Are working forests comparably diverse as non-working? Is that even an issue?

The WWF has gone the way of Greenpeace - they are now so extreme that you cannot trust anything they say. They never let facts get in the way of their agenda...

When it comes to paper there are other issues besides the actual trees. The chemicals it is treated with are very bad for rivers et al.

No, working forests are not as diverse as non-working. But if you stopped having these giant tree farms, it's not like they'd be replaced with non-working forests, they'd be replaced with strip malls or other types of farms. So better to have a mediocre forest than non at all.

That said, we should strive to protect our non-working forests. Which we do, with our system of parks.

I laugh every time that stupid "don't print this email" message causes the email I am printing to use an extra sheet of paper.

Penn and Teller have a humorous video on paper recycling.

BTW, the chemicals used to strip ink off of paper and then recycle it are at least as hazardous as those used to create new paper from trees in the first place.

In 1900, New Hampshire was 40% forested.

Anyone care to guess what the number was in 2000?

Arbor Day is a farce - more hairshirt "plant a tree" environmentalism.

Sam & NicoleK:

The healthiest ecosystem for wildlife is a forest where swaths have been clear cut. Most wildlife lives "on the edges" between forests and fields. Pure old-growth forests tend to produce wildlife stagnancy and decline. (Note the boom in wildlife in the past 100 years - something the environmentalists never seem to mention.)

As for the strip malls, I'd refer back to my previous post. We "see" the strip malls, but that only means they're anecdotal/emotional "evidence." The reality is much, much different. We have far more trees nationwide than we did 100 years ago and far more wildlife than we did 100 years ago.

Forest management (by the timber companies) has a lot to do with that.

I have to walk to the other side of the building to pick up anything I print, so I print what I need.

I save far more than I need, but my "excesses" have saved this company far more money than those printouts and copies have cost.

I won't divulge names, but one vendor altered their copy of a software license agreement after we signed it. Our official copy was not able to be located for some reason. My copy was sufficient to keep us from having to pay tens of thousands in license transfer fees.

Wood is the most renewable resource we possess. We should make lots more stuff out of it.

What Jeff said.

I'm always amazed by these "green design" people who want us to use adobe and hay and ground up unicorn horns to make solar-powered huts.

You know the saying: "XXX doesn't grow on trees"?

Wood grows on trees. Lumber is the ultimate "renewable"/"green" resource.

With SnagIt (or other screen-capture software), I can (and do) print ANYthing.

I need to print my stuff out constantly as I'm writing, because I read it to edit it as I'm writing, and I go through reams and reams of paper to do it.

Back when I used to write a lot, this was how I edited my work, too - I printed it out and wrote all over it. There's something about being about to scribble in margins, draw arrows to reorganize, and other similar things that really helped. Thankfully I no longer have to produce massive manuscripts – the process was akin to pulling teeth.

Chuck's email tagline reads: "Notice: It's OK to print this email. Paper is a biodegradable, renewable, sustainable product made from trees. Growing and harvesting trees provides jobs for millions of Americans. Working forests are good for the environment and provide clean air and water, wildlife habitat and carbon storage. Thanks to improved forest management, we have more trees in America today than we had 100 years ago.

I've always thought those messages not to print emails are silly - this just seems reactionary. I wonder who actually does print emails? Maybe the older generation who can't find them when they're archived or put in folders?

Our office (we're an Internet company) has only a single, dated Brother all-in-one printer/fax/scanner. It doesn't do anything most days, and it's not an ecological statement for us – we just don't need to print much.

