E.O. Wilson Wants Us to Leave Half of the Earth Alone

What would really fuck us over is if we overreacted to a minor ecological scare by wasting all our resources trying to stave off a small amount of global warming, or save a few random species, or preserve some percentage of the Earth's wilderness while leaving billions of Third-World residents forever mired in poverty, famine, disease, and death and perhaps dooming the First World to that same fate.Our goal should be sustainability and stewardshipof our surroundings, but also of ourselves.Edited by Jon, : No reason given.Edited by Jon, : No reason given.Edited by Jon, : No reason given.

You should read Cool It.Lomborg's taken plenty of flack for his views, and while his book is no masterpiece, he has a point with many of the things he says. And the spirit behind his argument, that we should be using our resources to improve people's lives as best we can instead of easing our conscience about the environment, is not off the mark.The Third World (and until recently the rest of it as well) has always been mired in poverty, famine, disease, and death. It was only recently that the trend began changing for the better in certain parts of the world, and that change was only possible through the environmental alteration now being complained about. Other parts of the world have not yet reached our point of development and there is no realistic way for them to even come close to doing so without engaging in similar degrees of environmental alteration.It is the mark of our great wealth that we in the First World can worry about minor changes in the environment and spend millions of dollars saving critters in foreign lands while people in those same lands worry where their next meal will come from or whether this fever will be the fever that finally claims the life of one of their children.The tragedy is our delusion that spending resources averting a little warming or saving a few endangered species will matter as much to our fellow less-fortunate humans as it does to us, especially when all the evidence tells us that folks were as poor, as hungry, as sick, and as dead before it started getting hot, and before critters started dying.I think our resources could be better spent growing more food (which involves cutting down trees, running tractors, applying fertilizers), providing more healthcare (which might involve spraying dangerous chemicals to control disease-carrying insects, or pumping out even more petroleum-derived plastics for hospitals and clinics), generating income in the third world (building industries that may be highly destructive of their environments), and pretty much anything else besides keeping the planet exactly as it is now and trying to make sure it never changes.Edited by Jon, : No reason given.

Who needs to lose weight? Half the world is starving to death.I think you need to get a grip on reality.While you sit in your armchair sipping your liquor and pouting about the loss of the rainforests, children in those same rainforests die in incredible numbers from disease, poverty and famine.Ask any man starving in Africa whether he'd prefer seeing the jungles ploughed over and planted with food or the Earth not get a couple degrees warmer.What do you think he'll say?Edited by Jon, : No reason given.

Calling him a scientist of any kind is probably being a little too generous, don't you think?

I wasn't promoting his views as a scientist, so whether he's a good scientist or not doesn't have much bearing on the point I was making.

We shouldn't.

If you read what I wrote, you wouldn't be confused.As I said, Lomborg's work is no masterpiece and the man is no genius (I was pretty critical of his book in my Amazon review, but I won't go into it here). What I was mainly bringing up in relation to his views is the value in his idea of analyzing the costs and benefits of environmental policy and understanding that the real value behind maintaining environmental quality is to improve and preserve human life and so EQ improvements can be weighed against the costs and benefits of other measures aimed at improving and preserving human life.The benefits to humanity of living on only half the inhabitable globe are far outweighed by the costs of doing soeven if it would make the environment a happier place.

Indeed Though many Third World countries aren't much better when it comes to warring on one another (or themselves). Infrastructure can be built. What's so great about the Great Plains? (And don't forget, many parts of the Great Plains were once Great Forests.)Edited by Jon, : No reason given.