It has been nice having some rain this week, even if it did slow down work. Next week looks pretty good. We will try to finish planting trees before the next storms hit.
Of course, we have 150% normal rainfall. The state and the Feds have announced 0% water allocation for the year. I know the reservoirs are still low. They would fill faster if they didn't flush all this rainfall down to the ocean. Just saying.
Some of you think I am a little hard on the enviros. I thought you night be interested in hearing from a reformed environmentalist. Patrick Moore is a co-founder of Greenpeace. He stepped away a few years ago and he has been vilified by his former colleagues. I have met Moore. He seems to be a pretty good guy.
Environmentalism for the 21st Century
By Patrick Moore
As we begin the
21st century, environmental thinkers are divided along a sharp fault line.
There are the doomsayers who predict the collapse of the global ecosystem.
There are the technological optimists who believe that we can feed 12 billion
people and solve all our problems with science and technology. I do not believe
that either of these extremes makes sense. There is a middle road based on
science and logic, the combination of which is sometimes referred to as common
sense. There are real problems and there is much we can do to improve the state
of the environment...
For me it was time to make a change. I had
been against at least three or four things every day of my life for 15 years; I
decided I'd like to be in favor of something for a change. I made the transition
from the politics of confrontation to the politics of building consensus. After
all, when a majority of people decide they agree with you it is probably time
to stop hitting them over the head with a stick and sit down and talk to them
about finding solutions to our environmental problems...
All social movements
evolve from an earlier period of polarization and confrontation during which a
minority struggles to convince society that its cause it is true and just,
eventually followed by a time of reconciliation if a majority of the population
accepts the values of the new movement. For the environmental movement this
transition began to occur in the mid-1980s. The term sustainable development was adopted to describe the challenge
of taking the new environmental values we had popularized, and incorporating
them into the traditional social and economic values that have always governed
public policy and our daily behavior. We cannot simply switch to basing all our actions on purely environmental
values. Every day 6 billion people wake up with real needs for food, energy and
materials. The challenge for sustainability is to provide for those needs in
ways that reduce negative impact on the environment. But any changes made must
also be socially acceptable and technically and economically feasible. It is
not always easy to balance environmental, social, and economic priorities.
Compromise and co-operation with the involvement of government, industry,
academia and the environmental movement is required to achieve sustainability...
As an ecologist and
environmentalist, not a political scientist or political activist, I have
always shied away from strong opinions on poverty and class. But it seems
unacceptable to me that so many hundreds of millions of people live at a
material standard that we in the industrialized countries would not consider
acceptable for a dignified life. I believe there is a great deal to be learned
by exploring the relationships between ecology and politics. In some ways
politics is the ecology of the human species. The two subjects have developed
such completely different disciplines and terminologies that it is hard to
think of them together. But I believe we must if we are to gain a truly
holistic understanding of the relationship between ourselves and our society,
and the Earth on which we ultimately depend...
MAY THE FOREST BE WITH YOU
http://www.maninnature.com/Management/Conservation/WConservation1f.html
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