Anti-Green Philosophy

[GEddie]

I was not even considering the possibility of societal collapse, but rather the cyclical nature of human world views even without such an event.

The pendulum exists whether or not society progresses or collapses. Just as Victorianism gave way to the sexual revolution, nature-worship lies ahead, even if by then Internet fora are replaced by mind-link commo. We are already seeing the beginnings of it.

ICXC NIKA

 

[lynnvinc]

I was not even considering the possibility of societal collapse, but rather the cyclical nature of human world views even without such an event.

The pendulum exists whether or not society progresses or collapses. Just as Victorianism gave way to the sexual revolution, nature-worship lies ahead, even if by then Internet fora are replaced by mind-link commo. We are already seeing the beginnings of it.

ICXC NIKA

I don’t really see it hardly at all. Most people I know, most environmentalists, accept the scientific explanations of environmental problems and seek solutions based on scientific knowledge.

However, I have known a few neopagans and one pagan over the past 30 years – students of mine – and I’ve read it is on the rise.

I was teaching my “Intro to Anthro” course in 1985 and was on the “religion” chapter. When I got to witchcraft beliefs, a student got all upset and said, “Well, I’m a witch and I resent the way you are talking about us.” Wha-? I couldn’t believe my ears – I had thought they’d all been burned at the stake centuries ago . Shocked and thinking, “please don’t put a hex on me,” and telling her, “well, I’m just teaching what’s in the book”

A few years later I joined an interfaith environmental group up in IL, and we were talking about outreach to other religions (it was composed only of Christian denominations - Presbyterians and Catholics). I told them I didn’t want any neopagans, that they were mean, but the group insisted that we be open to all faiths – tho we never did get any neopagans. We did, however, get a Jain from India.

Then some years later I met 2 other neopagans, and one explained to me that neopaganism is more like shamanism (which is the positive side of the witchcraft coin).

Then a few years ago one of my students informed me that she was a pagan (not neopagan), because her pagan ancestry went back centuries (apparently they had missed a few when burning them at the stake). Anyway, she explained how she and her family had to keep a very low profile because of all the hatred against pagans, and told about how much they had suffered over the centuries at the hand of Christians. She also did explain how they worshipped nature & did various nature rituals, etc.

However, I must say none of these neopagans or pagans (the earth worshippers) I met were into environmental issues much, certainly not a much as I am.

Also, a colleague anthropologist here in the Rio Grande Valley has found that brujeria, curandarismo, and Santeria (Latino versions of paganism/witchcraft) are increasing – which sort of parallels the rise of neopaganism in the Anglo world.

I put on my anthropological thinking cap – I had read that small-scale societies that did not have formal power structures or social control (bands, tribes) were the ones most likely to have witchcraft beliefs as a way of social control. It is not just people acting right bec they are afraid some witch would put a hex on them, but also when something bad happens (a child dies or a crop fails) they will be looking for the witch to punish or kill him/her, so people in that society do not act like witches or people with grudges – they strive to be friendly and “bury the hatchet,” bec they don’t want people suspecting they are the witch that caused the problem.

Well, I started thinking, how is our current society like these tribal societies without much formal social control, that would lead to fertile grounds for such beliefs to increase. It seems to me things in our society ARE out of control in many ways – for instance people drive like maniacs down here, bec there just isn’t a big enough police presence (it is the poorest area of the nation). And we have many many festering problems that our gov and we as a people are not solving, like serious enviornmental problems. Things are out of control. And that would make people seek other means of control…e.g., thru nature worship, neopaganism, brujeria, etc.

So in that way perhaps environmental issues are implicated in the rise of neopaganism – and the more the mainstream people in mainstream religions fail to mitigate problems, the more they push weak-in-Christian-belief others into nature worship and neopaganism.

But again I must insist, acc to my scientific beliefs at least, we cannot solve environmental problems by worshipping and sacrificing goats to Gaia or tree spirits. But who knows, maybe I’m wrong

I do think prayer to the transcendent and immanent God (so close and so beyond) can really really really help. I know it has helped me to find and implement solutions to environmental problems – God has so very graciously answered my prayers.