I'm not an expert on this but I have thoughts. Most working forests are not as diverse as non-working forests, but I agree with previous posters that even the least wildlife friendly working forests are way better for wildlife (and the environment) that strip malls and parking lots. There are things that can be done to make working forests even more beneficial to specific wildlife or to specific environmental problems like erosion caused by logging roads. There is a lot of information available to landowners who want to be able to make money off of their forest while also providing habitat for wildlife. Also, many forests that are primarily managed for wildlife include harvesting as a means to quickly achieve the habitat conditions required for the particular species that need that forest for habitat. An example would be an even age forest (one that was at some point completley cut over) that is now being managed for wildlife that need an uneven age forest (some species need areas inside the forest with thick understory that you get when a canopy gap opens up). You could wait several hundred years for the forest to naturally become non even aged, or you could quickly selectively harvest to create openings in the canopy where young trees will grow and get closer to what those species need in a decade. The wood from those harvests can be sold for profit to make wood products. To think of all forest harvesting as a negative is just not very helpful. Let's celebrate forests and the people who work in them for the many benefits that they provide for us such as paper, lumber for construction, wildlife habitat, cleaner air, and places for people to visit.

I do try not to print things that I won't use. But having a hardcopy in my hand makes it much easier for me to read complex things or perform editing. I guess what bugs me is the all or nothing thinking that all forest harvesting is bad.

>> We have far more trees nationwide than we did 100 years ago and far more wildlife than we did 100 years ago.

I am really skeptical we have more wildlife now than we did 100 years ago. Think wolves, sea otters, cougar, grizzlys, bison (I know you have to go back a bit little further for bison) etc etc etc.

By the way: New Hampshire in 2000 was 97% forested, as opposed to 40% in 1900. Robert Frost's stone walls running through the woods? They're running through the woods because those woods used to be plowed fields.

I agree to a great extent with AK's post. (I would point out that logging roads are also forest-firefighting roads. I'll take that erosion.) But AK does a great job explaining the "management" side of "forest management."

Look at it this way: Timberland owners are essentially farmers. Farmers don't strip their topsoil or pollute their irrigation systems. Timberland owners pay close attention to the mix of forest to field, the mix of old growth versus new growth, the canopy, vulnerability to wind and fire, and animal habitat.

But like with many things, it's John Denver's fault. He, along with a bunch of ignorant 70's-era hippies are to blame for misleading propaganda about the need to "plant a tree".

But Eric, there are some wildlife that are over-populous in certain areas - deer, wild turkeys, coyotes, etc. in Connecticut alone. (I'm sure if people are seeing this in other areas, though.) Not to mention skunks, mice, racoons, squirrels, possums, voles, and myriad bird populations. In fact, my hometown is so overrun with Canadian geese, domestic geese, ducks and swans that the harbor and local duck ponds are really crowded these days! People are always feeding them, though. And there are so many restrictions on hunters as far as harvesting the deer and turkey "in season" that the DEP here said they had to destroy a herd of starving deer. It was a load of crap, the way and why of what they did, but that's another story. Still, people around here are complaining about the deer, turkeys and geese all the time. It's not like we're talking endangered species here! I've also seen quite a few woodchucks and beavers lately.

I agree with you in that manner Flynne- the balance is out of whack because so many of the larger predatory mammals are gone.

Wolves just got de-listed two years ago from the endangered species list.

Deer, moose, elk, antelope, turkey, black bears... many were extremely rare sights just 30 years ago. Now, they're common (and nuisances, in many cases.)

For some ESA stats, look at the trend lines for each region: http://www.esasuccess.org/reports/

But that's only since the ESA was passed. More definitive: http://thewildlifemuseum.org/docs/Un-Endangered%20Poster.pdf

Bison:

1900 .............. 500
1950 .............. 5,000
2008 .............. 350,000

http://www.nps.gov/badl/forteachers/upload/Bison%20by%20the%20Numbers%20Lesson%20Plan.pdf

This is beyond stupid, but for what it's worth, it's not much more than a pdf file with the print flag turned off.

However, you'll get a kick out of what the little bit of extra is.

So...

I downloaded and installed their WWF printer, which seems to be just a repackaging of ghostscript the way the very useful bullzip pdf printer is.

I then had chrome print this page to the wwf printer, and sumatra pdf viewer immediately displayed it with no problem but would not let me print it.

So I uploaded it into google docs, where google docs made it quite trivial to print it out.

