An Order of Values

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

I was raised by a father who loved nature. He believed very much in not doing any damage to nature that didn’t strictly need to be done. For instance, instead of cutting a Christmas tree he would cut a branch of a tree, so he wouldn’t cut an actual tree.

On Saturdays he would take me on nature walks in the nearby woods, and he knew the name and habits of every bird and animal. He showed me the tadpoles in the little creeks, and took me in the evening to see the fireflies by the lake. He rescued puppies and kittens, and firmly believed in not hurting any of the Earth’s creatures.

Unlike the rest of the culture, he believed we shouldn’t litter. The whole “leave only footprints, take only pictures” would have appealed to him, if we’d owned a camera back then.

I’m still a naturist that way. I haunt natural history museums, and if we can get the Mathematician’s knees fixed, we’ll go for hikes again.

I don’t know what my dad’s opinion is on this strange cult of Gaia that has swallowed the world these last thirty years or so, since the fall of the USSR.

I don’t know if he realizes it is a substitute and stalking horse for communism. We don’t speak much about politics unless he initiates it, because he’s only getting his news from European news sources, which assume our news are dangerously biased to the right and seek to correct them. So, in a way he is living in a parallel world, and there’s no point talking about it.

However, I’ve been horrified by the vague and benign “we should take care of the Earth” which frankly those of us who are religious believe we should do, becoming “You will destroy humans to “save” the Earth.”

Yes, I know what they want is actually is to impose communism, or at least the ones at the top.

But on the street it has turned into this vile bizarre hatred of humans, a desire to “save” the Earth specifically from humans.

And the philosophy has penetrated enough for a lot of people to have decided not to have children, or to lead strangely hopeless lives in which they try to self efface.

Let’s leave aside the nonsense about a catastrophic climate change. While it’s entirely possible this could happen, it’d hardly be instant — unless we’re hit by a meteor or the like.

So putting that side, who are we saving the Earth for?

The Earth is not sentient. it doesn’t want this or that or the other thing. So who are we saving it for? Both of which are far far worse for the environment.

I know most of you probably agree with me, at least the regular readers of this blog. But I have to get this off my chest:

It’s all very well to look after your immediate environment. It’s perfectly acceptable to like to be outside with the trees and the animals. It’s great to study how animals interact with their environment and how evolution shapes the world.

It is however the greatest insanity to think that the Earth is somehow sentient and that it wants or needs this or that. It is insanity to believe that humans, creatures of the Earth as much as any delta smelt, are somehow unnatural and a danger to the Earth itself. It is insanity to believe there is even an ideal state for the Earth and we’re supposed to somehow achieve it. So many things we thought were good or we were doing for the better had unforeseen and bizarre consequences, even in our own lives, much less in the lives of a complex interchaining of ever changing and adapting organisms on an ever changing and dynamic environment.

If you think humans, specifically are going to destroy the Earth and need to be eliminated, you have joined a cult. An evil one.

Get up off your knees, go outside and take a deep breath.

The Earth will be here when you and everything you know is dust. What it will look like and be, and what inhabits you is not for you to control.

Enjoy it while you are here and don’t harm things — particularly living things — when you don’t have to (I interpret having to liberally. Humans are omnivores and do need animal protein).

Leave the things you enjoy for your children to enjoy, even if they enjoy it when they come back to the mother planet on vacation.

The business of humanity is humans. Go make more humans or build a better future for humans.

Gaia was always a fanciful construction, and the Earth will take care of itself.

98 thoughts on “An Order of Values”

  1. “If you think humans, specifically are going to destroy the Earth and need to be eliminated, you have joined a cult. An evil one.”

    If this is your true belief then I have a simple solution for you: You first! And the rest of us are happy to help you on your way.

    Liked by 4 people

  3. If marxism is driven by envy, I wonder if gaiaism is driven by disgust? If you look at their iconography, it is all clean vs putrid in some form. And their protests are about making the things they oppose gross or hideous in some way.

    Which would explain why there does seem to be a disconnect between the watermelons and the true greenies. The watermelons seem most happy when someone else loses, but the greenie true believers really do want humanity replaced by tree squid. But disgust is an easy and natural way for the marxists to motivate their troops, since they both, initially, want to burn it down.

    I wonder if this is one of the reason socialist movements seem to split into commi and nazi factions? The one faction goes into ever increasing purity spirals, while the other purely wants to be better than everyone else, so they will inevitably eventually get caught in one of the spirals. Or pushed by one of their fellow green eyes monsters to ensure they fall.

