People only want to thrive, not survive
Whenever I see a smart car, it has special meaning for me because I see in it a major part of the environmental movement's character.
Perhaps it's the very personification of this movement's mindset. Use less, do with less, be less. Don't thrive, but survive. Thrive is defined as, "To grow vigorously and healthily." While survive is, "To manage to stay alive, especially in difficult situations."
Quite a contrast. Trouble is, people have never really wanted to just survive, but thrive. Otherwise, I seriously doubt that we would have progressed in anything. Rather, environmentalism seems to have instilled in many the unreasonable fear of technology in particular, and progress in general.
I think this mindset could explain why fracking is such an issue.
I suspect that some on the anti side might privately wish no effort be made to extract gas, regardless the method.
People should be rather thankful the founding generation wasn't carbon footprint-crazy, because we still might have a 1790s standard of living.
For starters, might doctors still be leeching us? Having faith in what is called climate change seems to require one to abandon all critical objective thought and blindly embrace the premise that humans simply existing in certain numbers, and at a particular technological level, can irretrievably destroy Earth. One would have to believe the created were as strong as the creator.
But to actually itemize an Al Gore-faced environmentalism, it's about four basic things: Hostility toward technology (which allows population growth), the free enterprise system (because property rights guarantee human rights), the human species (expressed in programs like "Earth After People") and a means of further empowerment of a global state (if it's a global problem, it reasons only a global government can fix it).
Robert Olejarz
Sidney
We all need to break away from fossil fuels
Dick Downey's rant against Sustainable Otsego on Dec. 31 makes many points we can agree with. We're all addicted to fossil fuels, no question, and fracking for natural gas is one of the few ways we can get more of the stuff.
But Downey's an addict in denial. Fossil fuels, like most addictions, are killing us; they pollute the earth, air and water, and warm the climate; they make possible a population in excess of the carrying capacity of the planet, which in turns eats up other limited resources, from agricultural lands to fisheries to minerals to forests.
So who's living in a dream world? Downey's right that there are no easy answers. Renewables today can provide only a fraction of the energy of fossil fuels. But Downey wants to keep on trucking like it's 1955. Should we dig ourselves further into the dead end of gas extraction, as he recommends, or should we redirect investment to conservation and maximizing what we can get from renewables, painful as it may be? You decide.
Adrian Kuzminski
Fly Creek
Kuzminski is the moderator for Sustainable Otsego.
