Like Evil Captor, you’re taking the tiny group of people that runs these nasty polluting companies, and projecting their opinions (well, your perception of their opinions, anyway) onto every conservative in the country, including the many millions of poor conservatives.
It’s really very easy to argue with the substance of Evil Captor’s post. I believe that the vast majority of people (conservative and liberal alike) have pretty much the same Great American Dream ™–to have enough money to live comfortably and do things that they love to do. There are some ruthless people out there that would sell their grandmother’s still-beating heart and dump plutonium in your water supply to live on an island, but I don’t think either political party wants to claim them.
Sorry to say this, but you are wrong.
How to cut depends on many factors as you say: the weather conditions (wind, how much rain etc.), the risk of fires, how the logging roads will effect the soil, where to prevent the the forest from being to wet, to be a wet-land, etc. etc.
And therefore planning is always needed! (If you want maximal money for your children and grand-children).
The soil of the forest needs to be scientifically checked for various reasons mostly in order to know what and how to replant.
I am not an expert, but I have worked with Finnish forests and logging etc. for three years and 5 years in Russian forests, in different parts of Russia.
It is really so, that you do not log everywhere in the same manner, “just as my father used to do”.
When we speak environment, you will hear much about forests, but that comes later.
I am not speaking boycotting in that post. In my example people bought as before, they just left the packages at the cashier.
We can speak boycotting later.
Agreed.
I did not mean to compare in any “see how bad those are”-mode. I mainly tell what happens here; in Finland, in the Nordic countries and EU. But if I find something about USA or Canada, I compare to them in order to show that the problems are common for us all.
And the GDP in EU is really low now, and the production per capita, because we have a lot of “Kolhos-countries” that has just entered EU. And those countries with lowest GDP per capita are our greatest concern.
The whole OP is about how European feels and acts different from USA, but I have never lived, or even visited USA, so I can not compare. But when a lot of US-posters here has not lived in Europe, I try to put some light onto this.
Naturally. But anyhow, a fact is that, according to some source, Germany alone is producing an annual amount of waste, that equals a wall: 4 meter high, 10 meter broad and 800 km long!!! (As I remember just from my head). This does not mean that we in Finland are better, when we produce less waste. It is just a fact, a problem that we (hopefully) are discussing in this thread.
WRONG!
Productivity? Not always, not even often, but I come to this later.
Wealth? Depending whose wealth we are discussing? Later.
What is the standard of living if we live in a sewer?
A strawman filled with crap. Not even worth a discussion.
In that case, liberals are tend to be people who are so convinced that people are good at heart that they’d picket the capital punishment trial of Hermann Goering; pie-in-the-sky wackos who are convinced that they’re soul mates with the whales, who must never be hunted, but only watched and secretly worshipped.
They secretly wish that humans would be almost killed off so that the real nature could take over the earth. They hate personal responsibilty, and love forming committees to tell other people what to do. Oh, and they hate God and everyone who is religious.
How’s that for an overblown wacko rant? You’re my inspiration.
Have you seen Penn and Teller’s BS episode on the Endangered Species Act? They make a fairly convincing case for it as a good liberal goal that’s just bad law.
I’ve thought of starting this thread before, under the title of “Conservatives, why the antipathy for environmental issues?”
I’m one of the most churchified people on this board, so I think I have a little authority to say: A lot of the disconnect is the fact that a great number of the loudest environmental activists are convinced that animals are worth saving because they’re morally and spiritually equivalent to humans. This really makes the traditionalists/conservatives/religious people mad, and makes them want to shoot a fawn just to get back at them.
You honestly have to phrase things correctly to bring up some environmental issues at church. You can bring up picking up litter, you can be nice to animals, or save the whales, but you have to dance around the idea that vaguely sounds like “Animals are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on, or use for entertainment”. PETA may have some good points about animal abuse, but their shrill screaming and moral equivalence argument makes me want to train a dog to growl whenever I say “PETA!”.
I had an incredible horror at your words until I got to the last sentence and laughed very hard. Nicely done sir.