The only prayers He has trouble answering is getting others to do likewise and solve environmental problems – bec He gave them free will. What was He thinking .

 

[LittleSoldier]

If you click on the link in the story, it takes you to the report where they describe the methodology: tigger.uic.edu/~pdoran/012009_Doran_final.pdf

Target Population:

An invitation to participate in the survey was sent to 10,257 Earth scientists. The database was built from Keane and Martinez [2007], which lists all geosciences faculty at reporting academic institutions, along with researchers at state geologic surveys associated with local universities, and researchers at U.S. federal research facilities (e.g., U.S. Geological Survey, NASA, and NOAA (U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) facilities; U.S. Department of Energy national laboratories; and so forth). To maximize the response rate, the survey was designed to take less than 2 minutes to complete, and it was administered by a professional online survey site (questionpro.com) that allowed one-time participation by those who received the invitation.

Response Rate:

With 3146 individuals completing the survey, the participant response rate for the survey was 30.7%. This is a typical response rate for Web-based surveys [Cook et al., 2000; Kaplowitz et al., 2004]. Of our survey participants, 90% were from U.S. institutions and 6% were from Canadian institutions; the remaining 4% were from institutions in 21 other nations. More than 90% of participants had Ph.D.s, and 7% had master’s degrees. With survey participants asked to select a single category, the most common areas of expertise reported were geochemistry (15.5%), geophysics (12%), and oceanography (10.5%). General geology, hydrology/hydrogeology, and paleontology each accounted for 5–7% of the total respondents. Approximately 5% of the respondents were climate scientists, and 8.5% of the respondents indicated that more than 50% of their peer-reviewed publications in the past 5 years have been on the subject of climate change. While respondents’ names are kept private, the authors noted that the survey included participants with well-documented dissenting opinions on global warming theory.

---

There are two weaknesses in the survey:

This is a population survey, meaning that the “universe” of people they were targeting is defined by the database of professions they used to get the names. Therefore, the authors should, but do not provide statistics of the population proportions for each group in the database. So we can’t tell if 5% is greater, lesser, or about the same proportion of climate scientists that exists in the population. If it is about the same, then 5% (N=77) is fine.

The overall response rate is not high (30.7%), which means the possibility exists that some bias may be skewing the results (i.e., some unknown factor that motivates one person to respond while another to ignore the survey). The question then becomes whether climate change skeptics are less likely than climate change believers to respond to the survey. My guess is that they are not.

On the plus side, the effect size is huge. Very seldom do you get such a lop-sided result. Even if response bias accounts for 20% of the responses, you still have more than three quarters of climatologists (77%) agree that human activity is causing global warming.

It may not be the best piece of survey research, but it is certainly better than the totally unscientific claims offered by the climate change deniers.

Thanks. I tried to access your link but decided to decline the long agreement I would have had to accept in order to do so. Without seeing the actual study I can’t comment except to say that those red flags still exist. Some operational definitions would be helpful.

 

[Capullo_Zumbao]

Brothers, brothers … all this discussion about what is plainly evident.

Look, our Pope (may God bless him !) has enough scientific advisers to fill a cathedral, and I am pretty sure, in fact I know, that they are a few thousand times better informed and capable than we can ever be. The problem of our Church has always been to try to tell scientists what it “must be”, instead of listening to what they say. Remember Galileo ?. Well, what our Pope is doing right now is listening to what them scientists have to say. That is exactly as it should be. And you can get blue in the face if you want, but somehow I tend to believe what they say, instead of what you claim. There’s also the question that it agrees with what I can see and check. And I can not believe our Pope is doing this out of any occult motivation, certainly not for profit, which is what moves the oil money.

We are, for once, in capable hands, Praise God. Let’s follow our Pope’s lead. Am I speaking nonsense?.

 

[leonardo111]

There’s been some anti-environmentalism expressed here at CAF and also in Western society.

I suggest this comes from the same Enlightenment roots that founded American society and opposed the Catholic Church, and is based on old and faulty concepts of person and society.