And when you print it, you get the document back plus two pages of a kindly german WWF program demanding instantly you stop printing this document.

Dies ist ein WWF-Dokument und kann nicht ausgedruckt werden!

The panda holding a german shepard by the leash motif was an added spiff.

Humans aren't the only animals that engage in forestry:

"Forest elephants play an important role in the maintenance of forest dynamics. They are often described as the engineers of the forest, and they physically transform the forest as they move through it, contributing to the ecological functioning of the forest. They create light gaps by knocking down trees, they keep the undergrowth clear by trampling vegetation and speed decomposition by shattering rotten logs. They disperse seeds & fertilize the soil with their dung, compact it with their feet, and cultivate it with their tusks. By digging for essential minerals, they change stream flows, creating wet forest clearings known as bais"

http://www.wcs-congo.org/01ecosystemthreats/01biodiversity/102foresteles.html

Ecofascists think that human beings are the only living things that must be forbidden from rearranging their environment to suit their needs.

There some room for improvement and some silly things in this thread.

"I need to print my stuff out constantly as I'm writing, because I read it to edit it as I'm writing, and I go through reams and reams of paper to do it."

Typically, I examine a half-dozen size "E" blueprints, a few Word documents up to a hundred or so pages, a Filemaker database and two custom work management programs during the day, using two more applications and Lotus Notes to issue corrections and modifications. A second monitor, as you might guess, is important for this kind of thing. I rarely print things out because the changes go on to a variety of linked documents, and because the NEC 19WXM displays a full Word page at a time.

I suggest that you have merely fallen into the habit of printing. After all (unless I am mistaken) none of your work will appear to your readers on that ordinary letter-size paper. Also, your trash becomes an information-leak risk, requiring your shredder. I know you have one.

So - get a 2nd monitor. The 19", in portrait view, will snap to the next page when you touch the Page Down key, eliminating hours of scrolling and waiting for the printer each day.

Scrolling is the most wasteful thing a pro document processor can do. When the pages snaps to a new location with Page Down, your brain doesn't spend important time figuring out where to look next. Even stress levels go down.

-----

For those of you talking about forests, take a look here and use the coordinates at the top right to open Google Earth.

That spot is right between Central Shops and decommissioned C Reactor at SRS.

Now, zoom out to an eye altitude of about 60 miles. You'll notice that the Site's footprint is clearly visible.

What you're looking at is the absence of vegetable crops and housing development. Older-growth forest is present at SRS in abundance. Now, so are pine trees, sold and harvested.

I show you the picture because you might not know that the differences produced by human development are clearly visible - just, not from where you normally work or live. Before we wax all poetic about "millions of jobs", we might also remember that's true of the military and of "Big Oil", which we are supposed to loathe.

The real tragedy is not so much the production of paper, from soft woods which are easily grown - it's the destruction of hardwoods. You can wreck an oak that took two hundred years to grow with a chainsaw in 30 seconds.

Because that Sonic burger joint MUST be right there.

Because the nearest WalMart is two miles away, and that is just too far.

-----

Now that I've gotten you to open Google Earth, check these things out:

Kennedy Space Center - Feds seem to do a pretty good job saving the environment. It's simple: just stop people from building the same petty crap everywhere.

Polyarny - this is the Russian sub base. Count the subs at the pier. Scroll SSE and note the two capsized icebreakers. Wow. Russians do this a lot. Several ports have abandoned ships visible in various states.

Kantubek - used to be an anthrax testing center on an island in the Aral Sea. Whoa...

Bikini Atoll - will show you the Castle Bravo crater on the NW rim. Scroll in, and move a little WSW, and you'll see a blockhouse, built 60 years ago sitting in the water.

...and of course, there's ruined Prypyat'. Lots of cheap housing there...

OK. You get the idea. Lots of neat stuff to see, including evidence you might find useful when arguing a point about anything we do!

Ahem.

The claims about "more wildlife" today are complete lies.

When I was 10, I played with a brown bear cub. They were present on Merritt Island, Florida. No more.

