Do the damage first, use that as the means of working out what needs fixing, fix it afterwards.Otherwise you have got a principle of inaction, and that's what environmentalism is, the principle of never trying anything in case it goes wrong (which in practical reality causes people to do the things anyway, while environmentalists complain about it and try to bring in laws to punish people for it).
Edit: mmm, lovely cod. :) We should certainly try and preserve them somehow. Actually overfishing is fairly straightforward since it's not in the fishermen's interests to kill off a species of fish.
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Tue 4 Dec 2007, 22:25,
archived)
Edit: mmm, lovely cod. :) We should certainly try and preserve them somehow. Actually overfishing is fairly straightforward since it's not in the fishermen's interests to kill off a species of fish.
Arghh...You keep drawing me back in with interesting points to respond to. I really must stop and do some work.
Ok... it's a good idea. It really is, and I know how insincere anything you say on the internet can sound. But... the problem comes when we cause a problem we can't get back from. How do you fix the problem of wiping out an entire species, if we find that upsets the balance too much? That's why seed banks, zoos etc do have an important role to play.
I'd argue that environmentalism is exactly what you're saying - it's fixing the damage caused since the industrial revolution and (in some cases) caused *before* the industrial revolution. Yes, again, there are those environmentalists who just want to ban anyone from flying... but there are also activists who want us to adapt to change which now seems inevitable. While it's taking governments some time to catch up to these ideas, they finally are.
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Tue 4 Dec 2007, 22:34,
archived)
Ok... it's a good idea. It really is, and I know how insincere anything you say on the internet can sound. But... the problem comes when we cause a problem we can't get back from. How do you fix the problem of wiping out an entire species, if we find that upsets the balance too much? That's why seed banks, zoos etc do have an important role to play.
I'd argue that environmentalism is exactly what you're saying - it's fixing the damage caused since the industrial revolution and (in some cases) caused *before* the industrial revolution. Yes, again, there are those environmentalists who just want to ban anyone from flying... but there are also activists who want us to adapt to change which now seems inevitable. While it's taking governments some time to catch up to these ideas, they finally are.
Seed banks and zoos are excellent, yes.The solution to the event of ecosystems becoming crippled enough to cause problems to humans (problems of the material kind they actually care about) is ... well, when their ingenuity is spurred on by unproductive farming land or a perceptibly runaway greenhouse effect or whatever it is, some completely unexpected and fascinating solutions will become apparent. In the meantime, stop telling people to preserve things like tiger-filled jungles when nobody is concerned enough to want to pay for the jungle to be preserved. Somebody has to live near those tigers, without a good solid farm job to go to. This kind of regulation puts a brake (but only a brake) on environmental damage, and also puts a brake on creativity in general which would come in useful later in fixing the material damage, if any.
Anyway, yes, that was fun, thank you.
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Tue 4 Dec 2007, 23:09,
archived)
Anyway, yes, that was fun, thank you.