By the way as **Blake ** would tell you I actually do think that Whales must never be hunted, should only be watched. He thinks I’m crazy. Do you share the opinion?
Everything you say rings true to me. If it helps any, most (even liberal) environmentalist “I know” are not sympathetic to PETA. The group is embarrassing and by being lumped in with a group that many consider crazy, damages the environmental movement.
I know people who picket hunting of deer even when they are starving to death or doing as much damage to a park as a careless logging company would do. These two don’t even like PETA. I actually don’t know anyone who will admit to liking or supporting PETA. I know many Vegans and Vegetarians and they don’t even support PETA while quietly wishing we would stop killing all animals. They would prefer to make their point through literature and education.
I think the last straw for many was PETA’s got Beer campaign encouraging people to drink Beer not milk as apparently milking is somehow animal cruelty.
Thanks for the compliment. I think that there is about 1% of liberals who fit that description, like there is about 1% that fit the supposed conservative description. On both sides, and even in the chuch, there is a great tendency for the people who “believe the most” to be the leaders. Most people just can’t summon the energy or find the time, but the “true believers” can. They’ll make the time, and they’ll get on tv to scream about it, too. This then becomes the face of the movement/belief system/religion to the rest of the world.
As for the whales, I’m a little tired of the moral UNequivelency of animals, according to many people. Feed a snake in front of some people, and they’ll be horrified.
Me: So the snake is NOT God’s creature, and does not deserve to live?
Them: Urp.
I wouldn’t kill whales that are endangered. But you notice that no one argues for saving the rat. “Rats are people tooooooo!!!”
Where I get in trouble with Blake is I do rate Cetaceans as a higher intelligence. I don’t classify Higher Primates or Cetaceans with other animals. It is not completely rational, but it is how I feel.
Rats, we have no shortage and while I wouldn’t be cruel to one, if it was in my house I would kill it if needed.
On the other hand I have caught and released mice that got into my house so I have a trouble with the cute factor.
Snakes deserve to live, just not in my house I hope. Well maybe a small snake as a pet.
I think that most people here has now come to the conclusion that we all want to have a nice nature. We all like to have as it was when we as kids were at granny’s frm. Right!
But the unanswered question is: HOW??
What are our actions? What should they be?
No offence, but it seem to me that it is enough if we send Bambi some kisses every now and then.
Henry
Well, chimps are pretty darn smart, for animals. I read a story about how experimenters put a pole in a chimp’s cage to see if it would get the idea to knock down the fruit they had tied to a string from the roof. Instead, the chimp stood the pole up, and before it could topple over, climbed up it and grabbed the fruit, dropping to the ground.
Notice, though, that Kiko the sign-language gorilla has only a two-year old’s vocabulary after years of training. My barely 3-year old nephew grasps syntax and grammar and puts together small paragraphs, not just pidgin English phrases.
I’m not sure what a greater intelligence has to do with whether we should ever kill animals, though. It seems to me that to have a spiritual nature, which would be the dividing line for me, that an animal would have to be self aware, so that it could imagine the choices before it and the implications to itself and others. I don’t think anyone argues that even chimps do that. They’re not very concerned with things that don’t immediately help them or maybe their own social group. They’re animals!
Now, after all that, I should point out that I have a reputation of saving spiders from people. Why kill a non-poisonous (to humans) spider? It’s going to catch bugs you don’t like, so just throw it in the bushes instead of killing it. But it’s not cute at all, so it gets smashed.
I had a retaliatory cannon shot to fire back at you, but then I realized that not only is the target too big, I feel sorry for you. The bile and black tar ick that oozes out of your posts implies a person who is grinding up inside.
Henry, at the end of Jared Diamond’s book Collapse, in which he describes throughout history why societies collapse, he decides that the environmental problems of today (notably in China, Australia, and the US) raise serious questions about the sustainability, but that the continuation of these polluting practices is largely (if not completely) on the shoulders of the consumers, not the companies that produce.
He said, basically, how could one expect a company to change if it has no profitable reason to do so? If the consumers are still consuming, the manufacturers will keep manufacturing.