People want houses. Builders buy land, build houses, say, "Look at those woods!" Critters come into housing development. People kill them.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

And you might look at any reputable page on animal ranges. 6+ billion people eat everything they can get their hands on. The bigger stuff goes first.

Don't be an idiot. Don't mistake stories of animal encounters with an increase in animal population. Take a look a sprawl first.

Raddy, the stats ain't lyin'. There IS more wildlife than there used to be. Just cause you're p.o.'ed doesn't make it not so. Check AB's links.

Well, I guess those of us with our fancy-pants "facts" and "numbers" about species counts should just fold up and go home: Radwaste's pet bear has gone missing.

Guys, I'm in the middle of ideal deer country. Fields rich with food are separated by turnrows affording Bambi's relatives shelter.

Deer thrive here - but don't you know the difference between statistics and the real world?

The sites cited have specific goals, AND only cover a short period of time. "These are just a few of the hundreds of species whose populations have soared thanks to the Endangered Species Act."

This is from levels far below their natural state, and it says NOTHING about what that population was before the affected areas were settled.

Do you really think that 500 grizzly bears (confined to Yellowstone, at that) is everything there was? Gee - we have an Endangered Species Act. Does that mean that all is well, everything is done?

Where you live now was once wildlife habitat.

It's not wildlife habitat now.

Go outside and look. And make it a habit to read studies with grey glasses, not rosy ones. A stat that does not say what you think it is saying isn't "lying", but it's still not the whole story.

And, AB, don't try to make this about me to cover your lack of rigor.

Let me put this in perspective: ALL of the cited success stories at esasuccess.org/reports/, across the nation, amount to fewer individuals than half the people living in Augusta, GA.

You saw the word, "soared", and your heart swelled at the idea of how wonderful we are to do such a thing!

How big a success story is that now?

Go back to sleep, confident that all is well. Clear is the conscience that knows of no wrong.

-----

To put this in a more savage perspective...

...there are more Jews today than there once was. Obviously, we can relax and not concern ourselves any further, either with what happened in the past or with the future.

Yay!

AB, and Rads are BOTH correct... there is MORE wildlife, but not more TYPES. Bear ranges, as with other large carnivores have changed... But there are more frickin' deer then you can shake a stick at... becasue the large carnivores don't control population. And? there aren't 350,00 WILD bison... they are mostly domesticated like cows. There was just a fairly large story in the Denver post about the wild herds that we have, that they have gotten the testing to make sure they aren't bred with cows...

Still, the real question is, what makes an old growth forest more valuable than a new one? Why does one's reason to exist trump the other? Why is an old oak tree better than a sonic drive in? What difference does diversity make?

People act like this is intrinsic that one thing is somehow better than another, when change has ALWAYS gone on, everywhere on the planet. We too are change.

Now I, personally, would much rather see the towering oak than another fast food joint... Because I think there are too many fast food places, and I like trees better... but coming from a place where the forestry management of never cutting causes forest fire conflagrations undreampt of... many of these sorts of ideas have a lack of balance to them.

I KNEW someone was going to bring up the Jews!!

It always surprises me (negatively) when a self-labeled environmentalist thinks that "they" are cutting down old-growth forest land for paper.

Around here in Oregon, we know that those big evil paper and timber companies know that old-growth, on the rare occasions they get to cut any, is far more valuable as lumber.

If any part of 'em gets made into paper, it's the milling scraps from the conversion into expensive boards (if they're not just shipped whole to Japan for processing for the Japanese market).

And we see all the big fields of specially-bred (and possibly GM, in fact) cottonwood planted especially to make paper...

Funny aside- did you know they make high end paper out of elephant poop? High in fiber!

http://www.poopoopaper.com/

AB, I'm arguing we have more trees BECAUSE we have the tree farms... the paper industry is resulting in more forests.

I guess I'm just biased in favor of humans.

