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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: White Bear who wrote (8678)	5/18/2006 11:12:15 AM
From: ManyMoose	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

Thanks very much for posting that link. greenspirit.com I almost tuned the guy out when he talked about some of his early environmentalist activity, but I read on and I realize that he has seen the light. I particularly like the following passage: The sight of large bales of freshly mown hay placed evenly across a farm field is attractive to our eye in the late afternoon sun. The light and form of the hay bales is pretty to us, we tend to judge landscapes by how good a postcard they would make. The bales of hay are actually just large lumps of dead cellulose laying on a deforested piece of land. There is a very little biodiversity in a hayfield, yet it will more often catch the eye than surrounding forest land where biodiversity is high. The same is true of the sight of a field of flowers in bloom. The bold, beautiful colors of a monoculture tulip plantation, sprayed regularly with pesticides to keep the petals perfect for the florist's shop, are attractive to our eye. We hardly notice the gray-green monotone of the native forest nearby, containing tens of species of native trees, hundreds of species of native birds, insects, animals and plants. We need to give the public a new pair of eyes with which to see the landscape, to get beyond the immediate visual impression and to understand a little more about science, ecology, and biodiversity. This is perhaps the single most important task for the forest industry. The lesson is not a difficult one, but it is not intuitively obvious to people. They simply tend to judge the health of the environment with the same eyes they use to judge the aesthetics of the land. If a person strongly believes that forestry is bad because it is ugly, no amount of technical and scientific information will cause them to change their mind. First they must understand that the look of the land is not sufficient, in itself, to make judgments about ecology.