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Pastimes : Saving the Alaska Wildlife Refuge (ANWR: People’s version) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Marty Rubin who wrote (26)	5/27/2001 9:15:37 PM
From: average joe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 36

"Saving the Alaska Wildlife Refuge" do you believe that drilling for oil means that wildlife refuge is lost forever? Drilling takes place from production platforms with minimal environmental impact. It's not a problem. The oil affords a standard of living for those in the south and I'm sure, unless you live in a cave, you don't want to give up. The only thing that will drive new industry to create new energy solutions is a high price of oil. That is taking place right now. To step in and try and control that process would fail the system that we live under called capitalism. It's great to tweak the system but to tweak it so hard the entire thing collapses has almost already happened. Can you imagine if Gore would have been elected how high the price of oil would be right now!

To: Marty Rubin who wrote (26)	5/28/2001 6:44:03 PM
From: John Lacelle	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 36

Marty, Last night I spent some time in a hot spring with several environmental activists. I think the group was called "Global Outreach" or something like that. Anyway, my conclusion after an hour of discussion is that in fact, the tree huggers are right. The problem is though, the last time we had true tree huggers was 2,000 years ago with Druids and other Pagans that worshiped groves of trees. I would like to think that we could live within minimal impact like those people did, live in small communities, and give offerings to the Gods of the lakes and trees and such. However, in those days the human race was perhaps less than 100 million people. Humans had an impact on the environment, but for the most part it wasn't really too horrendous, save for perhaps the extinction of many unusual animals like mammoths and sloths which made for good eats for early Americans. However, you must fast forward to now: Homo sapiens is now over 6 Billion strong, and growing larger every day. Those humans want cars, houses, toilets that flush, and yummy things on their plates like shrimp, salmon, t-bones, etc. You (and all your granola munching friends) are completely missing the point that without modern agriculture, fossil energy sources, dams, clearcuts, and nuclear power plants, the human race would starve to death. We are indeed, stuck between a rock and a hard place. There are no easy solutions. But I can tell you (and whoever else might read this) that before we even begin to worry about the caribou in ANWR, you dam well better start thinking about how we can slow down, and eventually reduce the human birth rate. -John