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      1. I suspect Calvinism draws from the same root.

        The thing is, disgust, in and of itself is not intrinsically bad, but it needs to be in its proper place. But if it takes over one’s life, one will go insane.

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        1. Can’t be. At it’s core Calvinball is a celebration of the joy of semi-structured play with a friend.

          I may be a bit biased, Hobbes is the bestest Tigger ever!

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          1. Agree. We named a cat Hobbs. I vetoed naming our son Calvin. Meanie old me. FWIW Hobbs lived to be 20 years old.

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  5. Years ago I wrote an article for a magazine published by national space organization about a Moon base. At one point I discussed extracting minerals from the Moon’s surface by using strip mining. The editor asked me to remove the term. She stated many of their readers would be upset by the environmental damage to the Moon strip mining would cause. I pointed out the Moon was a dead, sterile piece of rock, with no biosphere. You could not “hurt” the environment because it was already dead. She stated she agreed with me, but the readers would still be upset and the golden rule (he that pays the gold rules) applied. I excised that section of the article.

    It’s not science. It’s religion.

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      1. I was surprised that several of the major figures (John Muir, Rachel Carson, Donald Worster [although his is not anti-people]) in the conservation and then environmental movement come from Calvinist traditions. Then some things started making sense, especially when I learned more about those particular denominations and the times. The twisted “innate depravity” allows activists to say, “There’s no hope for them,” and lifts any guilt from their shoulders.

        “They are never going to see the light, so if we destroy them and their works, it’s no real loss.” Which backs into “Unbelievers can be killed, and if we get some innocents, well, [Deity] will know his/her/its own.” Toss in a bit of end-times theology, and it gets scary quick.

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      2. I’ve found it interesting that several Evangelical theologians who seem to me to be of the Calvinist persuasion are denying that Ordo Amoris is a Christian concept. This struck me as odd since I had thought they’d kept Augustine but ditched Aquinas and while you can find it in Aquinas (e.g., ST II.II q 31) you find it first in Augustine. That’s what the City of God is about after all and is the basis of the Christian, OK Catholic, concept of ordered versus disordered desire, which is the basis of basically everything.

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  6. Gaia got tired of the continual resets her biosphere had to endure from regular asteroid impacts, so she evolved humans to make a technological society to stop that from happening.

    She can’t be happy with recent events.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. And of course they’re spinning her anger as being directed at technology, especially the very technologies that will help protect her from asteroid impacts, rather than at them.

      Hmm. That’d make an interesting premise for a fantasy novel or anthology.

      Liked by 1 person

    2. There’s also this: the geological history of the planet has involved relentless carbon sequestration on an absolutely massive scale. I don’t know if anybody has a handle on the amount as a percentage, but from what I’ve read, most of the carbon that exists on this planet has been converted by various organisms and then been locked away in sedimentary strata by geological processes. We live in the most carbon-poor environment the planet has seen since the dawn of life itself. (Well, maybe not quite; I think atmospheric carbon and general biomass was lowest at the end of the last ice age, but it’s been getting better.)

      And Homo Sapiens is the ONLY species that has ever existed that can *release* carbon in mass amounts for other organisms to use. I prefer to look at humans increasing atmospheric “greenhouse gases” as doing work for God, Gaia, nature, whatever you prefer, to ensure that the biosphere can support a rich abundance of life in future epochs.

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      1. For most of the planet’s existence, the percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere was over 20%. (BTW, there were Ice Ages Bank then, too.)
        Atmospheric CO2 is currently down to a small fraction of a single percent.

        The miles-deep layers of calcium carbonate I’m currently standing on didn’t miracle themselves into existence.

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        1. Yes, they’re moaning doom and gloom because CO2 increased from 0.034% to 0.038%. Why, it might hit 0.04% by 2030! Aaaaaaa! Hair on fire!

          At the height of the Carboniferous, when practically the whole planet was covered with jungles and rainforest, CO2 was 0.06% or more.

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          1. It’s also worth noting that there were times during the Jurassic when it’s believed the ice caps didn’t exist.

            Somehow the dinosaurs didn’t all drown under rising sea levels.

            Liked by 2 people

            1. No. But there were a lot more land under low level sea. Of coarse since then there have been a lot of the same land is now at 10k+ feet due to uplift.

