B.A.D. - The Environment

Today is Blog Action Day according to this website, and the day is all about bloggers uniting to put a single important issue on everyone's mind - the environment.

So, being a cyber-lemming at heart, I registered and here's my BAD offering on this single issue...

No matter how much I try to change it, I mostly find myself immersed in a Weltanschuuang based in doubt and ignorance concerning any actual facts that would provide a clear and definitive prediction for the future of this planet's bioshpere. I know it's a mouthful... but why should I waffle around about things that are so deeply political that no matter which "side" of any environmentally related issue you come down on, you're either preaching to the choir or merely pissing someone off?

Besides, the environment is not a single issue. It's an aggregate of many complex issues, both large and small, with too much pop pseudo-science and emotional baggage to be sorted out by a mere taxicab driver. Over-simplification of such a collection of complex issues that are, moreover, politicized, logo-ized, marketed, hyped, and plunged into Orwellian newspeak, can never be satisfactorily addressed as a single issue in my view.

Having said all that, however, my only hope of reducing this subject to a single issue would have to be based on my view that we are a fire society, and that a paradigm shift is long overdue.

I find it difficult, for instance, to jump on the "alternative fuels" bandwagon because it's stuck in the old fire society paradigm. Does it make as big a difference what we burn, as opposed to not burning things at all?

I also find it difficult to get excited about the global warming controversy, because so many ostensibly green activists are merely playing into the hands of their seeming opponents. The only real agendas are directed toward getting people to push for capitalization of more expensive fuels to burn in the future. It just comes back around to "alternative" fuels again; commodities that can all too easily be brought into tired old schemes that get everyone to believe there are shortages.

As long as all this political distraction persists, breaking out of the fire society paradigm is hopeless. And no matter what the long term effects of generating power by burning things may have on the biosphere, who can possibly argue that it's good for the environment? Whether it's fossil fuels, biofuels, hydrogen, or any other commodity, burning billions of tons every year results in billions of tons of something else dumped into the air or the water or onto the ground.

If this civilization is to realistically clean up the environment, people will have to think a lot further outside the box. It doesn't matter what we burn, it only matters that we continue to burn things to produce our energy. This has to change before most of the detrimental effects we have on our global environment can ever be realistically turned around.