Thanks for Commenting
Yes Mario, That is interesting. I guess I have always considered myself an environmentalist. But I don't get competetive about it. You know, like outshine other environmentalists with superior dedication or anything. At some point environmentalism can look a bit like religious sanctimony or something. Actually environmentalism has a lot of the negative traits that are commonly associated with religion.
Hypocrisy that's one. Say like Al Gore et. al. So we got people that are harping and droning on about how much damage people are doing to the atmosphere or biosphere or whatever, but these very guys consider that they are helping so much by generating 'attention' to the problem that they don't necessarily have to do anything real like stop driving motorcades of SUV's.
But you know hypocrisy isn't as bad as it gets. Hypocracy is only an inch from bigotry and it becomes bigotry when a class of 'superior' people emerges.
Superior, yeah you know like a Hollywood movie star or a party boss that fully expects that the 'common' people should be willing to make some sacrifices in terms of comfort and prosperity on behalf of the environment. Meanwhile Richie Rich and Mr. Big shouldn't really be expected to do anything so vulgar as to sit in the same cabin with a couple hundred commoners.
I don't know. I haven't really fully articulated this but I claim it is a small step from hypocrisy to bigotry.
Guys that don't want any more houses to be built... no more roads to be built... they all live in houses, drive on roads. When you present any challenge they retreat to this 'smart growth' argument. Smart growth... that means we get to live here and you can go live somewhere else.
That land your pa bought 20 years ago as a retirement investment. Well we think the government should forcefully acquire it and make a really pretty green belt... So I don't have to look at houses. Nevermind that I live in a house and nevermind that I live in a city. And that my lot is worth half a million and your lot was forcefully acquired at less than 10% of value. Well nevermind all that. I am an environmentalist cuz I like greenbelts and since you wanted to build a house, you are a developer. Environmentalists are superior to developers... even though environmentalists live in houses... built by developers... go figure.
You say "It seems to me that huge numbers of species have come and gone (think dinosaurs) without the earth coming to an end."
You lost me there.
You take the extinction of the dionsaurs as proof that Homo Sapiens canNOT become extinct?
It looks like the exact oposite conclusion is better supported: many many sepcies have become extinct. People are another species. People can become extinct.
Perhaps the loss of one species of butterfly, by itself, won't cause the extinction of people. But it's not just one species, it's thousand going extinct now.
What if it were not one species of butterfly, but one grain? Perhaps Tiosinte and its descendants, corn and maize? What if wheat were to become extinct because of some combination of other extinctions we can't now predict? We'd be in a world of hungry.
Commenting by HaloScan