              Definitely not the situation of Water World where dry land was the top of the Himalayan mountains.

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    3. She is not. Like all Planetary Entities she wants the bragging rights that come from evolving an intelligent, technophilic species that can leave the planet, spread through its home solar system and, eventually set up housekeeping in other solar systems. Those stupid greeniots are thwarting her will.

      You do know why she had to get rid of the dinosaurs?

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    4. There is also this: what has been a constant with Earth biosphere ever since its beginning?

      Conquering new areas. From mud puddles or whatever to the ocean, from ocean to every bit of land, and air… more, more more more! More for me!!!

      So… what would make more sense than Gaia wanting to conquer even more? Like maybe more of the solar system? There is that moon right next to it, and then there is Mars, and… why settle for just the solar system when there seem to be other stars with no life of their own?

      So She gets to work and creates a lifeform that can get her seed off just this one planet.

      Goddamn humans, get to work! Do what you are supposed to do or you will be wiped off and She needs to start all over with some other lifeform. Which would be too much trouble, so do what you are damn it supposed to do! NOW!

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  7. Gaiaists should be dumped into South American rain-forests without clothing/supplies to see if their love of Gaia will save them.

    Liked by 2 people

    1. Sounds like the ending of Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six. IIRC, a year later and they were gone. I can’t remember if the perps wanted all humans gone or if they were going to be the feudal lords over a handful of serfs.

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          2. And that bunker was (among other things) perforated with .50 BMG before the Gaians were dropped off.

            I stopped reading Clancy when his novels were getting sharecropped, and donated the older ones to the local library–which promptly shelved them. Excess money & wokeness are not much of a factor in the $TINY_TOWN branch.

            Still, I didn’t consider that several of his novels were going to be inspiration for various bad actors…

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    1. Oh no! You mentioned the “G” word… Geology

      Nothing pisses off a Gaia-ist/grant seeker more than mentioning time periods more than one hundred years.

      Liked by 1 person

      2. SERIOUSLY. Any time I see comments about rising temperatures I start to mutter about accuracy in measurements and geologic timescales.

        Ice cores and tree cores are *decent*, but not within the standard deviation required for accuracy. We’re talking a century at best for those, and I’d hazard it’s maybe half of that, if if if.

        This is what happens when one of your parents is a paleontology nut. (The other one was an engineer.)

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        1. Not only that, their ‘pre-industrial baseline’ temperatures are taken from the 17th – 18th century — smack in the middle of the Little Ice Age. “We’re all doooomed! The climate is warmer than an ice age!”

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          1. No. We are suppose to be in the middle of another mini ice age that humans have prevented because we are responsible for warming the planet.

            Dang it. Eyes have rolled under the couch, again.

            Okay, eyes cleaned and back in place.

            Now. Does anyone here want to live in a mini ice age? When highest outcome will cause the world’s bread basket (US) to not be a bread basket?

            To be clear: Not me.

            They are such idiots!

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            1. Heh. That is what I kept muttering when that little Swedish nimcompoop was having her 15 minutes of fame. Girl had obviously avoided school, or maybe Swedish schools are as lacking in teaching their own near history as Finnish schools already were when I was a child.

              Since she had obviously never heard of the last great famine in her country. That happened due to poor harvest, which happened due to years colder than average. And yes, tail end of the Little Ice Age…

              https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_famine_of_1867%E2%80%931869

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  10. I keep fighting the temptation to suggest Gaia yearns for the past, when she was covered in lush, green jungles and warm, shallow seas, and Man is her instrument to release the CO2 that would return her to that blessed state.

    But Dante says God really does have a special place in Hell for people who promote conflict and schism, so I don’t want to start a religious war. (And I’m not totally joking).

    Liked by 2 people

    1. One thing that does bother me a lot about the argument against fossil fuels is, if our theories are right, all of this carbon used to be living things, yet all of that biomass was sucked into the crust to vanish from the every ecosystem.

      How much life is simply not there because all of its raw materials simply sank below the seas?

      Liked by 1 person

      1. LOL!

        Nature evolved “dense woody cellulose”, then took a couple hundred million years to come up with “can rapidly digest dense woody cellulose”.

        This occurred during a very hothouse earth period, when the whole planet wound up with thick forested swamps. The stuff just piled up for eons, decaying only very slowly. “Carboniferous” indeed. As prior continents collided to form Pangea, vast piles of biomass got turned-under/subducted, to form the now useful coal beds.

