Slashdot Mirror
'Peak Wood' Offers Parallels For Our Time
Harperdog sends in a piece from Miller McCune looking back at the history of mankind's relationship with virgin timber. Again and again, civilizations have faced a condition of "peak wood," and how they handled it (or failed to) illuminates the current situation with regard to oil. The piece ends with a quote from the 19th-century social scientist and communist theorist Friedrich Engels, who is not generally thought of as an environmental seer: "What did the Spanish planters in Cuba, who burned down the forests on the slopes of the mountains and obtained sufficient fertilizer from the ashes for one generation of highly profitable coffee trees, care that the heavy tropical rains later washed away the now unprotected upper stratum of the soil and left only bare rock behind? ... Let us not flatter ourselves on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel the first."
Legalize Hemp and you get huge amounts of hemp oil and plastics from hemp oil.
Until we legalize Hemp, we are not really being serious.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
A gas tax (I know taboo) or a coal tax (another taboo) directly taxes the resource that is already scarce and allows the consumer to feel its actual long term costs.
You seem to have gotten the idea that we shouldnt use this stuff, that we should in fact instill financial penalties for using it.
Nothing has benefited mankind more than fossil fuels, and nothing has hurt mankind more than poverty. You don't (or at least didn't) know it, but you are an evil person. You recommend that we harm mankind, and for what?
"His name was James Damore."
The whole "I am powerless" mantra is simply pathetic.
If you're not powerless then why isn't Bob Barr President (or whoever you favor)? You're simply fooling yourself. Bill Gates isn't powerless, Barack Obama isn't powerless, but YOU are powerless and since you can't realize that fact, you're pathetically blind to reality as well.
Free Martian Whores!