I’d like to celebrate Earth Day 2007 with a couple of quotes from the first Earth Day, 37 years ago:
In ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish.
Paul Ehrlich
If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder by the year 2000. … This is about twice what it would take to put us in an ice age.
Kenneth E.F. Watt
Don’t get me wrong; I’m all for cleaning up the environment and conserving our natural resources. As a Christian, I believe that mankind is the steward of God’s creation and as such, we should all take that stewardship seriously. Many people of the pagan persuasion base their environmental responsibility on their worship of Gaia. Those who are concerned with national security want us to be energy independent to break our unhealthy reliance on Middle East or even Venezuelan oil.
The beef I have with environmental alarmists is this: Like the boy who cried, “Wolf!”, making dire predictions about the environment that eventually prove to be false is actually counter-productive to the environmentalist movement.
What quotes will we remember on Earth Day 2044 (Lord willing, I’ll be 94), and for what reasons?
You might be interested in this exchange between crow and rove at a washington event of some type. Kind of funny really. Lots of comments though. I ‘ve got one toward the end.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/laurie-david-and-sheryl-crow/karl-rove-gets-thrown-und_b_46501.html
I wonder how Crow intends to enforce her toilet paper limit. What happens if I use more than one square?
I’m working up a post dealing with single district voteing and ran across this. It says much better what I was trying to say about there being to many people in the world.
The tragedy of the commons http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
At the beginning of his essay, Hardin draws attention to problems that cannot be solved by technical means (i.e. as opposed to those problems with solutions that require “a change only in the techniques of the natural sciences, demanding little or nothing in the way of change in human values or ideas of morality”). Hardin contends that this class of problems includes those raised by human population growth and the use of the Earth’s natural resources.
To make the case for “no technical solutions”, Hardin notes the limits placed on the availability of energy (and material resources) on Earth, and also the consequences of these limits for “quality of life”. To maximize population, one needs to minimize resources spent on anything other than simple survival, and vice versa. Consequently, he concludes that there is no foreseeable technical solution to increasing both human populations and their standard of living on a finite planet
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I pasted the above but there is much more to read. Check it out as it is facinating reading. I wish I could put what I’m thinking so easily to print.