The Frontal Cortex

Oh darn it all, well what's the use then? I suppose a more desirable alternative would be to drive our SUV's to Walmart and stop for hamburgers at McDonald's along the way? I get so frustrated sometimes by trying to figure out what's the "right thing to do" in all of this mess.

Posted by: Miranda | May 6, 2008 4:15 PM

Look, I still think it's better to have concerned environmental attitudes. It's just that, in certain areas (like the Teton valley), these attitudes lead people to consistently choose damaging household locations, precisely because they want to commune with the nature they want to protect. Money buys space from other people. So it's still better to drive a Prius, and buy humanely raised meat, etc., but it's even better to live in an apartment with lots of people. (Small households are really bad for the environment.) So get a roommate! Or eight!

Posted by: Jonah | May 6, 2008 4:29 PM

My aspirations for a life in balance with nature are not without contradictions. Solar power and low amperage lights, ipod, macbook & wifi, composting head, and no plastic bags all makes my small sailboat look green enough until I looked into where the dry-cell batteries in the sailboat and in the hybrid end up every few years. Yup, in the land fill. Solving one problem has lead me to causing another problem.

Posted by: OftenWrongTed | May 6, 2008 6:27 PM

The Daily Mail is 'upmarket' in the same sense as Victoria Beckham is 'posh'.

Posted by: Neil | May 7, 2008 6:37 AM

There was a guest speaker at our humanist group meeting, a local professor who talked at great length about environmental choices and the value of 'planned local communities' built around home and work. It turned out he lived far out in the woods and he and his wife each commuted about an hour to work.

DAISNAID do as I say, not as I do.

Posted by: jay | May 7, 2008 12:40 PM

The point about not having kids is true. Extreme cutbacks on lifestyle still changes one's 'footprint' maybe 30%, not having kids makes long term changes in the order of 100's of percent.

[and now... a rant:]

But what this comes down to, and what I find very annoying, is the manipulative quasi-religious psychological pattern that is currently in vogue. I'm not talking about science, or specifically I'm not talking about rational information gathering aspect that is science (which does not make value judgements), but the secular religion mindset that has become the popular movement:

* Belief that there is an 'original state' of grace that is held as an ideal. Like many religious types yearning for the old days, true believers overlook what hell life was back before industrialization,. [I feel thiss is a sort of Panglossian notion about what is 'optimum'. Consider that if climate change were projected to go colder, we would be having almost the same arguments about humanitarian disaster -- suggesting a bit of the Goldilocks effect is at work here.]

* Belief that there is a fall. An original sin, in this case greed, 'wanting too much' (this perception of sin is shared by several religions as well}. By extension 'not wanting too much' is held out as a goal, the most noble of human aspirations. [I might argue that the one thing that has made humans different from other animals, gotten us from the heart of the atom to the moon, is that we are indeed never satisfied; that what we have is never enough. That is the most uniquely human of all behaviors.]

* Gestures of atonement are advocated. Atonement for 'greed' is self sacrifice, atonement for having too much is self deprivation. As in the case of religion, these are essentially meaningless rituals, but the person feels that they are 'doing something', and gets some reverse pleasure out of their personal sacrifices.

* As with religion, there is a need to bring others (the lost souls who have not seen the light) into the fold. Proselytizing, getting others to share the 'joy' of self sacrifice generally involves projections of guilt and or fear (religion learned millenia ago how useful this tool is), If you can generate a sense of guilt, even in someone who is not personally responsible for problems (like the Christian guilt over original sin), you can manipulate him. Once the guilt process is embedded, the process starts anew.

I don't care for such manipulation. I abandoned religion in part because of such manipulation.

The 20th century, despite all its problems, has made the biggest overall improvements in human life (food production, longevity, medicine, personal comfort) of any century in history. We still have hunger and poverty, but these are a much smaller portion of the world's population than ever. Aside for special problem spots (war zones etc), at the end of thw 20th the life span in the undeveloped world is now longer than the life span in the British empire at the beginning of the century. And most of this, food production and distribution, science, medicine, living standard has all been directly or indirectly created by fuel and the fuel driven economy. We have problems to address, but I'm not prepared to throw away the past 100 years of human achievements.

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