        That super-mass pile of wouldnt-compost is what made the unique and huge coal deposits. The stuff didn’t decay much because the really efficient cellulose eaters hadn’t come along yet. The layers were hundreds, even thousands of feet thick to start. The planet was overrun with swamp/forest/bog, pole to pole for much of it, driving oxygen levels high enough to support three foot long dragonflies. The biome collapse at the end was likely the microbugs finally figuring out “yum” and wrecking the eon’s balance. Plus a return to glaciation reducing the biome.

        Meanwhile, heat and pressure for eons, then upheaval and surface exposure. And then monkeyboys learned to play with fire…

        -That- was the gift to human civilization. We still have something like 1000-2000 years of extractable coal at current consumption. And that is after grabbing all the easy surface and near-surface deposits. Humanity could never have industrialized significantly on human-made charcoal. Just too inefficient and time-consuming to pile it up. Never “cheap”. Coal, on the other hand, taught us to seek energy dense and cheap fuels, and how frelling useful they are.

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    2. Earth is roughly 4.6 billion years old, and for about half of that time it remained a mostly sterile rock with water, with a poisonous atmosphere and lethal levels of hard-uv scouring the surface to keep things on that surface completely sterile. Then photosynthetic life in the oceans started pumping oxygen into the atmosphere about 2.3 billion years ago (which caused the “snowball earth” ice age), and that atmospheric oxygen eventually built the ozone layer and shielded the surface from the hard-uv, but it still took another billion and a half years for more complex life to develop. Then came the Cambrian Explosion and things took off from there, ultimately resulting in Facebook.

      If Sentient Earth / Dirt Goddess Gaia were to be nostalgic and pining for the good old days, just based on the 3/4 of the time since the planet stopped receiving the “late heavy bombardment” and cooled from being fully molten that it was free of complex life forms, it would be most likely pining for those calm days of its youth when its pristine rocky continents were cleanly sterile, and it only had minor inconsequential life infections in its oceans.

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      1. Objection: Atmospheric O2 being the driver of the Cryogenian is speculative, and there is circumstantial evidence against the hypothesis.

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      3. Or if nostalgic, maybe just worried. I think I read somewhere that during the Little Ice Age the CO2 levels were actually getting worryingly close to the point where plants would have started to starve to death. As it is they are still not doing all that well, and could use more of CO2.

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  11. Your father and mine would have instantly been friends! My (late and much mourned) Dad was a research biologist, and gave the best nature walks ever! He knew and identified all the plants growing locally, could ID all the little prints left in the dust, several times broke apart owl castings to identify what the owl had eaten. All the wild critters – Dad knew their life cycle, and their place in the ecology.

    I was absolutely thrown, when stationed in Greenland, and wondering about the plants which survived there. Especially the low-growing cover which grew around the rims of every shallow puddle, and put up a white blossom exactly like a fuzzy lollipop all around the outline of those puddles. No one could tell me what kind of plant it might be, since Dad wasn’t there, and this was before the internet …

    Liked by 1 person

        1. The plant that puzzled me may have been Arctic cottongrass – but I noticed that it grew in a neat one-deep pattern exactly around the rims of puddles and standing water. It looked like a regularly-spaced row of white lollipops, not patches like the cottongrass pictures.

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    2. Your father had the right attitude. Some people in my small town spend an inordinate time on their lawns. My straggly grass graduates into creeping Charlie (a low aromatic flowering weed) in the shade, and then to moss under the trees. I share the yard with squirrels and rabbits (that I feed in winter) and until last summer a couple of fairly large harmless snakes. In the house, usually a few spiders, both web-spinners and hunters (I call it biological insect control). And for mice (I draw the line there), I have a furry self-propelled mousetrap. Red in tooth and claw, as it were.

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  12. Any theory which does not accurately describe reality is useless to science.

    Unfortunately, there are those that find unsound, invalid junk theories to be extremely useful in politics.

    A dishonest scientist is a failure and a fraud — but that’s the sort of scientists the government supports.

    ———————————

    Politics perverts science. Scientists are rewarded not for finding and reporting the truth, but for telling those in charge of doling out the money whatever they want to hear. Play the approved tune and you get government grants, you get consulting fees, you get published. Make the wrong waves, and you don’t. Such conditions do not produce good science, or good scientists.

