Ah, Pericles <<If you can even hint at a way in which your world of innocence and abundance can be reached, I'll be the first to applaud.>>
Of course the clock cant be turned back- especially to a time that has existed only in the collective imagination. Anyway human nature was never suited to paradise. I just think it's a pity to go on the way we're going, more and more people in larger and larger cities until we run out of everything. Then what?
Objectively, it doesn't matter in the least. We'll just be one of the shortest lived species in the history of the planet and I won't be here to see it, but it still seems a shame to defecate in one's living room.

"there are disturbing parallels between the Australian Greens and the Dooms Day Cult of the USA" Really? Australia should do nothing until some other country does it first? Like a carbon tax. Australia has a proud history of doing some things. Do you still oppose votes for women, widows pensions child payments, Australia was a pioneering country with many social reforms. The Sydney Harbor Bridge was a waste of money and the Vietnam War was a necessity according to conservatives at the time. History has a funny way of continually proving these people wrong.

Paul 1405,

Add this to your list of firsts: the first nation bankrupted by a carbon tax.

There’s an old Roman saying: S/he who is fixated on diving in first, will quickly find that the head is a poor battering ram.
http://tinyurl.com/7m98gfd

A disturbing analogy, ybgirp.

>>...it still seems a shame to defecate in one's living room.<<

One that is very difficult to expand upon without becoming somewhat distasteful.

So let me put it this way.

If one was the only person using the living room, you would be quite correct in suggesting that it would be a shame - the expression "fouling one's nest" also springs to mind.

But it isn't our own personal living room, is it? It is just a corner of a very large, errr, community hall, in which a very large number of people are already, umm, conducting their business. These people do not, and will not, respond to your cries of "cease and desist", without some form of alternative accommodation for their, aaah, waste products.

So I ask again, without hope of a response: what would you have us do? Practical, implementable policies, as opposed to pious hopes and wishes to return to a different period of history.