While there has been much good in Enlightenment philosophy that corrected several evils – it brought us democracy and human rights – it has been more and more abused in modern times. I’m thinking the extreme tea-partyism that rejects Catholic social teaching is an example of it.

The concept of person and society promoted by the 18th c. Enlightenment philosophers was of original, free and autonomous individuals – independent of others and free of societal (and Church) restrictions and having total RIGHTS – who came together to form society to reduce inter-human conflict and secure other protections, only giving up a tiny portion of their freedoms as necessary for society to function. And then kings and the Catholic Church started abusing their power and taking away freedoms beyond what was outlined in the original social contract. The environment in their view was merely passive resources to be exploited, without any repercussions, such as pollution, etc.

This is in contrast to traditional societies that stress DUTIES over rights (or at least in the context of stressing rights, as the other side of the “rights” coin) and understood humans as emeshed in society and interdependent. These traditional societies focused on The Ten Commandments, dharma (righteousness and duties), and the Li – not “The Ten Rights.” And re the environment, traditional societies had a deep respect – a sabboth for the land, and God’s commandment to “keep the garden” (not destroy it), and God did not create the world to be a wasteland, but to be habitable (Is 45:18). They were closer to their source of subsistence (it wasn’t just a bunch of packaged food in some supermarket), and understood the environment needed care and protection.

The Enlightenment view is also in contrast to modern science that tells us we are interdependent with the environment – for human viability we need healthy air to breathe, water to drink, food to eat, materials with which to build our homes and products; and we need to avoid highly toxic chemicals permeating our skin, etc. We impact the environment and it impacts us (keeping us alive or killing us if polluted). The Enlightenment view is also in contrast to modern social science that tells us we humans are interdependent and have always been social beings, not autonomous beings wandering thru the forest, without others, without mothers or fathers.

And I think the reason this environmentally and socially harmful Enlightenment philosophy (if carried to its extreme, as it is here in America) is being used to abuse the environment (our subsistence base) and our brethren is because we live in a human-built world and get our social needs fulfilled by gadgets. We have socially contructed the environment or nature as wild creatures in wild places (polar bears and rainforest) beyond the fringe of civilization – perhaps cute at times, but expendable. We do not perceive the environment as the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, and the climate that makes our agriculture and food production successful. We see it as something way apart from our insulated selves, and the anti-greens then complain that greens are saving baby seals, but don’t care about human babies – without realizing human babies too need the environment to be viable.

Anti-greens would reject what JPII, BXVI, and Pope Francis say about creation protection, and twist their meanings, perhaps giving very faint lipservice to stewardship – as if simply saying that word has fulfilled ones DUTY to stop harming people and others of God’s creation thru environmental harms.

If I’m wrong in my assessment, let me hear your educated views on this. I’m not an expert in philosophy.

I can see that you are already brainwashed by enviromentalism.
God has created the earth and nature to be used and submitted at our will, not the contrary.
If God has done such, there is no need to fear that one day the earth will not be capable to do so.
It has done it since ever, and will always do so, because God controls the weather and the environment, not us.

 

[lynnvinc]

I can see that you are already brainwashed by enviromentalism.
God has created the earth and nature to be used and submitted at our will, not the contrary.
If God has done such, there is no need to fear that one day the earth will not be capable to do so.
It has done it since ever, and will always do so, because God controls the weather and the environment, not us.

According to that logic, it is perfectly okay to poison someone to death, bec God will protect that person and not let that person die.

The Bible and the writings on the environment of JPII, BXVI, and Pope Francis all explain that we need to “keep the garden” or protect the environment…if it is to serve us well. We keep it, it keeps us – a “co-service,” a conservation.