I reject outright the assertion that human development by definition is infringing upon virginal habitat. I reject outright the assertion that we are somehow the pollutant of the ecosystem solely by the fact of our existence. I don't buy into either the "Garden of Eden" utopian myth or the Native American as proto-environmentalist myth.

So within that context, we can look at the facts. And the facts are: We're doing an excellent job of stewardship in this country.

Our forests are healthier than they've been in a century. Our species populations are healthier than they've been in a century. Our air is cleaner than it has been in 50 years - if not longer. Our cities are cleaner than they've ever been. Our so-called "sprawl" leaves vast acreages of nature that is nearly entirely untouched, and our projected population growth will never threaten those natural lands.

So unless you advocate somehow removing humans from the mix entirely, which I'm not really in favor of, the facts say we're doing a pretty good job. The hand-wringing is based on anecdote, scare tactic and myth.

NicoleK: I see where you were going with it now. Of course, you're right. I was mostly reacting to the "strip malls" line. It's an interesting sort of bias. We see the strip mall that replaces the field and log it mentally as "evidence". We see the clear cut and think the same. But we don't see the natural (or seeded) reclamation of lands by forests, and for some reason we don't register mentally the species that are common today but scarce 30 years ago.

If you believe that humans are causing more than just a teeny bit of global warming,

And, you know that trees use sunlight to take carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, binding it into cellulose within its cells,

And you want to sequester the most carbon that you can, so it is removed for 100 years from the atmosphere,

And you understand that most newspaper and letterpaper lasts 100+ years in landfills without degrading back into carbon dioxide,

Then, you want to use as much paper as possible, throw it out, and put it into landfills.

Note, that you do not want your town to burn its waste to reclaim energy. The paper and energy must be buried. Ridiculous attempts to stop using paper merely substitute carbon emitting electricity for carbon-sequestering paper.

(Both true and sarcastic)

AB I dont give a shit what you object to out right.

I moved to where I am now 10 yrs ago, got my self a 5 acre spread, less then 500 people within ten miles of me.

5 yrs later everyone else decides they dont want to live to close to the city in their old HOA subdivisions, so they all move out here into NEW HOA subdivision.

And the complaint that the closest stores are are more than 5 miles away and there are no schools or resuteraunts.

Now I have 5000 people living within 5 miles of me, due to the housing crisis half of them are empty, 20 acre of old pecan trees are gone, 5 major sinkholes more than 20ft deep have opend up in the last two years.

Most of the wild rodents are gone, but theyve been replaced with norway rats brought over with all the construction materials from out of state, so technically there are more rodents then ever, but all of the owls, hawks, and the bald egale that used to roost at the end of my driveway moved out when their food supply vanished.

Hey at least I have close to 300 stores and resturants within a 10 minute drive, never mind the fact that I moved all the way out here to avoid all that shit.

AB humanity sucks, were an animal species no more noble or deserving then any other. Out problem is were smarter, smart enough to maximise the output of the areas we live, but juat like every other species we are capable of growing our numbers beyond that which is sustainable - and we will starve just as eaisly as deer are now all over america.

Nature doesnt give a shit about us, we ought to keep that in mind

"AB, I'm arguing we have more trees BECAUSE we have the tree farms... the paper industry is resulting in more forests."

That's not the only reason. Farming has become so efficient that it needs only a fraction of the land it used to need. I see around here some areas that were farmland 20 years ago, but they are no longer farmed; they are lying fallow and they are reverting to forest or meadow. The other thing: the "suburban sprawl" isn't displacing a lot of forest land. It doesn't have to... there's plenty of no-longer-needed farm land around, and that's where the new housing developments and shopping centers are going. Why buy virgin forest and spend a ton of money to clear and grade it, when you can buy farm land where all that's already been done?

I live in timber country. I hate seeing clear cut forest areas. They are an awful mess. Plus, they cut down all the trees and only replant a single species. It definitely changes things. Saying X number of trees has been planted to replace Y number of trees cut down is a bit disingenuous.

Still, the forest companies do a good job of harvesting, replanting and allowing public access so I guess it is a mostly acceptable trade.

