> Science is Teh 3vol.
You know shag, I had careful reply to your last post planned, but after reading this I really don't see the point: I figure you're going to read into it what you already think. And I feel solidified in my suspicion that there's a tendency for people having a really hard time taking a careful critique of technology on its own merits.
Instead I'll leave everybody with the following. Pollan posts most of his articles on his website, you can read them here: <http://michaelpollan.com/write.php> No need to bother with books.
This is what he had to say about something Bill McKibben wrote:
<http://michaelpollan.com/article.php?id=56>
It's Not the End After All November 26, 1995 No matter how many more—and better—books he may write, Bill McKibben is destined to be remembered for "The End of Nature," his 1989 bestseller about the greenhouse effect and its effect on, well, Bill McKibben. Written on the heels of the "greenhouse summer" of 1988, when record temperatures first stoked popular concerns about global warming, the book was an improbable salad of popular science and apocalypse that initially appeared in the New Yorker, when that magazine still published journalism in the prophetic mode. This particular jeremiad argued that since civilization had now with its greenhouse gases altered the very air, "nature has . . . ended," for there is no longer any place left on Earth untainted by man. This discovery, the author tells us, had a "faith-shattering effect."
On closer inspection, it turned out that what McKibben was really mourning was not the end of nature per se, but the end of a certain romantic and scientifically meaningless idea of nature conceived as the pristine opposite of culture, as "the world apart from man." McKibben's biggest contribution to environmental thinking in "The End of Nature" was to unwittingly expose the harmfulness of this idea, which deserves much of the blame for America's schizoid, all-or-nothing approach toward the environment; we possess the unique ability to worship Edenic wilderness while paving over everything else. Once you conclude, with McKibben, that all of nature is fallen—that even the rain falling upon Yosemite "bears the permanent stamp of man"—you are left with his counsel of despair: "If nature has already ended," he wrote, "what are we fighting for?" Indeed. And in one of those sentences any writer would sell his first-born to have back, he declared that "fighting for it is like fighting for an independent Latvia…" [...]
Kindly excuse me while I get back to my physics thesis.
-- Andy