“And the Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to tend and guard and keep it.” Genesis 2:15

Pope Francis, Laudato Si #67
“…Although it is true that we Christians have at times incorrectly interpreted the Scriptures, nowadays we must forcefully reject the notion that our being created in God’s image and given dominion over the earth justifies absolute domination over other creatures. The biblical texts are to be read in their context, with an appropriate hermeneutic, recognizing that they tell us to “till and keep” the garden of the world (cf. Gen 2:15). “Tilling” refers to cultivating, ploughing or working, while “keeping” means caring, protecting, overseeing and preserving. This implies a relationship of mutual responsibility between human beings and nature. Each community can take from the bounty of the earth whatever it needs for subsistence, but it also has the duty to protect the earth and to ensure its fruitfulness for coming generations. “The earth is the Lord’s” (Ps 24:1); to him belongs “the earth with all that is within it” (Dt 10:14). Thus God rejects every claim to absolute ownership: “The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; for you are strangers and sojourners with me” (Lev 25:23).”

 

[Capullo_Zumbao]

Brothers, brothers … how can there be any kind of doubt about our responsibilities ?. Some claim God made the Earth for us to do as we wish. But what is the essence of Jesus message ?. It is extremely clear, love your brother as you do love yourself. To waste what your brother needs is a SIN. We do not live on a desert island, and what we does affects directly our brother’s well-being. We must keep close watch on what we have and care for it, it is our duty to our brothers and to our descendants. It is also what Jesus bade us to do. It is also, what our Pope, may God care for him, tell us to do. It has not always been so, that our Pope tell us what our heart compels us to do is the right thing; let’s thank God for our actual Pope’s wisdom.

So stop beating the bushes and start cranking … our duty is clear. Conserve, and keep our numbers in check. It is for the good of us all, and we are not different from the rest of our brothers.

May God bless you all, brothers.

 

[weller2]

God has created the earth and nature to be used and submitted at our will, not the contrary.
If God has done such, there is no need to fear that one day the earth will not be capable to do so.
It has done it since ever, and will always do so, because God controls the weather and the environment, not us.

Dad gave me a million dollars to be used and submitted at my will, not the contrary.
If Dad has done such, there is no need to fear that one day the money will run out.
It will never run out, because Dad is a banker, so he controls the money, not me.

…Spot the non-sequitur!

 

[weller2]

She also did explain how they worshipped nature & did various nature rituals, etc.

However, I must say none of these neopagans or pagans (the earth worshippers) I met were into environmental issues much, certainly not a much as I am.

Interesting paradox.

Also, a colleague anthropologist here in the Rio Grande Valley has found that brujeria, curandarismo, and Santeria (Latino versions of paganism/witchcraft) are increasing – which sort of parallels the rise of neopaganism in the Anglo world.

Interesting. I wonder which way it will go as ecosystem collapse accelerates.

NB did you read The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi? It’s set in your part of the world (well, Arizona) during catastrophic drought in 2030s. The religious landscape in the book is interesting: the society is split between adherents of Santa Muerte and an apocalyptic version of Evangelical Christianity… Kind of makes sense.

 

[lynnvinc]

Originally Posted by lynnvinc View Post
She also did explain how they worshipped nature & did various nature rituals, etc, However, I must say none of these neopagans or pagans (the earth worshippers) I met were into environmental issues much, certainly not a much as I am…

Interesting paradox.

What the neopagans seem to believe is that they can impact or influence nature to do their bidding in a sort of supernatural way. This sort of contradicts science which points out that we are harming and impacting nature, and that when nature impacts and harms us there are scientific explanations.

However, I think it may be possible for a person (rather than some abstract, single-minded belief system) to hold both views – scientific and animistic. People sort of have a repertoire of belief systems, with different (perhaps even contradictory) beliefs surfacing according to context. Sort of like the anti-environmentalist, CC-deniers on CAF – they hold the anti-Catholic Enlightenment beliefs and Catholic beliefs and seem to have crafted some new religion out of these 2.

Interesting. I wonder which way it will go as ecosystem collapse accelerates.

NB did you read The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi? It’s set in your part of the world (well, Arizona) during catastrophic drought in 2030s. The religious landscape in the book is interesting: the society is split between adherents of Santa Muerte and an apocalyptic version of Evangelical Christianity… Kind of makes sense.

Thanks for the info on the book (a must read).

According to some anthropologists it is societies WITHOUT centralized authority, such as tribal societies, that more likely hold witchcraft beliefs. And how is works is that people behave in a friendly correct manner, patching up differences, not only because they don’t want to be hexed by witches, but also they don’t want to be considered a witch…with repercussions of banishment from the tribe or execution. In other words, when there are no leaders to take care of social order and societal well-being, witchcraft beliefs serve that function.

