Mining Planet Earth and Populating Planet California

Jason,

You wrote:

Still, replacing old growth habitats
of tremendous biodiversity with monoculture tree crops for houses
and paper is still hugely troubling.

I assume you mean the advantages of maintaining the old growth habitats outweigh the advantages of creating houses and paper.

My questions:
What are the advantages of maintaining the old growth habitats?
What criteria are you using for deciding these advantages?
Advantages to whom?
By whose values?

These are crucial questions to be addressed in this discussion.

Best, Michael

Michael R. Edelstein, Ph.D.
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Michael Edelstein wrote:

[Justin] wrote:

Still, replacing old growth habitats
of tremendous biodiversity with monoculture tree crops for houses
and paper is still hugely troubling.

I assume you mean the advantages of maintaining the old growth habitats
outweigh the advantages of creating houses and paper.

My questions:
What are the advantages of maintaining the old growth habitats?
What criteria are you using for deciding these advantages?
Advantages to whom?
By whose values?

A monoculture is significantly less robust than a naturally-evolved
ecosystem, and more subject to damage from disease or other disaster. We
need vegetable mass to keep breathing.

Also, from a purely exploitative view, the more different species around,
the more chance of discovery of useful chemicals, biological processes, or
just beauty. The big problem is that we often don't know what we're
destroying. This does verge on the precautionary principle, but it is
definitely possible to log an environment in a way that maintains most of
its biodiversity and stability. The property owner tends to get more
long-term value out of the land that way, too, but less short-term value.
Most of the charges laid against evil capitalists can be attributed to a
short-term outlook, rather than financial greed per se.

~Chris

Hi Michael,

> Still, replacing old growth habitats of tremendous
> biodiversity with monoculture tree crops for houses and paper
> is still hugely troubling.

I assume you mean the advantages of maintaining the old growth
habitats outweigh the advantages of creating houses and paper.

More accurately: I value biodiverse habitats more highly than
monoculture habitats.

My point, however, was more basically that the difference is
meaningful, and using careless numbers to argue that environmental
degradation isn't such a big deal doesn't help the Libertarian
cause.

My questions:
What are the advantages of maintaining the old growth habitats?
What criteria are you using for deciding these advantages?
Advantages to whom?
By whose values?

These are crucial questions to be addressed in this discussion.

Those questions are indeed crucial when you or I are deciding how
to act; each of us deciding what we value, weighing those values
with complete or incomplete information, and ultimately deciding
whether and how to protect those values or to trade them for other
values. That can be a much larger discussion with people more
informed than I.

The first step, I think, is to at least acknowledge that the
environmental impact of mining is more complex than merely
displacing some number of cubic miles of ore, just as the impact
of logging is more complex than merely replacing some number of
individual trees; and that environmentalists are more complex than
merely left-wing socialist wackos, just as libertarians are more
complex than merely right-wing capitalist wackos. :wink:

Thanks for your thoughtful response.

Cheers,
Justin

Dear Justin and Chris and Dr. Mike :wink:

One of the things Chris touched on and needs to be expanded on when talking about any environmental issues is - PROPERTY AND PROPERTY RIGHTS.

When a company owns the property outright and is totally responsible for what happens to its property - without any government interference - it maintains its property for the long term good - biodiversity and all.

When people satisfy their basic needs of food, clothing and shelter they think about other things. As has been show through various econometric models first promote economic development creating wealth for businesses and consumers. Reduce government size and mis-guided economic and environmental intervention. Then environmentalism will come to prevail through popular public demand.

Thus if you want an on-going broad based biodiversity and an on-going respect for Planet Earth and on going advances in mining technology - then get the damn government out of the way - let free-market capitalism do its thing - then we won't have to be concerned about environmentalists because we will all be environmentalist by choice not by demand.

Ron Getty
SF Libertarian

This discussion, while fascinating, is getting a bit too serious, and I'm
getting frightened. Let's change the tone a bit and talk about the End of
the World.

<http://www.endofworld.net/> http://www.endofworld.net/

<http://geo.yahoo.com/serv?s=97359714&grpId=8894836&grpspId=1600365370&msgId
=9223&stime=1155880117&nc1=3848610&nc2=3848644&nc3=3>

I only heard about the "precautionary principle" recently, so for
others who haven't, here are some links:

http://www.pprinciple.net/the_precautionary_principle.html

http://www.takingprecaution.org/inact_bayarea.html

I attended a workshop by the latter group at the NCDD conference
<www.thataway.org>. I like the spirit of the "principle", but there's
definitely a danger of alarmism. I did at least suggest that they
apply the precautionary principle itself to the adoption of
precautionary principle legislation: What are the unforseen
consequences of legislation? What are the alternatives to legislation?
It seemed to be a new idea.

Cheers,
Justin

Science Debunks Precautionary Principle
http://liberty-news.com/show.html?http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=14274

More on the pernicious precautionary principle:
http://www.mises.com/misesreview_detail.asp?control=259&sortorder=issue

Best, Michael

Dear Justin;

The precautionary principle seems to be somewhat similar to the unspoken law of MD's: First do no harm.
Or the proverbial: First learn to crawl - then learn to walk - then learn to run.

Ron Getty
SF Libertarian

Dear Dr. Mike;

The article click through for the first URL did not work. However, for those who want more on the Precautionary Principle google came up with a few articles dating back to a 1987 symposium - all of which or none of which which may be of interest - both pro and con.

BTW: I did the search with the words PP between quote marks which cuts things down dramatically on amount of responses.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q="Precautionary+Principle"&btnG=Google+Search

Ron Getty
SF Libertarian