Forgive me if the point has already been made but …
The Conservative stance is partly a result of extremist positions on the left such as giving more (or even equal) importance to some little fishy instead of humans.
You could say the same thing exists in Europe and maybe it does. However, we haven’t built a new nuclear power plant in many years and France does. Maybe the folks accross the pond have it right… conservation is great but let’s be reasonable.
Blake, there is, however, a very distinct cycle to all of this. There are certain trees that cannot grow in direct sunlight and need the larger trees, then there are animals that need the fruits from the smaller trees to live, and other animals that need to eat the animals in the trees, and so on.
I think, aside from those talking about the air, there is the bigger worry that down the line, if we are not careful, we’re going to throw the whole system out of wack.
However, since we have domesticated animals and crops, I don’t know if that would effect humans or not to a considerable degree.
Just a thought.
Also, to bring up Jared Diamond’s Collapse, I found his analysis of Easter Island, and his application thereof to the present, interesting in regards to depletion natural resources.
I haven’t gone back to read all of your posts on the issue, so I don’t know if you were saying it’s not as big a deal as people think to cut down rain forests or just that it’s not a big deal as it concerns the world air quality.
LOL!
I did not know about this guy, but he seem to have the same opinion as I have. Ain’t I good? (blushing)
And I am “far left” from the Am. point of wiev.
Please read my posts on page 2, posts # 88 an post # 98 and see if it is true?
Saying that I am wrong when I state that logging can be carried out without any regard to science and planning is just nonsense. I will provide a list of 12 major logging operations worldwide that are carried out with no regard to science or planning if you wish. How do you explain that such things are occurring if I am wrong when I say that they can occur?
Similarly your statement that “we spoke rainforest and that is certainly not “clearing forest” is simply nonsense. Do you honestly not realise that rainforests are being cleared right across the world? And if you are aware of that fact then how can you conclude that rainforests are not being cleared?
Yes, but as I have just proved those acts have absolutely no practical impact at all. It’s a total waste of time and resources. Per unit GDP the EU produces more waste then the US, where people don’t; leave their rubbish with the cashier.
Quite clearly the action has no impact on reducing the amount of waste.
Can we see some evidence that Finland does produce less waste per GDP dollar? I would expect that it would simply because it is such a tiny densely populated country and so has no transportation issues. But I would still like to see some evidence that it produces less waste than the US relative to production. Certainly the EU as a whole produces far more waste than the US.
I appreciate that English isn’t your first language, but you have now simply stopped making any sense at all.
You say that you will address two points later, but never do.
The third point is a total non-sequitur. You claimed that the EU was w wonderful example because it produced only half the waste per capita of the US. When I pointed out that was because the EU was only half as productive as the US you respond I’m wrong because living in a sewer is a bad thing. That’s; a total non-sequitur. Whether living in a sewer is a good thing or a bad thing my point is till correct. It is not worng. The EU is only half as productive as the US and it does produce more waste per capita dollar then the US.
Similarly I stated that “The EU can maintain low waste production levels precisely because they have low productivity and low standard of living, The question you need to ask is whether this is a wise and ethical choice to be making. Is reduced landfill worth the cost of child poverty or forced prostitution in Slovenia and Cyprus?” Your only response to his was that it is “A strawman filled with crap. Not even worth a discussion.”
Dude you can’t do this. I totally discredited oyur argument with figures to support it. You can’t say that it’s a strawman and not worthy of resposnse. That’s not a rebuttal. There is no strawman involved in pointing out that the EU produces half the waste of the US because it is only half as productive. Do you actually know what a strawman is?
Henry I am rapidly coming to the opinion that you are yet another enviro-apologist. Very keen on showing how wonderful environmental action works in the EU, but when someone points out that such policies have reuslte din the EU producing far more waste than the US relative to useful productivity you claim that it’s omehow irrelevant and even a strawmna.
Mate, it’s not irrelevant and it’s not a strawman. It’s very relevant that the EU can maintains relatively low waste production but only at the cost of having even lower relative productivity and standards of living.