It actually is beginning to look like there are fewer and fewer leaders and institutions taking care of our social order and well-being…

With ecosystem collapse this will only get worse, esp if the leaders and institutions keep refusing to address the problems, or even to acknowledge them.

 

[GEddie]

Interesting paradox.

But it makes sense, in that if the Earth is a divinity, no human effort is needed or in fact possible to “save” or “protect” it.

I am having to revise my earlier theory concerning environmentalism and nature spirituality.

ICXC NIKA

 

[GEddie]

What the neopagans seem to believe is that they can impact or influence nature to do their bidding in a sort of supernatural way. This sort of contradicts science which points out that we are harming and impacting nature, and that when nature impacts and harms us there are scientific explanations.

However, I think it may be possible for a person (rather than some abstract, single-minded belief system) to hold both views – scientific and animistic. People sort of have a repertoire of belief systems, with different (perhaps even contradictory) beliefs surfacing according to context. Sort of like the anti-environmentalist, CC-deniers on CAF – they hold the anti-Catholic Enlightenment beliefs and Catholic beliefs and seem to have crafted some new religion out of these 2.

Thanks for the info on the book (a must read).

According to some anthropologists it is societies WITHOUT centralized authority, such as tribal societies, that more likely hold witchcraft beliefs. And how is works is that people behave in a friendly correct manner, patching up differences, not only because they don’t want to be hexed by witches, but also they don’t want to be considered a witch…with repercussions of banishment from the tribe or execution. In other words, when there are no leaders to take care of social order and societal well-being, witchcraft beliefs serve that function.

It actually is beginning to look like there are fewer and fewer leaders and institutions taking care of our social order and well-being…

With ecosystem collapse this will only get worse, esp if the leaders and institutions keep refusing to address the problems, or even to acknowledge them.

Well, yeah.

Where there is a central authority, there is also normally a central religion. Religious freedom and secularized authority go back only to early modernism.

And while witchcraft was persecuted throughout time, it only became a hysteria in a tiny colony on the edge of NA, where the powerful government was an ocean away.

ICXC NIKA

 

[Capullo_Zumbao]

Well, it seems that some new-fangled discoveries on how the Sun works predict a low some fifteen (15) years in the future. If so, maybe we will need all that C02 to warm us up, LOL …

That would be a good thing, because we humans are not going to do anything effective to curb GW, I know that much.

Have a nice day and do not despair.

 

[lynnvinc]

Well, it seems that some new-fangled discoveries on how the Sun works predict a low some fifteen (15) years in the future. If so, maybe we will need all that C02 to warm us up, LOL …

That would be a good thing, because we humans are not going to do anything effective to curb GW, I know that much.

Have a nice day and do not despair.

Not really – assuming that the single, recent study presented only at a conference is correct – because it only alludes to the 11 years solar cycle with one of the solar minima becoming especially deep, having a stronger than normal cooling effect. And after the 11 to 15 years the solar cycle then reverses to its maximum, causing greater warming.

The enhanced greenhouse effect from our GHG emissions will be having an even greater warming effect by 2030, so either that deep solar minimum and enhanced GH effect will cancel each other out, with no net increase in temps for 11 to 15 years; or there will be a slight cooling impact or slight warming impact, depending on which forcing is greater.

However, GHGs, such as CO2 last in the atmosphere for a very long time, compounding as we add more. A small portion can stay up there even for 100,000 years.

So the greater and much longer term forcing is the CO2 and the greenhouse effect is increases.

Here is a graph that shows the solar cycles (bottom), the global average temps, and the increasing CO2 in the atmosphere…the temps track the solar cycles up until about 1980, then start tracking the CO2 levels.

(Please Note: This uploaded content is no longer available.)

 

[lynnvinc]

Well, it seems that some new-fangled discoveries on how the Sun works predict a low some fifteen (15) years in the future. If so, maybe we will need all that C02 to warm us up, LOL …

That would be a good thing, because we humans are not going to do anything effective to curb GW, I know that much.

