Wow.... This is so skewed....and myopic.
I think that we are the stewards of this earth. If we foul our water and land we will be forced to eat at a toxic table. Should we be concerned about the future earth.... Hell YES. Otherwise all of those great minds will be too poisoned to do very much.
We wash ourselves, our clothes, use common sense about sanitation so why would we want to kill our environment ? Our minds are great but sometimes the product of great minds can create great vulnerabilities ... Like genetic engineering. We are not so advanced that we can understand the implications of our actions. Case in point. There was a lab that was supplying Avian flu to research labs around the world. The virus was supposed to be dead. What this lab sent out was live human flu virus cells along with live avian virus cells in the same containers. There are very few mutations to get to a highly lethal avian flu that has human to human transmission capabilities. We are very lucky to have missed the deadly consequences of a viable H to H transmission mutation. Apparently we are capable of killing ourselves on a grand scale. Doesn't it make sense to only act with the highest ethical and moral standards in our dealing with our home...this earth... So far as we know there is nowhere else for us to go to rival this beautiful sky , water and land....We are of nature and nature encompasses us.

Puzzlelady,

Overman was never postulating a disembodied mind - if you had read the first part of the article you would have seen that. Quit putting words in his mouth.

Puzzlelady

You seemed to have missed the point of the article completely, which is that environmentalism is a religion, it is a religion of hate, a religion that believes man should live like animals – without the use of their mind, and believes killing 5.5 billion people would be a good start.

“We humans and our much-vaunted minds are not advanced enough yet to have developed beyond the stage of devouring each other. We are still pragmatic and virtual cannibals of each other's energies instead of using our intelligence to secure long-term survivability of each individual within the existing reality.” This is complete BS unless you are talking about countries dominated by socialism or environmentalism.

Remember the law of causality. You can't have mind without life, and you can't have life without its life support system. It's not a matter of choice or relative value. Life is the highest value, and self-preservation the first priority. We can dicker about the means but not about the ends. A is A.

you bet! I'm a mechanical engineering designer, registered with the gendarmerie, and reality does catch up ... often, quickly!

Science doesn't seek proof for all time. It's not a religion. A key feature of science is invites scientists to find new evidence contradicting our current understanding. That happens all the time.

It hasn't happened yet with the claim that burning stuff is affecting the climate. We all wish it weren't true, but some people take that a step further and look only for evidence that supports what we wish were true. I understand the tendency. When I fix a bug in electronics I'm designing, I find myself wanting to dismiss evidence that the fix didn't work as exceptions. Eventually reality catches up with you.

I respect your opinions but how can you say the choice is false. Isn't that decision before us now? It would be nice to preserve both but what if that's not possible? Which would you say is more valuable?

Fortunately I cannot view videos easily, so I didn't bother trying. Instead I peeked at the huge paragraphs of text. Didn't bother going past more than a few words.

Maybe I missed something. Or maybe next time it'll be something worth reading.

I can respect that position. However, we've all heard the Little Red Riding Hood story, and know the dangers of wolves that dress up as nice grandmas, Most people have reverence for "nature" in the same way they might trust an older, wiser person. Communists have dressed up in this way to deceive us and it has worked. They have hidden their religion of collectivism behind nature to sell it to a new generation, and have been so aggressive that many conservationists have been tricked into adopting their position so not to throw the baby out with the bath water.

They have been very successful because they have paralyzed our opinions by taking hostage our values, dressed up like nice grandmas to lure us closer.

Who doesn't like nature? When that answer is provided, then comes,,,,,,,,,,,,who doesn't like various forms of socialism and communism? Because the progressive values have been affiliated by the nature lovers it helps lead minds to the statement, capitalism is bad for nature. Managed societies by government is good for nature. That is what we find out when we get close to grandma and discover that she's a wolf.

That is a good point.

"46 & 2, just ahead of me" - TOOL

remember East Anglia, CG! that dry-labbed data discovery is typical of "proofs" contrived by folks seeking to legitimize their religion.

for those of us who find that our emotions are the studied expression of our thoughts -- instead of the common shrinks' idea that they reveal our innermost selves, mysterious and impulsive -- the creative process is kinda like bearing a child, it seems to me (as a male), a gorgeous growing mental revolution where 1+1 can equal 2 to a very large power!

