On Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 11:16 PM, SS <back2scool...@hotmail.com> wrote: >At the end of the day we are having no more effect on the earth than anything else.
That statement, I feel, is important enough to reply to. Some of the others are interesting but can wait till I have more time. Yes, we are all a part of nature--even our man-made objects. But we, as human beings building dams, diverting rivers, cutting down rain forests, strip mining the surface, polluting ground water, and, subsequently wiping out many species of plants and animals (yes, something which also happens without our help) can not be considered as "having no more effect on the earth than anything else." Our Earth and it's atmosphere are parts of a (mostly & practically) closed system. Space dust and junk do regularly find their way in, sometimes catastrophically, but that is outside the scope of us being responsible for our own actions--for us being accountable, because we, as human beings, can and do have a significant influence on the chemical composition of the air and water and the soil itself, through our machinations. If you want to pretend that that is not true I would suggest that you find another closed environment--say your living room--and run a hose from your idling car exhaust into the living room and then try to tell me that pumping waste gases into a closed environment won't have any more effect on it than whatever else goes on in there during a normal day. You just can't pump large volumes of carbon dioxide--or anything else--into the atmosphere and not have it change the chemistry of it. That should be totally axiomatic. Now, what effects that change in chemistry may invoke within the closed environment is open to debate, I'll admit.
