Dear Hasbeen,

You wrote: “Every action of organisations like Friends of the Earth and the Sierra Club, lead by activists with no understanding of anything, leads to such unanticipated consequences. Yes they are a damn sight more dangerous to nature & wild life than any logger, due to their simplistic emotive approach to every thing they touch.

They have yet to show they have ever thought through their emotive actions to their quite obvious, to any thinking person, conclusions. To call them, idiots is to insult every village idiot who has ever trod the earth.”

In that you are totally wrong. The Australian Democrats of which I was a proud member listened to the advice of knowledgeable people and based their activism on both feeling and scientific advice. To the best of my knowledge the Australian Democrats are the only Australian political party which has actually been led by a scientist, John Coulter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Coulter_(politician)

Dr John Richard Coulter (born 3 December 1930) is an Australian medical researcher and former politician. He was the fourth elected parliamentary Senate leader of the Australian Democrats, serving from 2 October 1991 to 29 April 1993. His understanding of conservation and environment principles was exceptional for the time…

The founder of the Sierra Club was John Muir. Muir was an influential Scottish-American naturalist, author, environmental philosopher, botanist, zoologist, glaciologist, and early advocate for the preservation of wilderness in the United States of America.

If the political parties of Australia were led by people as knowledgeable as John Coulter and John Muir rather than humpty-dumptys like Barnaby Joyce we would be much better off.

Instead of accusing groups that you know nothing about of ‘no understanding of anything’ and a ‘simplistic emotive approach’ you might find out what they are really like.

Hi David, thanks for an interesting topic. The idea that indigenous people could live in harmonic balance with their environment. There are notable exceptions, by generally without applying population pressure, or the over exploitation of their environment through technology and over demand indigenous people survived rather well. My wife tells me as a child, when they went to the sea shore to gather kai (food), both her mother and father would stress, not to gather too much, only what they needed, leave some for others etc.

ttbn, can you explain your comments; "People are not animals. Only a Green would believe such nonsense" then this; "There are too many people, particularly of the Green sort, who think that animals are equivalent to human beings."

Bazz,
>Aiden, you MUST have seen the reports on the enquiry into the bushfires.
>They were quite conclusive that AGW had nothing to do with it.

Which reports are you referring to? It certainly can't be the NSW one, which states on page iv:
"Climate change as a result of increased greenhouse gas emissions clearly played a role in the conditions that led up to the fires and in the unrelenting conditions that supported the fires to spread, but climate change does not explain everything that happened."

Interestingly I can appreciate both David F and Hasbeen's perspective here.

Not everyone knows about Friend's of the Earth and... so perhaps comparing them to the Green's Movement at large is reasonable. The Green's Political Party appears to be influenced by Communism who are well known for using emotion as one of its propaganda tactics- Institute of Propaganda Analysis 1937.

Engineers and business people- perhaps see logging as satisfying a necessary population need and sees the logging industry as not to blame for the population problem.

There was recent controversy about fires ostensibly due to the failure of clearing of underbrush from around towns as a contributing factor.

Interesting point about the wood chips being substituted for coal because of population energy demand growth.

Population growth- means energy demand growth- means employment demand growth- means more damage to the environment.

The different positions seem to be related to supply vs demand side activity. Patrick Deneen talks about this aspect of the Left and Right Liberal roots being of the same cause- essentially John Locke's Man in Nature along with John Stuart Mill's conception of freedom.

Locke's theory of mind is often cited as the origin of modern conceptions of identity and the self, figuring prominently in the work of later philosophers such as Rousseau, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant. Locke was the first to define the self through a continuity of consciousness. He postulated that, at birth, the mind was a blank slate, or tabula rasa. Contrary to Cartesian philosophy based on pre-existing concepts, he maintained that we are born without innate ideas, and that knowledge is instead determined only by experience derived from sense perception, a concept now known as empiricism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Locke

The ideas of Locke perhaps creates the impression that the self is the preeminent value without constraint.

Dear Hasbeen,

To think of forest as only a timber resource is to limit our understanding of it. Loggers may consider it as a renewable resource. However, that only concerns the regrowth of timber. The forest is also a home for both flora and fauna which may be destroyed by the act of logging. Trees may grow again, but the species that depend on them may disappear. Some areas should just be left wild. Forest fires are part of a natural cycle. Some plants will not reproduce if their seeds are not subjected to heat. Just as it is unwise to build houses on a flood plain houses should not be built in the middle of a forest.

Dear Canem Malum,

There is reason to think the mind is not a tabula rasa at birth. A baby regardless how old knows what to do when a nipple is presented to it. Children in general do not need to be taught grammar. They instinctively speak correctly.

Kant writes of our a priori knowledge, that which we have built in. We add to this knowledge from experience. Empiricism is a concept which has largely been abandoned as it alone is limited as an explanation of knowledge.

Humans are social animals. Considering the self alone yields a limited knowledge of our humanity. During medieval times some thought the original language of humans was Hebrew.

https://charlesasullivan.com/3965/hebrew-and-the-first-language-of-mankind/

We really don't know that there was a original language. It seems more probable to me that different groups of humans developed different languages which are lost in the mists of antiquity.

Aiden, perhaps we should redefine the argument.
The popular greenie argument is that the bushfires are the result of
global warming. However reading the Commonwealth report it seems to
place more emphasis on the marginal effects of global warming.
It talks about average temperatures and drier fuel.
However interestingly temperatures at the time of older fires were
higher for the Black Friday fire in Victoria and in the late 19th
century.
The temperatures during the fires was not all that remarkable so it
hard to see how such a fuss could be made of blaming global warming.
Those of course were spot measurements and not averages.
The ABC made quite a meal of the fires and AGW.
The original report to which I was referring was a report by a
forestry scientific organisation whose name I do not remember.
No matter the fires were not that far removed from previous
experiences we have had of bushfires.