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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (21739)	5/18/1998 2:34:00 PM
From: Skipper	Respond to of 108807

X, Except I don't think it is a good idea to proceed to spoil the earth, not at all! But I can't possibly understand all the tradeoffs that are being made, by millions of people, in thousands of industries, everyday. I do know about the tradeoffs that I'm making in my daily life, that all of us are making, and are unwilling to give up. And in the process I can see that the earth is being spoiled, and will continue to be spoiled. I do not wish it, any more than I wish for death, but there it is! I do not think we have a choice. If we stay here we will spoil it beyond it's abilty to support us, and beyond our ability to leave it at that point. We can no more prevent the earth from being used up than we could have prevented the Europeans from leaving the old world to colonize the new, because billions of individuals will make billions of individual decisions to make their lives easier and better, in the short term. I believe that our best hope for space colonization to actually occur is the discovery of - you guessed it - a profit motive. That's what our forebears had when they came here. What they did was not inherently wrong, though there certainly were numerous cases of excess, which are easy to see in hindsight, and about which they may have been expected to have more foresight, such as the time when they cut down that beautiful old tree in Calaveras. Skipper

To: epicure who wrote (21739)	5/18/1998 3:20:00 PM
From: Skipper	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

X, Maybe it would help to give an example of why I am so sure that the earth will continue to be spoiled. Remember (well maybe you won't - I'm a little older) the commercials that were run back in the '60s with the Indian looking out across a despoiled country, with a tear running down his cheek, encouraging people to "Keep America Beautiful"? It was then that I realized how easy it is to not litter, to just hold onto a piece of trash until I found a trash can. Well, to drive around the Bay Area, let alone a Third World city like we can see in National Geographic, it is painfully obvious how even this simplest effort is still not made by vast numbers of people. And we are not even talking about eliminating trash - just putting it in one place! Skipper