The assumption - and a very wrong one - however is that CO2 is a pollutant. That simply isn't the case - it's the product of combustion both in cells and burning fossil fuels, and then it gets turned back into O2 by plants through photosynthesis.

Case in point: India and China have been dumping millions of tons of C02 into the air for the past two decades, yet global temperatures have remained constant. Sorry, but the global warming nonsense is all a fraud. Only 40 years ago in the late 70's these same climate models were predicting another mini ice age. Until they can get better at predicting the weather two days from now, I have zero trust in their predictions about the climate ten years from now.

The case that CO2 accounts for a significant amount of global warming is solid IMHO, but I'll be happy if the scientific consensus shifts the other way b/c so many human activities depend on burning stuff.

Cap and trade is not perfect, but it seems like a a good alternative to hard limits. Someone at church passed around a petition against cap-and-trade b/c they want hard limits. I say we should do our best to calculate the cost of our activities on the environment and tax that instead of taxing good things like work.

If the scientific consensus turns out to be wrong, it will be like how they discovered a low-fat diet isn't necessarily better for you. We'll all be happy.

Actually you do get it...and a point.

Cap and Trade has also been the source of huge amounts of fraud wherever it's been implemented.

At the risk of being flagged, shouted out of the Gulch, or stoned, this whole argument, to me, smacks of the same kind of logic that weeps and rends it's clothing at the plight of the baby seals, but thinks nothing of the thousands of infants aborted every day. I just don't get it.

Absolutely!!! Nailed it.

Some of my technical work puts me in direct contact with what I call "leedy greenies". These people really are in some sort of religious cult. When a though is no longer allowed to be tested by science it becomes religion. And, frankly, we have a lot of that in our culture now...in medicine, in the enviro movement, in economics...

Excellent piece OMW.
"The earth has its best chance because of mankind, not in spite of it. Of the two, man’s mind is more valuable and if one has to be saved, it must be the imagination of human beings." This sentence put the emphasis on the priorities of a rational mind on a system that is controlled and directed by physical forces and interaction. Man's employment of ethics based on logic and rationality in the development of science and technology have allowed the Gaia worshiper to hitch a free ride on the productivity of the human mind while they imprison their mind to the the forces of inter galactic physics. The blank out. The Earth is only one CME (corona mass ejection from the sun) away from bringing physical survival back into a real and personal perspective. Gaia, Mother Earth, and the loony left is helpless against it, but man's logical, rational mind has the capacity and capability to know the threat and prepare for it and survive . The other organisms on this planet are just along for the ride.
Cheers.

Thank you for noticing!

Lana asked, "Doesn't it make sense to only act with the highest ethical and moral standards in our dealing with our home...this earth...?" Within the context of her statement that the failure to avoid creating a toxic environment will poison all the "great minds," I have to agree. But I think we owe the duty to our fellow humans more than to "the earth." To me, this gets to the core of morality and ethics: does one have the right to knowingly or recklessly harm another person for one's own personal gain, or not? To imply, as CircuitGuy did, that it's acceptable to destroy individuals' cabins on a lake, as long as greater economic value is produced, sacrifices the individual for the so-called common good, and I do not agree -- though the supreme court does: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._Cit... . On the other hand, I believe accidental and unforeseeable damage that may occur is a reasonable price to pay for progress, but may still require compensation. The tough question today is whether harm is likely to occur from any given activity. "Science" has been manipulated, and I have no doubt that the powers that be are telling us harmless things are harmful, and vice versa.

I, too, believe in the reasonable exploitation of Earth's natural resources, but I have to point out that Cap and Trade legislation was based on the faulty premise that CO2 promotes global warming. Additionally, those promoting the legislation had no substitute for the lost power that they wanted to shut down, effectively proposing a huge rise in energy prices and (at best) economic malaise. I am all for scientific advancement, but there has to be a reasonable phase-out period to minimize the economic costs of such changes. The knee-jerk reaction being employed with Cap and Trade was an example of agenda run amok - not sound and practical legislation.