Carlin captures a profound truth: Nature just doesn't care one way or the other. If we screw ourselves up, tango sierra. If we spread out into the universe, bearing earth life with us, we don't win any brownie points, either.
Gaia isn't self aware, and doesn't have opinions.
(And plastics will go away in geologically short times, anyway.)
Damn that was good, thanks JP.
He articulates damn near everthing I have ever posted on AGW, here and elsewhere over the years.
"It doesn't punish, it doesn't reward, it doesn't judge at all, it just is....."
A very basic truth.
Unfortunately it is people that are the problem, with their various forms of superstition replete with heaven/hell, reward/punishment dialectics, steered by Fearless Leaders who have tapped into a higher understanding of the Order of the Universe. When all it ever is is people taking their existential fears and inverting them outward against everyone else.
Poised in between collectives of people who thought if they built a lever and folcrum big enough they could move the earth (arrogance) to other end of the spectrum those who see man as a disease and a scourge (self haters) are people of simple common sense. This is a value-neutral chaotic maelstrom we exist in, so large in scope (both space and time) and we exist within realtive stability in an infinitesemal portion of it.
Out of this reality we are born and we make our way. We know our blink of an eye existence will soon be over. We are simultaneously insignificant in the grand cosmos and yet perfectly sovereign as individuals (for a while). It seems a majority of people can't accept this and must superimpose some Higher Meaning to the whole thing, themselves perched at the top as Philosopher King of course. And so people are enslaved to build pyramids and autobahns and other great wonders, or people are enslaved to be quarantined from harming Mother Earth. Either way there is some conception, the Volk or Gaia or whatever, that the individual must subsume themselves.
I'm not a nihilist and I have no problem with man using his intellect in making as best a world as he can, and understanding that collective efforts are necessary to make incrementally greater gains than individuals could possibly do singly. But they are ephemeral and unlastings. And it's simply a matter of doing all these things voluntarily and without force. The problems begin when anyone believes that they have some great universal understanding of this chaos, and they are building something everlasting, that they get to use force against people to maintain this figmentary order that they have made out their own heads.
Any greater order than individuals (having life thrust upon them) trying to carve out an existence from the resources at hand, working voluntarily together along the way, abandoning each other as well, and possessing articles they have made in attempt to stave of the inevitbilities of life, just isn't real. That is why so much broadcast force is necessary to bring people to heel in the first place. We have reached a point where people acting self interestedly and peacefully is unacceptable. Our States are now made up nearly exclusively of people with collectivist agendas in which force is the unquestioned catalyst for everlasting progress. It's not a system that protects the peaceful and productive, it is a system that consumes the peaceful and productive for its own fantastical ends.
I am sorry to be a party-pooper, but Carlin is actually playing into the Greens' hands. Most regular people couldn't give a damn about Gaia or the spotted owl, what they are worried about is, as Carlin (incidentally?) puts it, that it is we humans who are in fact the extinct species, and that it is our own fault. They are correct, of course, only problem is that the Greens are selling them the wrong reasons for this future extinction, and the majority are actually buying them. If you listen carefully to Carlin's "rant"*, all he is doing is reinforcing this agenda.
*It is anything but. Carlin's act always struck me as well thought-out to the point of feeling staged.
Have to correct myself there: the reasons are not necessarily always wrong, but the proposed solutions always are.
meh, i don' think thats all right alisa. carlin is clearly concerned with the destruction of the environment, but he also is concerned with the destruction that could be wrought by arrogant behavior, over-estimating one's abilities, and ignorant do-gooderism - all of which are within the aim of Mr. Pearce's general ideas and reasons for the post (at least, i think so, given the intellectual foundation of this blog. i could be wrong).
carlin is cutting both ways and in my estimation correct on both accounts.
Maybe you are right. My problem with this (beside Carlin not being all that funny) is his ultimate 'we are doomed no matter what we do' message. This goes against most people's sensibilities: we must do something, anything, and if we are really doomed, then what have we got to lose by trying to become more 'natural'?