Tuesday, June 24, 2008

10 Audacious Ideas to Save the Planet

And yes, I'm aware of the irony of linking to this article after posting the Carlin clip below. Quite honestly, I'm less interested in "saving the planet" (which, all things told, is doing just fine) as I am in saving my own hide.

Selfish? Possibly.
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5 comments:

Anonymous said...

If you're more interested in saving your "own" hide (ahhh, ego! you most human of traits), than the "planet's", I wonder why massive scale, high tech engineering projects requiring large, healthy economies and solid infrastructure would be something you'd put your faith into. That's a pretty sketchy risk to take given the current geo-enviro-economic-political environment.

Face it Mac, in the coming years and decades you're going to need to take care of local, human scale survival basics as well as keeping your fingers crossed and your eyes peeled for the magic elixir. It's definitely a bad idea to keep all your eggs in one basket.

Furthermore, you could easily transpose Carlin's "control is an illusion!" routine onto the transhuman/techno-salvation project as well. It's at least as presumptuous to think that a select few of us (largely white, liberal) Smarty McSmartpants will make it safely through the current planetary bottleneck, and into some sort of astounding post-human future, as it is to think we can "save the planet".

Just sayin...

7:49 PM
Mac said...

Face it Mac, in the coming years and decades you're going to need to take care of local, human scale survival basics as well as keeping your fingers crossed and your eyes peeled for the magic elixir.

Who said one can't do both at the same time? Why must they be mutually exclusive?

My own life is inexorably connected to those of many others; such is the nature of the beast. I wasn't appealing to egoism so much as realism.

11:52 PM
Anonymous said...

Save the planet? Save mankind you mean. The planet will continue to do quite nicely with or without us...and so-called global warming is just nature's way of getting rid of an unwanted species...us!

3:44 AM
Mac said...

Carlin notwithstanding, there's nothing wrong with wanting to preserve our species. And while to do so under the guise of "saving the planet" is a bit arrogant, it's better than nothing. I appreciate Carlin's rant, but most environmental scientists don't conform to his depiction. Which is a good thing indeed.

5:54 PM
Anonymous said...

Mac: I said 'as well as'.

I guess that Carlin routine threw me a bit. I'm always concerned that empathy and a sense of connection with the Earth, and by extension, our fellow human beings, has gone out of vogue. These self-serving trends really do bother me, especially in the face of the modern situation, and I worry that they might inspire suffering on scales we haven't quite seen before, as people in more well-to-do regions make certain White Man's Burden style decisions. You could even argue that we've already arrived at this dystopia.

To quote Bruce Sterling:

"What is needed is the energy for intervention, without the grim mania of totalitarianism."

7:42 PM

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