Dear davidf,

Very cheeky. I'm having my chain pulled but am happy to play.

Your daughter seems to be a very principled person and if she were mine I would also be proud.

But an Alpha from Brave New World? Really? My good fellow, have we read the same book?

So the men and women who assembled her car, built her home, paved the road out the front, collected her garbage etc are her Deltas and Epsilons? In Huxley's novel and indeed our own society the Alphas could only live the lives they did off the backs of the lowers castes. I'm wondering if you have seen the Hunger Games yet? Donald Sutherland plays an excellent Alpha.

By the way BNW was my introduction to the Greek alphabet (very non-classical education I'm afraid). I had wondered aloud in class why on earth Huxley placed 'Gamma' between Alpha, Beta and Delta , Epsilon. Oops. Why do embarrassing moments remain so vivid?

Let's park a discussion of Fascism for the moment.

By growing her own foodstuffs your daughter certainly would be limiting her energy footprint yet I would venture to guess it would be many times that of the typical African woman for instance.

The defining parameter of wealth in this word is the access to, and affordability of, energy. There is a direct and irrefutable relationship between the two. Most the energy consumed in the Western world comes from non-renewable fossil fuels.

Your lines;

“Educated people have more internal resources to fill their lives than less educated people.”

“Those with greater inner resources aren’t generally as dependent on material goods for their fulfilment.”

Might just as easily read those who are more educated have better jobs and need to spend less time on securing the material goods that we all are dependent on to achieve a certain quality of life.

I'm not sure it is seemly for you or I or indeed our daughters, from our privileged positions, to be ever critical of the striving for that quality of life by those less fortunate than ourselves.

thanks for that correction Csteele. So abortion is people acting like animals. I should really thought of that. Thankfully we have a conscience and know its wrong unlike the animals you mention.

My dear runner,

Lol. So there is no keeping a so called 'Good man' down huh?

It may have escaped you but each example I gave was of the male interfering with the female's reproductive rights. Isn't that exactly what you are doing? By your logic I could regard you and your ilk as animals.

Well certainly those bombing clinics are, the question is are you?

Perhaps that might be explored in a thread about abortion which this clearly is not.

Dear csteele,

I am embarrassed by the post I wrote. Of course my daughter’s carbon footprint is much greater than that of the typical African woman. Part of our large carbon footprint is due to the fact that we live in an energy wasteful society. My daughter would not care to live in the neighbourhood where the culturally deprived children she works with live. Actually she might be willing to if she were single, but she isn’t. She probably has a much smaller energy footprint than most people with her education, but it is certainly much greater than that of a subsistence farmer with no electricity or plumbing.

The energy footprint of a person on welfare in our society is much greater than that of such a subsistence farmer. Much of our carbon footprint is not dependent on our individual actions. In order to cut down on our carbon footprints government and business must make decisions with that goal in view.

Outside of a time living in New York City slums and my time in the army during WW2 I have never lived in any but pleasant conditions. However, I have never been critical of the striving for quality of life by those less fortunate than ourselves.

I still think that those who are educated to take pleasure in less costly pursuits consume less than those with the same income who do not have those inner resources.

Modern industrial agriculture has been described as the process of using land to turn oil into food. The decision makers in our society do not take into account what will happen as oil and other commodities on which we base our standard of living become more and more scarce and expensive. Business is mainly concerned with short term earnings and government is mainly concerned with the next election.

Too many people are struggling for too few resources. Those struggles have already affected the African subsistence farmer in Somalia and similar places, and my descendents will not have the immunity from those struggles I have had during most of my life

*We can still try to leave simpler lives which consume fewer resources.*

We can indeed David f, but we also have to separate what is more
like feelgood from what matters. I've had this debate with Squeers,
a number of times. Squeers goes on about consumption, yet he has
6 children. Now it does not matter how many times Squeers pedals to
work, it is insignificant in comparison to what his 6 children and
their children will consume.

David f please tell me just what you mean by "culturally deprived children". Are you talking about some kid in a New York ghetto, who has the whole world within reach, if they choose, or a kid on a Pacific atoll, with a population of 200, who will rarely if ever see other human beings.

Sounds like a lot of self congratulation, all this talk of do gooding. If it makes you feel good to muck around with a particular type of youth, great, but please, not so much grandstanding with it.

Perhaps if it were not described so grandly it would sound a bit less like pompous BS, just like all this rubbish about carbon foot print. If you stopped giving your self, & your daughter such airs, you might sound less full of your self.

I get so sick of all this self indulgent talk of an individuals carbon footprint. By the time the Prius driver has shouldered his share of the societies use of resources, the difference between it & a nice V8 Cadillac is so small as to be insignificant.

Not that it matters of course. If our society had not developed all of modern medicine, transport, & food production, most would still fail to achieve 35 years of life. Now I think that the improvement in quality of life is a good thing, & carbon foot print be damned.