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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (63618)	5/5/2008 7:10:37 PM
From: Sam	Respond to of 542132

It seems to me that, if you buy into the predictions, it could hardly be anything else than one's one and only priority. True enough. My "hair is on fire," as Joe Romm put it in his book, Hell and High Water. If you are looking at catastrophe, the end of life as we know it, moderation is no virtue. That all depends on what is meant by "moderation." I have studied a great of Aristotle, and after you study and talk and write about him enough, you eventually realize that "moderation" is, like many seemingly "hard" terms, quite relative to cultures, situations and actors. I do my best simply by encouraging people to read some of the essays and books I have read. If enough of us read them, we can change the world as our own consciousness is changed. Or the world will change without us. Which is, unhappily, far more likely to happen, since humans always confuse their own purposes with reality. Ask anyone who has had a spouse with high blood pressure or cholestoral and never changed their diet or, e.g., stopped smoking, only to die a very premature death from organ failure, a heart attack or a stroke.

To: Lane3 who wrote (63618)	5/5/2008 7:20:27 PM
From: Mary Cluney	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542132

<<<If we are looking at catastrophe, the end of life as we know it, maybe even the end of humanity, moderation is no virtue. >>> The margin for error as to when it all ends could be anywhere from several decades to thousands (or tens of thousand) years. In cosmic terms, that is a blink of an eye. But from what I understand Al Gore is saying, there is an eminent tipping point where the damage becomes irreversable. That doesn't necessarily mean life ends immediately after reaching the tipping point. It just means there is a tipping point and that tipping could be approaching. Even if this is true, there are and will be a lot people not giving a darn as long as the end is not in their life time. Personally, I don't think I will be contributing to fighting GW, but I am not going to discourage those people that feel the calling to do something about it.