eco-optimism

[Wojtek Sokolowski]

At 03:21 PM 8/7/01 -0400, Gordon wrote:
>If I were to discuss labor, money, living standards, political
>relations, crime, the "justice" system, war, the interests of
>non-human animals, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation,
>language, the practices of various religions, diet, poverty,
>police brutality, the death penalty, real estate, homelessness
>and so forth, I could get reliable facts supporting a leftist
>position.  But environmentalism, except for its religious
>elements, has apparently been dominated by people who feel it
>is all right to make stuff up and claim that it's factual.

Not really.  Environmentalism is no different from other topics mentioned
in your missive and, for that matter, most of passes for scientific theory
in general.  Every one of them is a cognitive strategy that involves two
processes: the positive heuristics or imposing a culturally meaningful
interpretation on a selectively assembled set of facts, and the negative
heuristic or steering any inquiry away from facts that may undermine that
interpretation (i.e. dismissing evidence as irrelavant or althogether
ignoring it).

What falsifies interpretations, ideologies and scientific theories is not
facts, but the socially, culturally and politically constructed rules of
what facts count as valid contradicting evidence.

wojtek