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I think human happiness and well being obviously has to be at the forefront of people's minds when discussing all of these environmental issues. We always have to keep in mind that it is, in the end, for the human good that we are even concerned, so we have to use human good as the measure. This should be an undisputed premise of every environmental argument no matter who you are (so long as you are human).
Face it, we as human beings change a lot of things in the world, other forces in nature change a lot of things, the world is always in a state of change. Meteors collide with Jupiter and the moon, volcanoes erupt on Io, comets dissolve on their way past the sun, it really doesn't matter one bit to us even though these are huge changes that dwarf anything we humans do or will ever do. That some sun across the galaxy explodes doesn't concern us in the least, unless we felt it was actually going to have some impact on us. Everything in this Universe gets filtered through human eyes before we understand it.
The only reason loss of ozone in the atmosphere or global warming or loss of rainforest, etc, is an issue to us as human beings is because it affects us as human beings. We don't get upset that strip mining tears down a mountain for the mountains sake, we are concerned about it because it destroys a natural view that we as human beings like, or that it affects the water we drink, changes our economics, gives us raw materials, creates an impact where ever the waste materials are discarded, etc. All we are arguing about when we argue about the environment is what is best for us as human beings, would we rather have the view of the mountain or would we rather have the resources gained from the mining, for example ? Would we rather have the economic advantage to the local area or would we rather have the peace and quiet ? Nothing we do is for any good but a human good. Even saving whales, white tail deer, fish in a stream, etc, is because it serves our purposes to have those animals in our world. We want to cut down rainforests to make room for crops, for wood, etc, and we want to save rainforests for bio-diversity, etc, not because we want bio-diversity for it's own sake, but because bio-diversity affects us, we want to live in a diverse world that has medicines, genetic diversity, and the like. We human beings are the measure of everything we do.
With that said ...
It's when you start talking to someone who is interested in the environment for it's own sake that you start getting into trouble, because there really are some folks out there who actually believe in saving jellyfish for their own good, even if that means the loss of some human beings in the process. There are people out there who want to see trees thrive on the decaying remains of homes, to see deer running across what used to be thriving interstates, and all of that, who really do think that human beings are evil and need to be culled for no other reason than that they are evil. This group is very odd, and there is always the simple response ... if you really think humans are that bad, then why are you still here ... to which they always seem to have some response that distills down to - they don't want all humans gone, just all humans except for them, so they can enjoy the natural world without all the displeasure that comes from actually having to share the world with other people.
Global warming hasn't even gotten to the point of that kind of debate as far as I am concerned. When it's proven that there is actually global warming, the next obvious question is ... so, like, is that actually a bad thing ? The only ill effects people have said so far is that things will "change", the coast lines might move, the weather might change, humans might in the end have to move, but so far as I have read the whole reason human civilization has taken off at all is because we are in a lull between two periods of ice age glaciation, it's going to be a real struggle convincing me that (1) global warmth isn't better than global cooling, (2) that change is a bad thing, and most of all (3) that I should give a rat's ass. The last one is the most important, because considering everything through human eyes I have trouble seeing how cooling the earth by a degree or two is going to benefit mankind more than having a way to drive themselves to work every day.
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Last edited by wind_magic; 02-27-2008 at 08:11 PM.
Reason: spelling and grammar
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