Responses to Roedy’s Environment Essays Responses to Roedy’s Environment Essays
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Introduction

Here is a sampling of the email I received in response to my various essays on the environment. My comments are shown in green. You can email your comments to me at email feedback to Roedy Green or Canadian Mind Products. Please tell me if you don’t want your comments posted publicly.

The Environment

Clean up your website : Dr. John Chadbourne johnchad@swbell.net Mon, 02 Sep 2002

I am a Professor of environmental engineering at SMU. I came to appreciate Ken Keyes Handbook to Higher Consciousness around 1985 and find it to be a source of inspiration today. I see your concern that the world is "unhealthy and getting worse" at your web sites.

book_cover recommend book⇒Handbook to Higher Consciousness
 paperbackhardcover
ISBN10:0-9600688-8-00-9600688-9-9
ISBN13:978-0-9600688-8-3978-0-9600688-9-0
publisher:Love Line
published:1984-08
by:Ken Keyes Jr.
Ken’s classic. This is by far his best selling book.
Canadian flag amazon.ca. amazon.com. American flag
Canadian flag chapters.indigo.ca . powells.com American flag
French flag amazon.fr. barnesandnoble.com American flag
German flag amazon.de. amazon.co.uk. UK flag

Humans are a natural part of the evolutionary process - perfect - and improving the quality of life every day. Read Bjorn Lomborg’s Skeptical Environmentalist and you will have the facts to support this position.

book_cover recommend book⇒The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World
 paperback
ISBN10:0-521-01068-3
ISBN13:978-0-521-01068-9
publisher:Cambridge University Press
published:2001-09-10
by:Bjorn Lomborg
Canadian flag amazon.ca. amazon.com. American flag
Canadian flag chapters.indigo.ca . powells.com American flag
French flag amazon.fr. barnesandnoble.com American flag
German flag amazon.de. amazon.co.uk. UK flag

I have become convinced that life has never been better and that it is getting better all the time. Look into Brian Fagan’s Little Ice Age for a glimpse of what the green movement has forgotten to mention about how difficult life was even 100 years ago. (ignore the half dozen totally unsupported statements about global warming catastrophes being caused by humans - they are simply PC salesmanship).

book_cover recommend book⇒The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1850
 paperback
ISBN10:0-465-02272-3
ISBN13:978-0-465-02272-4
publisher:Basic
published:2001-12-24
by:Brian M. Fagan
Canadian flag amazon.ca. amazon.com. American flag
Canadian flag chapters.indigo.ca . powells.com American flag
French flag amazon.fr. barnesandnoble.com American flag
German flag amazon.de. amazon.co.uk. UK flag

You are clearly moving forward toward Living Love. Consider the unconditional love we hold for the planet as well as for each other. No one wants to cause harm (well, except for those suffering individuals who are in so much pain that they strike out at everything). Clean up your website to be as totally positive and unconditionally loving as Ken was. A beautiful future awaits us all as we evolve into Higher Consciousness.

With Love,

Dr. John Chadbourne

Obviously there are reasons to be optimistic. Computers are evolving rapidly to surpass us and perhaps to rescue us from our folly. The green revolution succeeded better than anyone expected. We are finally cleaning up the world’s rivers. Fewer people are starving to death in India and China.

On the other hand there are some signs we are serious trouble — for example having to treat beluga carcasses as toxic waste, the erosion of topsoil, the population that grew from 2 to 6 billion in my lifetime, the disappearance of the tropical rainforests, the disappearance of wetlands and the dwindling populations of all the large mammals but man.

The usual extinction rate is 1 species per century. Lately it is over 1000 per year. These are trying times for the biosphere, though we know it has seen worse.

As for global warming, it seems now even Bush agrees it is happening. The remaining disagreement is about the extent to which our emissions make it worse. It strikes me as foolhardy to perform such large scale experiments on the biosphere. We don’t even have decent mathematical models yet. Unless we are sure an action will do no harm, we should be prudent and attempt to leave it alone. We are so cavalier, letting the Wesley Crushers of the world experiment on the global life support system. Let them experiments on small, safer subsets.

I also realise we have ice ages about every 10,000 years and we are due for one any time now. We would have a rougher time than before getting though such a natural disaster simply because we have so many more mouths to feed. North Americans raised on twinkies, who were taxied to school each day, are far from Inuit in their ability to deal with such adversity.

It seems to me, we oil guzzlers are like a wastrel squandering his inheritance. Just like a bank account, it will eventually run dry and rather suddenly. It will be quite a wrench to switch over from oil to extreme energy conservation and renewable sources. We need to get on with it. Playing Pollyanna is playing into the hands of short-sighted businessmen.

Ken was no Pollyanna when it came to nuclear destruction or environmental collapse. He advocated doing something about it rather than wringing your hands in despair or going into denial.


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