Thank you!
>Perhaps a quibble, but extinction, by definition, reduces bio-diversity.
>It doesn't enhance it.
Yes, I was being wilfully argumentative. But species extinction and bio- diversity go hand in hand. Species extinction is just as much part of the law of natural selection as bio-diversity. One without the other would be unworkable (would the world just fill up with more and more species?).
>
>Furthermore, there is a distinction to be made between extinctions caused
>by human agency and those which are not. We get to chose whether or not to
>allow certain extinctions to occur. Should we save the tiger, or rid the
>world of the beasts?
Oh for sure. I'm all for such campaigns, as long as they are based on human values, like aesthetic ones.
>
>It is also possible to drive an eco-system to failure,
I strongly suspect that the concept of eco-systems is metaphysical absurdity.
> I read of a recent study which looked at the viability of the
>Amazon rain forest. The authors thought that another 10-20 years or so of
>deforestation would doom the entire Amazon since the feedback mechanisms
>would be disrupted
Yes, I remember reading something like that, about 20 years ago!
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I don't really understand what Christopher is saying here:
In message <3B73F1C1.1A634199 at erols.com>, Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema <crdbronx at erols.com> writes
>Doesn't green thinking also oppose suburban sprawl, and the incoherent
>development of rural areas?
Yes, that was the point that I was making. Green thinking opposes the growth of large working class suburbs, and seeks to protect the countryside for rural elites.
>Unrestricted capitalist development has its own
>anti-mass component.
Well capitalism has its own anti-mass element, which is ably represented by its conservationist wing.
(It is telling that you think that the problem with capitalism is that it is 'unrestricted'. I would have thought that its real problem was that it creates restrictions: upon growth, income, mobility and so on.)
>This aspect of environmentalism would seem counter to
>it.
Of course if you see capitalism as favouring growth in incomes across the board, then environmentalism is counter to it. But capital accumulates by *restricting* working class incomes, in which ambition it chimes happily with environmentalism.
>After all, assuring that working people would live in compact
>geographical areas and have to use more cooperative forms of transportation
>seems to serve both environmental ends and also to counter the corporate
>élites' long-standing social/political strategy of pushing individual home
>and car ownership as a way to integrate working people into a conservative
>consensus.
Are you saying that if working class people are impoverished by environmentalist policies that they will rise up against capitalism? Perhaps they will, but surely they will demand things like home and car ownership...
Do you think that it is right that people should be dissuaded from owning their own homes?
-- James Heartfield