Letter to the Editor

My letter to the editor was printed in this weeks edition of The Spooner Advocate. Looking at it now I don't know if I like it. This seems to happen with almost everything I write.

Lately my letters have been focused on laying out reasons why people resist this culture and why they are working for a better world to live in. People doing this work are criticized just for simply doing the work. It's crazy. Anyway, I'll post the letter below.

New Ideas


I have a few questions about this statement in last week’s article titled “Not so cool” by James Lewis “Man-made global warming is again presented as settled science…” When have scientists ever sat down and agreed on anything? Am I hearing you say that citizens and their governments should do nothing about global warming until science settles the matter?

When wondering about those questions one only needs to turn the famous German physicist Max Planck. He had this to say about new and important ideas in science: “An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over its opponents…what does happen is that its opponents gradually die out and that the growing generation is familiarized with the idea from the beginning.”

Mr. Lewis stated in his letter that 30,000 scientists at the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine have all agreed “man-made global warming is speculative at best and flatly wrong at worst.” Of course, on the other side of the spectrum, there are many scientists that say the planet will continue to warm no matter what we do. We have exceeded the global warming tipping point, and in the near future we’ll be facing a sudden biological die off. Which of course means that we will suffer the same fate as the dinosaurs: extinction. The story of Homo sapien will be over. Time will tell which group of scientists hits closer to the mark.

I do know this though. If anyone would have written into this paper 60 years ago and said we might be facing extinction they most likely would have been laughed at. This isn’t the case nowadays. This alone is an indicator to me that not only scientists are starting to realize that we cannot continue to do what we are doing to this planet and not suffer the consequences, but so are common folk. So I don’t know if I would be so quick to label folks concerned about global warming as “alarmists”. I’d lean more towards viewing them sort of the way Planck viewed scientists with new ideas: a growing generation of people genuinely concerned about our future as a species on this planet. This new generation has been gaining steam since Rachel Carson published “Silent Spring” back in 1962, and they’re using the tools that are available to them (legislation being one of them) to make sure future generations have a planet to live on.

Time will tell if we can legislate ourselves to sustainability. Personally, I think it’s going too take much more then that.

Public Radio and Global Warming

Thank you for your comments about my letter in my last post, Willem and Sonny.

This morning I called into another show on WPR (Wisconsin Public Radio) about global warming. This time the guest was Joel Rogers from the Apollo Alliance. What he basically was saying is that we can have a sustainable civilization, system of capitalism, and so on. He has an article in this months issue of The Nation Magazine talking about that.

I think it was in his book Welcome to the Machine where Derrick Jensen talks about how no government is capable of taming and controling the megamachine. Anyway, I called in and said that basically what the guest is proposing is impossible. Because any system that takes more from the landbase than it gives back is inherently unsustainable, therefore civilization has always been and always will be unsustainable. And I also said that since civilization has always been based on slavery, and the wage slavery that is a part of capitalism can never be fair or just.

Well, he started off his response saying he didn't agree with my premises. The rest of the response is what most of us have probably heard hundreds of times already, " there are many benefits to civilization. With the right restraints and management we can have our cake and eat it too, and so on. Of course, the response was more indepth. I just can't remember all of it right now.

I often wonder when guests are asked questions similar to the one I asked that after show they actually let them percolate into their conscious?

"In order for us to maintain our way of living, we must, in a broad sense, tell lies to each other, and especially to ourselves. It is not necessary that the lies be particularly believable. The lies act as barriers to truth. These barriers to truth are necessary because without them many deplorable acts would become impossibilities. Truth must at all costs be avoided. When we do allow self-evident truths to percolate past our defenses and into our consciousness, they are treated like so many hand grenades rolling across the dance floor of an improbably macabre party. We try to stay out of harm’s way, afraid they will go off, shatter our delusions, and leave us exposed to what we have done to the world and to ourselves, exposed as the hollow people we have become. And so we avoid these truths, these self-evident truths, and continue the dance of world destruction". D. Jensen

You can listen to my question if you click HERE. The program is fairly easy to find on the archive list. It would be Joy Cardin's March 28th show at 6:00 AM. My question is about 35 minutes into the program, just after WPR's middle of the show newsbreak.