Jed Rothwell wrote:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Personally, I also think it is deplorable that there are parents who are oblivious to raising children that never have the chance to see the miracle of a firefly. Truly tragic.
One moment -- there's something more here that deserves a comment.
I grew up outside Philadelphia in a built-up suburb. On summer evenings, sometimes we'd sit on the porch and watch waves of fireflies launching themselves from the lawn. As a child I sometimes caught them, and on one occasion I put what must have been dozens of them into a large jar and put it in my bedroom for the night (I didn't have a lot of empathy for bugs in those days).
Now I live outside Boston in a built-up suburb. It's just 300 miles by car from where I grew up; less, in a straight line. The climate's similar, the housing stock is similar, the lawns are similar, the population density is similar. The house I live in has a reasonably large untreated lawn -- no pesticides -- and lots of things live in it (beetles, spiders, ants, worms, crickets, to name a few).
For the first time in several years, I saw a firefly last year. This is not because I'm never outside in the evening in the summer! I am, fairly often, and I've been watching for them.
They're not there.
Where have the fireflies gone? What's happened to them?
Is this "ten-legged frog effect", or the result of a slight change in the climate, or what? Whatever it is I find it disturbing.
But wait a minute, Jed. There is an absurd aspect to what you're saying! Let me put it differently: That's just plain ridiculous! You tell us it's unhealthy to surround ourselves with an "artificial environment" every minute of our lives.
Really???? Forget the moon. Let's stay on Earth. I put it to you that most of us are ALWAYS in sight of (or at least being influenced by) some man-made structure every second of the day. How many individuals within Vortex-l have the privilege of being able to completely extricate themselves from an "artificial environment" . . . It would appear that in order to live up to your expectations we would have find a way to walk away from our computers, the Internet, our cars & transportation. Turn off the electricity.
This is a good example of the "slippery slope" logical fallacy. You have taken a reasonable, conventional, well-understood idea to an unwarranted extreme, to the point where it becomes a "red herring" fallacy -- something completely different from what I (obviously) had in mind. People have worn clothes and eaten cooked food for hundreds of thousands of years. There is no going back on that, and no survival without such things. Yet at the same time most people have lived reasonably close to nature, and our children have been exposed to things like clean running water in streams, trees, places to run and play during the summer, dark nights, clean air, fireflies and other benign wildlife. I think this is the most healthy way for most people to live. It is much better than living cheek-by-jowl with pachinko parlors, highways, concrete, and spending all day shut indoors playing video games. That is what I am trying to say. I doubt anyone here seriously disagrees.
As I said, if the solar towers produced 5,000 MW, instead of 200 MW, and we could limit the number of towers to maybe 5 or 10 in populous state, that would be reasonable. (Perhaps they could be made this large; I would not know.) That would not dominate the landscape everywhere. They would be no more disruptive than airports and large aircraft cruising overhead.
Ah, yes. Airplanes overhead.
If something is always there, you don't notice it until it's not.
After 9/11 all the airports closed, and for a couple of amazing days we had NO CONTRAILS in the sky. The change was incredible -- I didn't specifically look to see if they were missing; I just noticed it spontaneously. Suddenly all those long, skinny clouds, and long, puffy clouds, and long, broken chains of blobby clouds that we never notice because they're always there, were _not_ there. And the difference was startlingly dramatic.
What's more, there was never the sound of a plane going over. I hadn't even realized how much of the time I was hearing aircraft until we went for 24 hours without hearing any.
It was really pleasant.
I should mention that I'm relatively close to two airports (Logan, across Boston, and Hanscom, a couple of towns over in the other direction). Presumably many people in the U.S. live so far from the nearest airport that they noticed no difference. And I'm just as dependent on the airlines, who bring me fresh vegetables from Argentina as well as ink for my printer, as anyone else is. But just the same, we do seem to have a bit too much of a good thing here...
