What a big article of wrong.
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Originally Posted by Michael 'Jurassic Park' Crichton
And what about indigenous peoples, living in a state of harmony with the Eden-like environment? Well, they never did.
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Did someone sleep through anthropology? There are indigenous people alive right at this very moment who have maintained harmony with their environment for hunderds, perhaps thousands of years. The Sanema, a group of indigenous people who live in the Upper Caura region of Venezuela, have lived in relative harmony with the wildlife and plantlife of their various homes for hundreds of years. It was only when corporations moved in large farming comunities that the balance is being lost (as the population explodes, wildlife can no longer sustain the human population.
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Originally Posted by Michael 'Congo' Crichton
And if you, even now, put yourself in nature even for a matter of days, you will quickly be disabused of all your romantic fantasies. Take a trek through the jungles of Borneo, and in short order you will have festering sores on your skin, you'll have bugs all over your body, biting in your hair, crawling up your nose and into your ears, you'll have infections and sickness and if you're not with somebody who knows what they're doing, you'll quickly starve to death. But chances are that even in the jungles of Borneo you won't experience nature so directly, because you will have covered your entire body with DEET and you will be doing everything you can to keep those bugs off you.
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Strawman. No real environmentalist (or ecologist, as I like to call myself) has any illusions about the realities of nature. In fact, we propose using our current knowledge to protect humans from infectious diseases, parisitic insects, and starvation. We, at least I, do not want us to go completly back to a hunter-gatherer state without bringing back some of our great accumulation of knowledge. As someone who went on a survivalist safari of Brazil and Peru, I know what's out there. The fact is that if you're trained and instructed well enough, you can actually survive in those environments. I had a blast. My wife didnt want to come for some reason.
Just because Michael Crithon decided it was a good idea to sleep on the ground in a forest (which no one but complete amatures does), doesn't mean we'll all make that mistake.
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Originally Posted by Michael 'Sphere' Crichton
Well, it's interesting. You may have noticed that something has been left off the doomsday list, lately. Although the preachers of environmentalism have been yelling about population for fifty years, over the last decade world population seems to be taking an unexpected turn. Fertility rates are falling almost everywhere. As a result, over the course of my lifetime the thoughtful predictions for total world population have gone from a high of 20 billion, to 15 billion, to 11 billion (which was the UN estimate around 1990) to now 9 billion, and soon, perhaps less. There are some who think that world population will peak in 2050 and then start to decline. There are some who predict we will have fewer people in 2100 than we do today. Is this a reason to rejoice, to say halleluiah? Certainly not. Without a pause, we now hear about the coming crisis of world economy from a shrinking population. We hear about the impending crisis of an aging population. Nobody anywhere will say that the core fears expressed for most of my life have turned out not to be true. As we have moved into the future, these doomsday visions vanished, like a mirage in the desert. They were never there---though they still appear, in the future. As mirages do.
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What Michael Crichton doesn't realize is that he is actually arguing against himself. When most see that the population predictions are falling, that must mean that everything'll be allright. Actually, that speaks to the fact that it is worse than we estimated. If the population increase is slowing, it must be doing so for a reason. Enter environmentalists. No one can argue with the fact thawt the Earth can only support so many people. Eventually, after so many billion, the various ecosystems will shut down and a lot of people will die. It's similar, in fact, to the peak oil theories. Once there are a given number of people on the planet, production of food will not be able to sustain us. Once people start dying, econemies will colapse, disease will run rampant, Carrot Top will have a sitcom; basically the threat of partial extinction. One of the warning signs of this approaching is when poorer countries start to see zero population growth, and then negative population growth. Like it is right now. As the negative population growth makes it's way up from the poorere countries to the more wealthy countries, then we start to lose the cheap labor from the poor countries and we start to see the econemies fluxuate. I can go on, but I think this is starting to paint a picture.