Wing Ah Ling, in response to your original questions of 25 Jan:

I’ve answered 1 & 2.

3. “…who is to decide what human life is to be sacrificed to the value of conservation, and how?”

What aaare you on about? NO human life is to be sacrificed. Any ‘greenie’ that advocates cutting off essential resources that will lead to people dying is not a person I want to be associated with. Why do you assume that those who advocate silly end-of-the-spectrum things are speaking for whole conservation movement or representing the cause of sustainability? They’re not. This is a major flaw in your reasoning Wing. Unfortunately, in my experience, very few greenies or environmentalists are true sustainabilityists.

4. There are six questions under this one point!

“How is future value to be accounted relative to current value?” I presume you are referring to the value of resources. We can’t meaningfully compare future value to current value for non-renewable resources or potentially renewable resources that are being consumed too fast. All we can say is that they will have greater value as they become scarcer and the demand for them increases. If they become scarcer but the demand drops, due to alternatives becoming widely used, then their value may indeed fall. Or if the demand drops due to population stabilisation or reduction and/or improved efficiency and/or greater frugality, to the point that some currently overharvested resources become renewable and hence ongoing, then their value will not change that much.

“Is a person expected to deny food to their baby now, so as to leave enough for a hypothetical human being stranger in ten million years time?”

Of course not. But we should be expecting people worldwide to have fewer babies.

“If yes, then why permit any resource use at all? If not, then how is the fair amount to be calculated?”

continued

Wing Ah Ling wrote, "The assumption that we can improve our capacity to do this by using government, is simply false."

"Government does not bring superior knowledge, or moral virtue, or capacity to solve the problem: it brings a much more limited knowledge set, and only a greater concentration of power, of force. But that can’t solve the problem.

" etc. etc. etc"

This is all anti-democratic neo-liberal ideological dogma. What Wing Ah Ling is telling us is that we can't possibly arrive at a solution to the problems by using our collective intelligence through democratically elected and accountable political representatives.

Rather, everything has to be left to 'the market', that is, greedy private corporations.

I don't know what planet Wing Ah Ling has been on for the last five months, but if he had been on planet Earth, he would have surely noticed the total shambles and the economic meltdown caused precisely by what he is peddling as the solution to all of our problems, this the winding back of Government controls over the financial sector since the days of Ronald Reagan.

---

Wing Ah Ling wrote, "This is critical. My opponents do not even recognize the issue, or understand the argument."

Well I sure do and it's been shot down in flames by, amongst others Naomi Klein in "The Shock Doctrine" of 2007.

Her work shows conclusive that the claptrap that Wing Ah Ling is peddling above was just an ideological smokescreen to allow corporate thieves to steal publicly owned wealth and and money from the poor ever since Pinochet with the support of neo-liberal advisors, from Milton Friedman's Chicago School of Economics, seized power in Chile in 1973.

It's a sinister, sociopathic and anti-democratic belief system and has been rejected out of hand by every thinking decent person around today.

continued from my last post…

Everyone should be entitled to access the resources needed to raise a healthy child and to have a decent quality of life. No calculations are needed, just the general philosophy of stemming the ever-increasing pressure that humanity is exerting on the global environment and resource base.

“If by total government power, how is it to be stopped from degenerating into ecological and economic disaster [?] If by partial government power, how is that any improvement on the original problem?”

I’m really having to guess what you’re driving at here. You’ve come up with the quite ludicrous notion that in order to achieve sustainability, we have to start cutting off basic resources to some people to the point of starving them. Then you’ve pondered on how much resource restriction is needed to preserve resources for the future, and how we calculate this. Then you’ve pondered on just how these restrictions could be implemented. Is this somewhere near your line of thinking Wing?

You’re building your whole argument upon a totally whacky premise.

5. “In calculating it, what value are we to give future resource use, future human happiness?”

See above answer to question 3 under point 4.

6. “Seriously, why don't the sustainability school just kill themselves?”

And it is at this point that I feel that I am totally wasting my time in responding to you. Seriously, this statement just destroys any credibility that you might have had.

“They think there are too many humans, and some or all resource use is unwise or immoral. Well?”

I certainly do think that there are too many humans and that some resource use is unwise and downright immoral. And you have a problem with this! Dear oh dear!

”Who is “They”? Who are you referring to? What is your ‘sustainability school’?

“What makes them think that any amount of resource use is reasonable? But if it is, then how are you to judge which particular human action is okay, and which is not? How is that any improvement to on the original problem?”

You are repeating yourself.

Fungo -

You say "I find sustainability as it is generally used to be a hollow, unhelpful and fallible concept."

Wikipedia has the following: "In 1989, the Brundtland Commission articulated what has now become a widely accepted definition of sustainability: "[to meet] the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

I'm not sure what you mean by "sustainability as it is generally used." I think of the Bruntland Commission definition as the way sustainability is generally used.

Do you think that we should do things now that compromise the ability of future generations to meet their own needs?

ericc, I'm afraid I don't have the time or space here to elaborate on my views around such a complex question. The point I was merely trying to make was that the question of ecological ruin and "unsustainability" is debatable and debated, and I find it astounding that someone could find it inconceivable that anyone could even question the concept. This smacks of fundamentalism to me. Perhaps I could ask you and Ludwig which particular "future generations" you have in mind given views on population control? How would say the absolute survival needs of 10 million currently living humans be valued against some other less urgent need of 1 million future people?

Daggett: is that the best you can do? Wipe the spittle from your chin man.

Obviously if you get your understanding of the philosophy and economics of liberty from Naomi Klein, you won't understand what you are talking about on the topic.

You are failing to understand the issues. Governments are also corporations. They have all the same problems of greed as other corporations, with none of the redeeming features.

Ludwig
By 'sustainability school' I meant to refer to anyone, including you, who argues for political action on the ground of the value of sustainability. When I say implicit in the argument, I mean implicit in the argument of anyone urging political action on that ground.

Your entire approach is to assume what is in issue. This is logically fallacious. It is religious faith that is immune against rational disproof. No matter how much it is disproved, the belief system just keeps popping up again, as if self-proving.

Your premise is that our current lifestyle is 'grossly unsustainable'. But you don't seem to understand that:
- that fact is itself in issue, and it is not proved by merely insisting on it
- you do not have knowledge of the resources, technology, human values, and all the relevant potentialities to know that the time-frame means any problem is imminent – it could be millions of years away; you have not proved otherwise
- 'we' (the human population) is not a decision-making entity; putting the onus of proof on others effectively asks them to justify their existence, and their liberty, to you on pain of imprisonment so you can have a fret about something that you haven’t shown is even a problem in the first place.
- the state is not society, and vice versa
- political or governmental action necessarily means forcibly stopping productive activity
- human life depends on much of the productive activity that the sustainability school wants to stop,
- rationalisation of the conflict over the different possible uses of resources is required if the issues are not to be decided by arbitrary power and brute force