"I reject outright the assertion that human development by definition is infringing upon virginal habitat."

Wow. You can cite Web sites, but can't see what aerial and satellite photography shows, plainly.

Look at the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Look at the southern border of Kennedy Space Center.

Spend just a few minutes finding out what archaeologists find under current construction sites.

Or, just live long enough to remember what where you're living used to look like.

Of course, you could refuse to learn, and remain part of the problem: the people who move to "get away from it all", then do their damnedest to turn where they are now into the hell they left.

And by the way - so nature doesn't care about us. That doesn't mean you get to be stupid or careless about either conservation or your vulnerability to natural events.

You know, part of this is overshadowed by water issues. Even Florida is finding out that no, you can't just come here and build what you please - even when the county commissioners are all paid off.

"just live long enough to remember what where you're living used to look like."

Fascinatingly ignorant.

The places I used to live were horribly polluted. Like everywhere in the 1970's, the air was full of smog. The river in my town was unswimmable and unfishable. Deer sightings were rare. Bear, moose, fox, turkeys and fisher cats were unheard of and thought to be extinct.

Today, where I grew up: People swim in the river (without catching hepatitis, which happened in the 70's). The Atlantic salmon run the river. Deer and fox are a nuisance. Turkeys are abundant. Moose, bear and even fisher cats are sighted regularly.

But that's just where I lived. Nationwide, would you have us go back to the days where air pollution killed tens of thousands each year because we were burning coal and wood for light and fuel?

How about the halcyon days before the automobile, when horse shit piled up on the streets and spread disease?

How about 100 years ago, when "mill towns" were factory-dominated, smog-choked industrial wastelands?

Or how about the smog that choked the cities just 35 years ago, before the widespread use of the catalytic converter? The "brown cloud" in Denver? The L.A. smog days (20 years ago, there were more than 100 per year. Now we average fewer than 3 a year.)

Take it local: Your neighborhood might be growing. Your local farmland might be consumed by suburbia, but there are ghost towns in the midwest where the fields and forests are reclaiming the developments. In the Northeast, forests now stand where cultivated farmland dominated 100 years ago.

The air is cleaner, the water is cleaner, the forests are healthier, the animal life is more abundant than 100, 50 or 30 years ago. Those are all facts.

(And if you're worried about overpopulation, the UN projects the world population to peak by 2050 and then start declining.)

Recycling is such a simple issue if you think about it clearly. If someone will pay you for the feedstock, it's worth recycling. If they want you to pay them to take it, it's not.

Ok, from an economist's point of view this ignores externalities. That can be (and is) managed in various ways.

Hence, Ferraris get recycled (stealing from P.J. O'Rourke here). Copper gets recycled because it's one of the industrial metals which is genuinely in short supply and is worth the labour to do it. Aluminium gets recycled because it's so damn expensive to smelt and re-use is so cheap.

Glass and plastics - are marginal. The cost of sorting and the fact that the reconstituted material is only good for lower valued, lower quality uses makes it a feelgood exercise. Probably not worth the effort. About the only glass recycling effort that ever made sense was the old re-fillable milk bottles that you left out for the milkman for washing and re-use. Of course, health and safety plus cheap plastics make even that too labour intensive.

Paper? Why would you bother? It's harder to recycle paper, what with the ink and all, varying stocks, colours, etc, than to make new product.

BTW, the chemicals used to strip ink off of paper and then recycle it are at least as hazardous as those used to create new paper from trees in the first place.

No, AllenS - it's even worse than that, paper recycling is far worse environmentally than production from scratch.

"AB humanity sucks, were an animal species no more noble or deserving then any other."

Humbug!

From cow to ape no species on earth will ever accomplish anything more than breeding more of itself until it dies.

None will ever demonstrate a sentient thought, amongst all the species that live on the earth, only human beings care capable of rationalizing, debating, and deciding the nature of our existence. Only we are capable of profound change, and only we can create, invent, and manipulate the earth to our benefit to the extent that we have, and will continue to do.