Have a nice day and do not despair.

I actually put this question to the climate scientists re “Solar activity predicted to fall 60% in 2030s, to ‘mini ice age’ levels: Sun driven by double dynamo” – Science Daily summary of Valentina Zharkova’s research results sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/07/150709092955.htm

Here is Gavin Schmidt’s (a top climate scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies) response:

[Response: It’s a 60% reduction in the magnitude of the solar cycle (not solar activity), and it’s not obviously terrible. It’s a statistical projection with no physics, so the extent to which it’s believable is unclear. The connection to a new ‘mini ice age’ is completely made up. That level of change in solar forcing is about -0.1W/m2, which would be made up in just 3 years of current CO2 concentration growth. – gavin]

 

[Capullo_Zumbao]

Vaya, hombre. And I thinking all our problems would be solved by mother Nature …

You’re right, of course, but for a sec it was a relief.

In the end, nothing much will happen to our Planet. Life will go thru an inflection. It has happened before. We will be replaced by the new and improved version. But I am egotistic enough to care for my grandchildren …

So our Pope is right. Listen to what he says. And have a beer … that helps considerably.

P.D.: we are now at 45º C, and some tourists have died from heatstroke, as well as careless locals. Same old same old. I’ve lived thru 52º C here in Sevilla … now THAT is Sevilla Warming, LOL …

 

[Saint_Frank]

There’s been some anti-environmentalism expressed here at CAF and also in Western society.

I suggest this comes from the same Enlightenment roots that founded American society and opposed the Catholic Church, and is based on old and faulty concepts of person and society.

While there has been much good in Enlightenment philosophy that corrected several evils – it brought us democracy and human rights – it has been more and more abused in modern times. I’m thinking the extreme tea-partyism that rejects Catholic social teaching is an example of it.

The concept of person and society promoted by the 18th c. Enlightenment philosophers was of original, free and autonomous individuals – independent of others and free of societal (and Church) restrictions and having total RIGHTS – who came together to form society to reduce inter-human conflict and secure other protections, only giving up a tiny portion of their freedoms as necessary for society to function. And then kings and the Catholic Church started abusing their power and taking away freedoms beyond what was outlined in the original social contract. The environment in their view was merely passive resources to be exploited, without any repercussions, such as pollution, etc.

This is in contrast to traditional societies that stress DUTIES over rights (or at least in the context of stressing rights, as the other side of the “rights” coin) and understood humans as emeshed in society and interdependent. These traditional societies focused on The Ten Commandments, dharma (righteousness and duties), and the Li – not “The Ten Rights.” And re the environment, traditional societies had a deep respect – a sabboth for the land, and God’s commandment to “keep the garden” (not destroy it), and God did not create the world to be a wasteland, but to be habitable (Is 45:18). They were closer to their source of subsistence (it wasn’t just a bunch of packaged food in some supermarket), and understood the environment needed care and protection.

The Enlightenment view is also in contrast to modern science that tells us we are interdependent with the environment – for human viability we need healthy air to breathe, water to drink, food to eat, materials with which to build our homes and products; and we need to avoid highly toxic chemicals permeating our skin, etc. We impact the environment and it impacts us (keeping us alive or killing us if polluted). The Enlightenment view is also in contrast to modern social science that tells us we humans are interdependent and have always been social beings, not autonomous beings wandering thru the forest, without others, without mothers or fathers.

And I think the reason this environmentally and socially harmful Enlightenment philosophy (if carried to its extreme, as it is here in America) is being used to abuse the environment (our subsistence base) and our brethren is because we live in a human-built world and get our social needs fulfilled by gadgets. We have socially contructed the environment or nature as wild creatures in wild places (polar bears and rainforest) beyond the fringe of civilization – perhaps cute at times, but expendable. We do not perceive the environment as the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, and the climate that makes our agriculture and food production successful. We see it as something way apart from our insulated selves, and the anti-greens then complain that greens are saving baby seals, but don’t care about human babies – without realizing human babies too need the environment to be viable.

