[at-l] musings on wind farms, the Trail, mankind and such

[icw at esisnet.com (Clark Wright)]

Hey!  First, I applaud your individual actions - nothing worthwhile ever 
got done without the many small steps - real action - taken by many 
individuals . . . having said that, I do differ with your thoughts in a 
couple of important respects.  Mankind and his/her superdevelopment in 
western countries - especially the US - is not something to be ashamed 
of, is not "unnatural" (see some of my prior musings on this topic), and 
really is not all that out of line when you compare the amount of 
productivity associated with "our" country's use of a larger percentage 
of the world's resources.  Further, I am an optimist - we always will 
discover new forms of energy, conservation, etc.  No, the real battle is 
not one of moral guilt, but rather one of preferred choices - what kind 
of a world do we want?  I, for one, want one where we work hard to keep 
a number of areas undeveloped, but are not ashamed of the areas that we 
do develop - we need both long term to maximize our potential as a 
species, and our role as (if you will) God's trustees . . . the computer 
and internet revolutions offer hope (remember Alvin Toffler's book 
"Third Wave"?  it is still relevant!) . . . if we can use these tools to 
maximize decentralization of majro industries (such as power companies), 
we can do some amazing things - BUT, we also have to realize that to 
keep some areas undeveloped, we will need to have a lot of people living 
in more densly populated areas - a big dilemma right now of the 
so-called "smart growth" movement is the fact that we have to cluster 
people in relatively dense areas in order to maximize surrounding 
"greenspaces" . . . I see an important moral there - i.e., we need both 
technology and dense population centers and open, undeveloped green 
spaces, plus high tech food production in order to make this planet 
sustainable for the longer term . . . then, if you look REALLY long 
term, who the heck knows??  Geologically speaking, we have only been 
here for a few seconds on the 24hour clock of earth's existence . . . a 
point that should humble us on whatever side of whatever policy issue we 
may be on! 

The AT is an excellent, living metaphor for all this . . . we decry 
highways, towers, air and sound pollution, etc. - but we need all of 
that for any of us to get to the darn thing in the first place, and for 
us to return "home" afterwards! :)

clark
[thru-thinker]