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  13. Pingback: Not quibling, really, I’m not | Dio's Workshop

  14. There is no ideal state for the Earth, other than a perfectly smooth frozen spheroid sinning around a common center with the Moon. Probably take a couple billion more years to get there, and humans as they currently exist won’t likely be there.

    Cameron’s Avatar movies are the worst combination of “The Noble Savage”, “The Sentient Planet”, and the “Evils of Western Culture.” It’s pretty, it makes a gorgeous backdrop for the Hero’s Journey, and it’s dumber that dirt.

    What most of these Gaiaists (is that a word already or can I coin one?) and Ecofreaks fail to comprehend is that humans are what determine value. Without us, there is no value, and preserving ‘nature’, in whatever state it happens to be in, is absolutely meaningless.

    Humans aren’t much different than ants and beavers when it comes to modifying our environment to improve our survival and comfort; we just do it on a scale that’s more noticeable. (Considering the prevalence of ants world-wide, and how much of their modifications go completely unseen by us, their mods may actually surpass our own.) Yet the eco-crowd isn’t screaming to castorate the beavers and diminish the ants, just humans.

    No, this focus on control over human modification of the environment is precisely that, all about control. And not control of the ‘natural’ environment, but control over the human part of the environment. i.e. people. And that’s because they value themselves more than they value the rest of us. This is a fundamental competition for resources, and you and I are the ones who have no value to the Cult of Gaia.

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    1. Do not get me started on the Smurf Movies. There is No Science There.

      Just one, since geology has come up in these comments: How could antigravity rocks ever coalesce into a planet forming from a primordial matter cloud around a star in the first place?

      As rocks and ice bits first started to clump together in the matter disk, any antigravity matter bits would repel themselves away from any aggregations, presumably flinging themselves off towards LaGrange points or other least-gravitationally-curved-spacetime regions. there’s no way it would even arrive at meteors, since as soon as it started to approach it would repel itself into a miss trajectory. Unless matter was transmutated into antigravity-stuff after the planet was formed there’s no way it would ever be on a planet in the first place.

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      1. Which implies one might look for antigravity-rocks moving in odd patterns (“orbits” might not be applicable to antigravity-repulsion-driven movement patterns) around any normal rocks accumulated at LaGrange points in our own solar system.

        And equal-and-opposite, if there’s more of them than regular rocks at the stable L- points, they’d probably repel the regular rocks away, so just looking for odd patterns in observed-vs-predicted orbits around the L- points could be instructive.

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          1. Or the antigrav is some strange daughter isotope of something gravitically normal?

            I think back to the Upsadasium plot of Rocky & Bullwinkle. An anti-gravity is farfetched… but only about 20 years earlier the world found out if you slammed a couple lumps of the just right metal together, it could destroy a city. After that, maybe a floating (in air) metal isn’t so strange? Of course, cartoon and Rule of Funny.

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            1. If I remember the concept correctly, Pandora was a moon that had vast amounts of a naturally occurring, room temperature, super conductor. Set up a magnetic field, and you can get levitation via Meissner effect. Several problems with that being: (1) AFAIK the Meissner effect only works over a few inches, not hundreds of feet. (2) What’s the source of the mag field, current from lightning, or a flux tube from the giant planet Pandora orbits? (3) a mag field of that strength, or electrical current enough to produce that kind of effect is going to produce an environment that at the very least, none of the flying equipment could survive in; and likely wouldn’t be survivable for living organisms either.

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      2. Oh, Dances with Wolves meets Ferngully? Those movies are a joke.

        One of my pet peeves is the biology missteps, the most egregious of which is: If all higher order lifeforms on the planet are hexapedal, then the dominant lifeforms will also be hexapedal, not bipedal.

        I’m not even going to touch the ‘limb we use to control mounts and beasts of burden is also used during sex’.

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        1. “…the ‘limb we use to control mounts and beasts of burden is also used during sex’

          I am also not going to touch that one, especially regarding floor shows in Tijuana involving donkeys.

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    2. The Reader’s vote would be to place the first syringe in Beijing. DC would be next.

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  16. The ideal state for the Earth and everything on it is the set of teachings outlined in the scriptures. But since too many people won’t follow them for now, we make do.

    If the planet is self-aware, I suspect she is in agreement

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  17. The “destroy all humans to protect the Earth” has been part of the enviro movement since at least the 1970s. Granting that it was more subtext than text back then as compared to now, it was nevertheless an inescapable consequence of what was being preached then. Something that Ayn Rand, at least, made clear in the essays collected in The Return of the Primitive (originally The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution). Even then, some were bold enough to opine about wanting a plague to wipe out 99% of humanity. It has, indeed, gotten more overt. But the wish was always there.

