permaculture

[Claude Genest <genest@together.net>]

Thanks to all who've replied on the Lomborg thread. I had a rough holidays
because of that guy I can assure you.

I happened upon a bit from ISHMAEl Author Daniel Quinn's book "Beyond
Civilozation" that helped me decide to stop knocking on closed doors:

"Beyond civilization isn't a geographical space up in the mountains or on
some remote desert isle.It's a cultural space that opens up among people
with new minds.

Old minds think : "How do we solve these problems."
New Minds think : " How do we make happen what we want to happen"

As you discuss the ideas found in this book with your friends, you'll be
able to spot the old minds easily. They're the ones who are always playing
"devil's advocate", always proposing and concentrating on difficulties,
always nailing the progress of your dialogue down to problems. Focus instead
on what you want to happen and how to make it happen, rather than on all the
things that might keep it from happening."


What I want to see happen is for our culture to develop an ecological
mindset. Damned if I know how to get there though....

There was a thread a while back that sought to answer why PC isn't reaching
more people. The concensus (?) seemed to be that it was because the subject
was so hard to define, harder still to grasp.

Lately, maybe because it's grey, cold, windy, wintery, I've given up pot and
I hate x-mas, It just seems that the deeper reason is that people plum don't
give a flying fiddler's  shit....

And on that negative note I'm off for one of my all time favorite activities
- skating on the lake when the ice is transparent and you feel like you're
walking on water.....