Anti-greens would reject what JPII, BXVI, and Pope Francis say about creation protection, and twist their meanings, perhaps giving very faint lipservice to stewardship – as if simply saying that word has fulfilled ones DUTY to stop harming people and others of God’s creation thru environmental harms.

If I’m wrong in my assessment, let me hear your educated views on this. I’m not an expert in philosophy.

Great post.

Personally, I’m skeptical about the whole global warming and carbon emissions claims because it’s too tied up into political agendas which are very dubious. Am I willing to accept that the climate changes/is changing? Sure. But I don’t accept that it’s due to the actions of humans and that we’re headed for some environmental doomsday. I don’t trust international bodies like the UN with their population control agenda and the environmental lobby with their misanthropy and quasi-neopaganism.

Now, we do have a responsibility to safeguard the Earth as a treasure, for she is our mother and our home and we share her with many billions of others of God’s non-human creations. They have just as much of a right to be here as we do and not to have their habits destroyed. We have to get away from this exploitative mindset and placing obscene profits before everything else.

So I totally support conservation (Teddy Roosevelt, yay!) and animal welfare (not rights, which are a different animal). I’m also not big into capitalism and much prefer duty-based traditional societies rather than the failed modernist mess we’ve gotten into. I just don’t buy into “science” with a negative political agenda behind it.

 

[lynnvinc]

Great post.

Personally, I’m skeptical about the whole global warming and carbon emissions claims because it’s too tied up into political agendas which are very dubious. Am I willing to accept that the climate changes/is changing? Sure. But I don’t accept that it’s due to the actions of humans and that we’re headed for some environmental doomsday. I don’t trust international bodies like the UN with their population control agenda and the environmental lobby with their misanthropy and quasi-neopaganism.

Now, we do have a responsibility to safeguard the Earth as a treasure, for she is our mother and our home and we share her with many billions of others of God’s non-human creations. They have just as much of a right to be here as we do and not to have their habits destroyed. We have to get away from this exploitative mindset and placing obscene profits before everything else.

So I totally support conservation (Teddy Roosevelt, yay!) and animal welfare (not rights, which are a different animal). I’m also not big into capitalism and much prefer duty-based traditional societies rather than the failed modernist mess we’ve gotten into. I just don’t buy into “science” with a negative political agenda behind it.

Most of the global warming mitigation measures mitigate a host of other environmental problems, including pollution and resource depletion, so as long as people are doing all they can for these other problems, then they don’t have to accept AGW to help mitigate it. So you are definitely on a good track.

The only thing that keeps confusing me is this idea that global warming and carbon emissions claims are tied up into political agendas. The greenhouse effect and how CO2 & other GHGs cause warming were discovered nearly 200 years ago, well before any political issues arose. In fact Svante Arrhenius, a Swede physicist who helped introduce the greenhouse effect in the 1800s, sort of thought the warming might be nice … in Sweden, I suppose.

I think what is tied up into political agendas is not global warming or climate science, but climate change denialism. Global warming from the greenhouse effect is just a scientific fact hanging out there, whether or not we decide to do anything about it. Those who care about life on earth might want some policies to combat it. However, policies do not determine science. It’s the other way around…science makes people think about whether or not we should have policies and what those policies should be.

Laudato Si makes it clear that the cap & trade scheme is not working and won’t work, and that we need other policies and practices that work AND do not harm or put an undue burden on the poor.

I’m personally up to that challenge, but I can understand that it is a whole lot of thinking, doing, and trouble for most people; they have their regularly scheduled lives.

25 yrs ago I thought all I would have to do in response to AGW is implement mitigation measures at the personal and household levels, then tell others about it (and about the financial savings in doing so) and they would run with it and do the needful and I could get back to my regularly scheduled life. That didn’t happen. I’ve spend the past 25 years doing what I can (at financial savings to us) and banging my head against the brick wall of resistance in others to do anything.

And nearing the end of my life (I’m on the brink of retirement now) I suppose that’s how I’ll go out of this world … banging my head against the brick wall. All for the sake of God’s kingdom and its righteousness