permaculture

["souscayrous" <souscayrous@wanadoo.fr>]

There is nothing to answer in Lomborg's practical analysis: we are still
using oil; there is still tin, copper, chromium, phosphate, gold and silver.
It is simple to imagine new sources, new processes of extraction.  Even when
the world has eventually yielded its mineral deposits Lomborg will not be
proved wrong: because, surely, by then, there will be mine ships plying
interplanetary routes laden with the fruits of other worlds.

Cassandra will always be a lonely and destitute woman.

Penitential environmentalism is exposed to the pragmatic derision of the
status quo expressed through Lomborg and trite rebuttals are the stock of
modern politics not a thoughtful counter movement.  Any response must be
deliberate and profound however difficult and lengthy.  As we are
discovering in the illuminating discussion currently lead by Flick Wright,
the roots of our thinking go deep and an aboriginal interpretation (or other
cultural perspective) of Lomborg's analysis might enlighten an answer.

It is not insatiable technology but insatiable desire stripping the world.
It is not the exhaustion of oil, or tin, it is not the transformation of
rain forest to carbon dioxide and ash: this is the product and not the
source.

Lomberg is tangential.  He touches my concerns with his words but his
meaning is not mine.  Resources, finite or infinite, have nothing to do with
my belief in recycling, small is beautiful or my disgust at my societies
over consumption.  Nothing.


Souscayrous


-----Original Message-----
From: Claude Genest [mailto:genest@together.net]
Sent: Wednesday, January 02, 2002 3:39 AM
To: permaculture
Subject: Guardian article on Lomborg






    Running on empty?

Ever since it became our most valuable resource, we have worried about
whether our oil supply will last. But, says Bjorn Lomborg, such fears are
age-old and unfounded. In the second of his three exclusive essays for the
Guardian, he argues that the wells will never run dry
Read Bjorn Lomborg's article in full, complete with footnotes and graphs
(pdf file)
Bjorn Lomborg's bibliography (pdf file)

Thursday August 16, 2001
The Guardian

It was an axiom of the early environmentalists that we were running out of
resources, and that fear underlies much of the movement's thinking on
recycling, on the belief that small is beautiful, and on the need to
restructure society away from its obsession with resource-consuming
production.