I agree with you 99% philosophically, but note that there is a basic difference between the kind of environmental intervention we’ve gotten into from the kind that we started with. It’s a change in scale.

Our method of intervention in nature includes an automatic multiplier of scale. It may possibly be that there have always been people, even in hunter-gatherer times, who wanted to manipulate the environment that way. It wasn’t till relatively recently that we figured out how.

Now there’s a totally unexpected consequence. Our interventions have increased in scale to become greater than our environment’s ability to recover from them. We’re no longer a small thing in a big place, and it upsets very many of our unquestioned assumptions.

So… my conclusion is that we took many centuries searching for how to multiply our manipulation of the earth and have a very few decades to figure out how to stop it. That there is curiously no public discussion of the issue at all, not even any terms for it that the public is familiar with, is a clue.

The complete silence about it indicates that the discussion we and many others are trying to raise is being actively suppressed. I see it daily with nearly all my friends, family and professional peers, all actively grasping for ways to dodge around it and never asking any open questions about it.

I think what’s doing that is most centrally that the problem human behavior we’re collectively engaged in, and the behaviors of the environment it is coming into conflict with, all violate the model of determinism. They’re all behaviors of independently reacting individual systems, all now bumping into each other in an open environment. So then people who are clinging to their place in the mainstream of human thinking need to creatively avoid discussing them.

What do you conclude from that??

Phil Henshaw

> From: Anselmo Pedroni
> Sent: Friday, September 19, 2008 11:26 AM
> Subject: Re: The probable, the desirable and the possible.
>
> Hi Phil!
>
> Humans, wether intentionally, unwillingly or unknowingly, have always
> manipulated their environment, since the dawn of times.