Thanks again,

Love,
Claude

> From: "keller" <ak.and.ak@on-line.de>
> Reply-To: "permaculture" <permaculture@franklin.oit.unc.edu>
> Date: Sat, 5 Jan 2002 13:05:32 +0100
> To: "permaculture" <permaculture@franklin.oit.unc.edu>
> Subject: Re: Guardian article on Lomborg
> 
> From: Claude Genest <genest@together.net>
> To: permaculture <permaculture@franklin.oit.unc.edu>
> Sent: Friday, January 04, 2002 11:07 PM
> Subject: Re: Guardian article on Lomborg
> 
>> Seems that Lomborg's book is an expression of the general public's having
>> had enought with ( what they perceive to be) environmental doomsaying.
> 
> I'm not sure this is so. I think the people who did not like the
> environmntal movement have always been there as well as the supporters.
> 
> I think part of the problem is that there is a lot of unclear thinking in
> the environmental movement. Some people mix it up with pseudoscientific woo
> woo stuff or take unproven theories just because they please them and so
> make it easy to attack them. Some people in the environmental movement are
> actually antiscientific, and I think that is a big mistake.
> 
> However, it looks like Lomborg's writings are not scientifically sound
> either. The people who wrote about him in Scientific American (January 2002)
> really take him appart. It looks like if one throws hard science at him he
> will break. He is plain wrong with a lot of what he is saying. Stephen
> Schneider says about him (page 61: "Lomborg admits. 'I am not myself an
> expert as regards environmental problems' - truer words are not found in the
> rest of the book").
> 
> This guy has done a lot of damage, and it is very important to develop a
> sound line of argument against him. It is just bad one hase to waste time on
> such a nutcase. Here is the bottom line of one of the reviews (Steven
> Schneider: "Global Warming, Neglecting the Complexities):
> 
> "For such an interdisciciplinary topic, the publisher would have been wise
> to ask natural scientists as well as social scientists to review the
> manuscript, which was published by the social science side of the house.
> It's not surprising that the reviwers failed to spot Lomborg's unbalanced
> presentation of the natural science, given the complexity of the many
> intertwinning fields. But that the natural scientists weren't asked is a
> serous omission for a sepectable publisher such as Cambridge University
> Press.
> Unfortunately, angry reviews such as this one will be the result. Worse
> still, many laypeople and policymakers won't see the reviews and could well
> be tricked into thinking thousands of citations and hundreds of pages
> constitue balanced sholarship. A berrer rule of thumb is to see who talks in
> ranges and subjective probabilities and to beware of the myth busters and
> 'truth tellers'."
> 
> The botom line of the next article  (page 63, by John P. Holdren) is titled:
> "Energy: Asking the wrong questions" reads like this:
> 
> "Of course, much of what is most problematic in the global energy picture is
> covered by Lomborg not in his erngy chapter but in those that deal with air
> pollution, acid rain, water pollution and global warming. The lais id
> devastatingly critiqued by Stephen Schneider on page 60. There is no space
> to deal with the other energy-related chapters; suffice to say that I found
> their level of superficiality, selectivity and misunderstanding roughly
> consistent with that of the energy chapter reviewd here. This is a shame.
> Lomborg is giving scepticism - and statisticians - a bad name."
> 
> This is the resume of Thomas Lovejoy's article (page 67) titled:
> "Biodiversity: Dismissing Scientific Process":
> "... Biased Language, such as "admits" in the instance, permeated the book.
> In Addition to errors of bias,the text is rife with careless mistakes. Time
> and again I sought to track references from the text to the footnotes to the
> bibliography to find ba a mirage in the desert.
> Far worse, Lomborg seems quite ignorant of how environmental science
> proceeds: researchers identify a potential problem, scientific examinations
> tests the various hypotheses, understanding ot the problem often becomes
> more complex, researchers suggest remedial policies - and _then_ the
> situation improves. By choosing to highlight the initial step and skip to
> the outcome, he implies incorrectly that all environmentalists do is
> exaggerate. The pint is that things improve _because_ of the efforts of
> environmentalists to fllag a particular problem, investigat it and suggest
> policies to remedy it. Sadly, the author seems not to reciprocate the
> respect biologists have for statisticans."
> 
>> 
>> I just find it so frustrating: What I want to talk about with people
>> (mom/dad brother/friends) is Permaculture.
>> But I can't do that till I define our "other way of seeing".
>> And I can't do that till I convince people that it's worth taking the
> time
>> to consider an ecological perspective, and I can't do that till I convince
>> them that something's broken and needs fixing, and I can't do that till I
>> wade through their objections which include things like
>> "you're too negative and seeing the glass as half empty - stats/facts
> reveal
>> that things aren't getting worse, they're getting better !"
> 
> I know these problems and understand completely. But I think now one must
> throw one's seeds where they have a chance to grow. Instead of trying an
> uphill battle to convert people who don't want to hear it, I think it is
> more effective to search for people who are ready to make the next step. For
> example, my impression is that at the moment I can achieve more in Cameroon
> than in Germany, so that is where I put my energy.
> 
>> I guess this Lomborg stuff is a little like the Canadian in Alberta a few
>> years back who made headlines saying that the Holocaust had never
> happened.
>> What can you say to that ? "yes it did" ?!
> 
> Generally I belive it is impossible to change people if they don't want to
> change.
> 
>> As Thomas Pynchon says in "Gravity's Rainbow" "If they get you asking the
>> wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers".... What a
>> catch-22 this Lomborg puts us in ....
> 
> Next time somebody throws Lomborg at you in a discussion, just get out
> Scientific American and cite these sections I have cited above. That might
> suffice to silence them. Do not delve into a discussion of details. Just
> make clear the man does not know what he is writing about. If somebody
> insists on discussing details, point to the essence of these reviews. They
> say that Lomborg does not have the expert knowledge required to write about
> these things. So don't you and that somebody, so why waste time on such
> discussions. The experts have reviewd the book very negatively. Scientists
> have marked the book off. So discussing it would be a waste of time. Use the
> fact that Scientific American has a good reputation. A book must indeed be
> terribly bad if such a Journal devotes eleven pages to a negative review -
> starting with an introduction by the Editor in Chief.. That might be a
> record for the Guinness Book (the longest slating book review ever published
> in that (maybe: in any) journal). It starts with an introduction by the
> Editor in Chief, John Rennie:
> 
> "Science defends itself against The Skeptical Environmentalist"
> Misleading Math about Earth
> Critical thinking and hard data are cornerstones of al good science. Because
> environmental sciences are so keenly important to both our biological and
> economic survival - causes that are often seen to be in conflict - they
> deserve full scrutiny. -with that in mind, the book The Skeptical
> Environmentalist (Cambridge University Press), by Bjorn Lomborg, a
> statistician and political scientist at the University of Aarhus in Denmark,
> should be a welcome audit. And yet it isn't.
> As the book's subtitle - Measuring the Real State of the World - indicates,
> Lomborg's intention was to reanalyze environmental data so taht the public
> might make policy decisions based on the truest understanding of what
> science has determined. His conclusion, which he writes surprised even him,
> was that contrary tothe gloomy predictions of degradation he calls "the
> litany," everything it sgetting better. Not that all is rosy, but the future
> for the environment is less dire than is supposed. Instead Lomborg accuses a
> pessimistic and dishonest cabal of environmental groups, institutions and
> the media of distorting scientists' actual findings [A copy of the book's
> first chapter can be found at www.lomborg.org]
> The problem with Lomborg's conclusion is that the scientists themselves
> desavow it. Many spoke to us at Scientific American about their frustration
> ath what they described as Lomborg's misinterpretation of their fields. His
> seemingly dispassionate outsider's view, they told us, is often marred by an
> incomplete use tof the data or a misunderstanding of the underlying science.
> Even where his statistical analyses are valid, his interpretations are
> frequently off the mark - literally not seeing the state of the forests for
> the number of the trees, for example. And it is hard not to be struck by
> Lomborg's presumption that he has seen into the heart of scince more
> faithfully than have investigators who have devoted their lives to it; it is
> equally curious that he finds the same contrarian good news lurking in every
> diverse area of environmental science.
> We asked for leading experts to critique Lomborg's treatments of their
> areas - global warming, energy, population and biodiversity - so readers
> could understand whay the book provokes so much disagreement. Lomborg's
> assessment that conditions on earth are generally improving for human
> welfare may hold some truth. The errors described here, however, show that
> in iths purpose of describing the real state of the world, the book is a
> failure."
> 
> ...nuff said.
> 
> I admit that my former love affair with Scientific American has faded away
> long since, but sometimes I am happy I have not canceled the subsrciption
> yet.
> 
> Andreas
> 
> 
> 
> 
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