortably "religious" about the environment in particular. I'm not one of them. [...] Could it be, maybe, that your statements reflect the thought of some people that might be denying ecological disasters ? What's religious about being horrified at the loss of 70% of the North American Forest ? If that is indeed the correct number (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_in_the_United_Sta... : a 25% loss for the US with a stabilized 20th century but this here http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange2/current/lectures/deforest/deforest.html http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange2/current/lect... hints that primary forest area aren't counted the same way http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange2/current/lectures/deforest/defores9.JPG http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange2/current/lect...)... What's wrong with being religious, anyway ? > It's just that as I drive from coast to coast, as I have done more than once, I'm not overwhelmed with the horror of the landscape. May it be because you can't compare to the same ride 500 years ago and so the impact doesn't sink in ?

jerf 13y ago
"Could it be, maybe, that your statements reflect the thought of some people that might be denying ecological disasters ?" That is a nakedly emotionally manipulative reply with no substance. I mean this judgment to apply to your entire post, just quoted the worst part.
- johnchristopher 13y ago
  > That is a nakedly emotionally manipulative reply with no substance. That is the effect I wanted to achieve in order to better parody and criticize parent's own manipulative wording: "some" people, "sometimes", veiled attempt to accuse opponents of being "religious", etc. I thought it was more obvious, sorry. Next time I'll just state it plainly like you did (no irony). For what it's worth I couldn't find any numbers regarding the 70% loss and what it really refers to.
  - jerf 13y ago
    Heh, yes, that never works. To be clearly a parody one must post something that would "obviously" never be posted seriously by someone. This turns out to be a high bar. Especially in emotional areas like environmentalism.
sageikosa 13y ago
Maybe because 5 billion years ago there wasn't anything life-like going on around these parts. Many changes have occurred since then, and many will occur yet again. Not every genetic sequence is sacred, and the vast majority that modern taxonomy would consider "species" have come and gone without me shedding a tear.
- enraged_camel 13y ago
  That is correct, but which species before humans has caused so much change to the environment in such a short time? Sure, there's the natural eb and flow of the environment. But that tends to happen over very long periods of time. When you're talking about 70% of forests being destroyed within 500 years though, that's something else entirely. Make no mistake: the change our planet has gone through over that short time period is unprecedented.

api 13y ago

As George Carlin said: "Stop talking about saving the Earth. The Earth is fine. We're fucked." One of the things I hate about green ideology is that it frames this issue in selfless religious moralistic terms when it's really all about pure self-interest. To what extent can we continue doing this? For how long? We depend on these ecological systems, and the economic cost of replacing them would be far beyond our capacity to invest (if it's even within our technical capability). We depend on many, many resources that are presently being extracted far faster than their rate of formation, with fossil fuels being chief among these. Couriscant in Star Wars is fiction, and is likely impossible even with imaginary post-singularity-level technology. Its climate would have little or nothing to regulate it, and its atmosphere would revert to pre-photosynthesis reducing composition. Less than a thousand years after mass die-off and the collapse of global civilization into a new dark age, most of the "damage" will be gone. This is less than a microsecond on geological timescales. The planet will be fine. Such brutal die-offs have occurred before many times in geological history, and it's absurdly naive to think that it couldn't happen to us. Nature doesn't care about us. It doesn't care how much we suffer or how many of us die. We have to worry about that, or nothing will. And even if it doesn't happen suddenly, there's the whole quality of life issue. Do we really want to live in a b-grade cyberpunk dystopia of endless ugly sprawl, routine Fukushima/BP Macondo type industrial disasters, increasing pollution, commodity hyperinflation, and unattainably distant gaps between the rich and everyone else? Because that might be what an ecologically depleted world looks like: a few super-rich demigods presiding over massive seething ghettoes policed by drones. That would also be a new dark age. Edit: it might help people understand if we tried to estimate the cost of replacing these ecological systems with artificial industrial replacements. I'm gonna guesstimate somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000X current world GDP. You could probably arrive at an estimate by working backwards and assuming thermodynamic efficiencies at reconstructing the biosphere in the 10-15% neighborhood. So SUM(GDP,1012AD,2012AD) / 0.15?

ChrisNorstrom 13y ago

Do you live in the USA? Do you know how notorious we are for paving over land with strip mall parking lots that will never be anywhere near full? How we run from our problems rather than solving them? How we move further and further away from the city, create massive traffic from the long commutes, and in turn move further and further away again? How county folks strike down and red tape high density apartments anywhere near their neighborhood, even vote against light rail and trollies because they're afraid the overhead wires will "lower their property value". We create neighborhoods that require a 3 mile drive just to get to your neighbors house a few yards away: http://www.chrisnorstrom.com/2011/10/the-great-cul-de-sac-problem-and-how-to-fix-alleviate-it/ http://www.chrisnorstrom.com/2011/10/the-great-cul-de-sac-pr... We're really bad at city planning.