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    1. It’s just another gnostic death cult. I really don’t understand where they come from, but they do seem to be always with us,

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      1. If only they’d put their money where their mouths are, and do the “lemming midair dance”, I could have some respect for them.

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      2. This one is easy, trace the leadership and donors back through time

        greenies —> ban the bomb –> peace activists –> us/russia friendship societies –> comintern

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    2. And it was a big enough part of the popular awareness in the late ’80s that Brin had a person like that as his ultimate antagonist in “Earth”. That novel was published in 1990.

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        1. If I remember correctly, it’s got a lot of stuff that would drive the left nuts today –

          Female in-fighting and attempted murder amongst the baboons, with the tacit permission of the alpha male in the pack; an acknowledgement that humanity will always need people like the (now dead) character who joined the military, while also noting that the woman (iirc) in authority who surveyed the scene afterwards generally held the military in contempt; the identity and goal of the ultimate antagonist; and probably more, though it’s been decades since I read the book.

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            1. “Glory Day,” (Glory Year? It’s been a while since ai read it but it stuck with me) has a lot to infuriate the left too, particularly feminists. The super-stable matriarchy, which just happens to be hostile to any form of individuality even among women, for one thing.

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              1. Glory Season. In-story the term refers to the time of year when a substance called glory falls from the sky (IIRC), and triggers the libido of the women on the planet.

                (the humans on the planet have been modified so that the women are particularly interested in sex during the time of year when they conceive clones of themselves, while the men are significantly *less* interested in sex at that time of year)

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          2. So interesting primate fact: In many primate societies, there is massive bullying from the upper status females towards the lower status ones. The goal seems to be to stress them out to the point where they stop ovulating.

            IOW, bullying is an evolutionary legacy designed to reduce offspring of opponents.

            Use that information as you will. I’m kind of fond of the idea of using it to compare the bullies to various primate species, and that they haven’t evolved beyond them.

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            1. In this instance *spoilers for a thirty year-old novel* –

              A man who’s largely been a failure at everything provides to the immediate needs of a pack of baboons that are kept in a large enclosure. I call him a keeper, but he’s ultimately a glorified janitor, making sure that their enclosure stays clean, and the baboons are properly fed. His life up until this point has been a mess, and this is likely the closest he’s come to a fulfilling job. He’s not an animal expert. That title belongs to his superiors.

              The other female baboons are actively trying to murder the victim mother and her infant. She offers it to the keeper, who recognizes the gesture as a plea to protect her and her infant (a single mom he went home with in the past did something similar, though he didn’t understand it at the time). The males in the pack aren’t actively involved in the murder attempt. But they’re also not preventing it. And the alpha male gives the keeper a look that the keeper interprets as an unspoken command to not get involved, or suffer the wrath of the pack.

              I don’t know how accurate it is to real baboon society, though given what I’ve heard about chimpanzees I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s close to accurate. And it goes without saying that it flies against all of the “animals never hurt members of their own species, unlike HUMANS!!1!” nonsense that we hear nowadays.

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              1. 2001: A Space Odyssey. Moon-Watcher’s troop of ape-men get driven from their water-hole by another troop, before the monolith shows up.

                I know, a movie isn’t proof of anything, but it’s based on observations of primate behavior. Most everything we do is an echo of our evolutionary past. Some of us, sometimes, use reason to override those primal instincts.

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  18. I think the leadership of the Environmentalist movement realized that if their constituency can’t talk to anyone, the constituency won’t disobey or leave them when they realize that they shouldn’t be stepping in the leadership…

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  19. Environmentalism

    It’s right there in front of us. It ends in “ism” not “ogy.” Ergo, it is an ideology, not a science.

    Further, as I highlighted, you can’t spell it without “mental.”

    Facts, just facts.

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  20. I just bought an electric commuter bike for multiple reasons:

    1. I’m a couple of months shy of 70; hills are getting more dificult.
    2. The noise and stress of excessive traffic cause serious health issues. Now I can continue to help save the the humans.
    3. I need a way to get to work, stores, and doctor’s offices when government regulations try to force me into a 4-ton, $200,000 electric car. And that’s the entry-level model, costing only $1000/month to insure .

    I’m saving my environment and that of my neighbors.

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