We're the only species that can make our lives count for something more than simple self perpetuation.

None will ever demonstrate a sentient thought, amongst all the species that live on the earth, only human beings care capable of rationalizing, debating, and deciding the nature of our existence.

Although I agree with you Robert, you left out the word "currently" before "capable" and the word "ever" should be qualified by "in their current form". Who knows which species will be ascendant and sentient in 100k years? Or a million? Here and now though, we're it.

But your general point is very true. There are lots of cases of "evolutionary arms races" around. Predators that grew bigger and bigger fangs until they could barely hold their heads up, while their prey grew bigger and bigger for defense until they outstripped their food supply. Followed by a general collapse of both. Happened thousands of times. The most you can say is that sentience and the ability to interpret and control your environment is either very rare or possibly unique.

People don't understand that if you want something to stay the same, you have to *actively* manage it to keep it that way. Otherwise it will change right out from under you.

About my, "just live long enough to remember what where you're living used to look like."

"Fascinatingly ignorant."

What an idiot you are. You've just cited the very impact of man on the previous ecology, then claim some lack of mine for not seeing how wonderful it is that we're so much cleaner than we used to be.

Hey, I get that. What you're not getting is that however much cleaner NYC, for example, is today than it was a hundred years ago, it is dead when compared to the same location a thousand years ago. I'd describe the habitat there at the time, at the confluence of the Hudson and Atlantic, but I'm sure I would be casting pearls before... someone who wouldn't know what they were.

Again: you apparently cannot understand what aerial photography clearly shows. You haven't noted the deforestation of the Amazon basin or Costa Rica, despite their high profile. Nor have you understood the idea that a few thousand critters here and there helped by a Federal program does NOT mean that there was and is no adverse impact on those creatures by our displacing them.

Pot, kettle has been right in your house every day. Enjoy the company.

"From cow to ape no species on earth will ever accomplish anything more than breeding more of itself until it dies."

You're very sure of yourself. Perhaps you have not noticed that you are a member of a transitional species. Well, with great power comes great responsibility. One of those would be understanding the status quo.

There is more than a few minutes' light reading HERE on the subject.

Do be sure to be thorough w/r/t the many references.

And note that a significant number of humans will never "accomplish anything more than breeding". There is considerable overlap, you'll notice, between the dumbest people and the smartest dog.

"I'd describe the habitat there at the time, at the confluence of the Hudson and Atlantic, but I'm sure I would be casting pearls before... someone who wouldn't know what they were."

I don't fetishize nature, so the fact that it has changed does not, in itself, concern me. There's a huge difference between being a good steward of the environment, and trying to freeze nature in time. Nature itself changes, so that's a pointless exercise anyway.

We're the only species that can make our lives count for something more than simple self perpetuation.
Posted by: Robert

And yet given the fact that so many of our species dont apire to anything other than that(and given the myrid "accidental" pregnacies they dont even aspire to that) I think my original point stands

"I don't fetishize nature, so the fact that it has changed does not, in itself, concern me."

So far as the Manhattan area goes, that's an interesting turn of phrase. "It" didn't change. We did that.

Gee, "fetishize". I hadn't seen the term before. Does that mean "wanting to see it conserved"? Does that mean, "not wanting to pretend everything is hunky-dory, bring in more bulldozers, put in another convenience store"? If so, count me in.

Gee, so many people use the Two Wrongs fallacy, or Appeal to Consequences. But the argument is not really with me.

If you have seen the cover of any decent text on ecology, you know that the biosphere is sustainable by sunlight alone. For one creature to live, basically, another must die. That's how the food chain works. Now, do not be confused by modern agriculture, which is dependent on oil for its enormous production and distribution effort. That has increased the biomass, but it's not sustainable.

My point is merely one of awareness, not complacency. Understand what is going on. Wreck the house, you have no house.

-----

Meanwhile:

You can save a ton of paper, but, more importantly, time, with at least a second monitor in Portait mode.

Buenas, Igual no es el sitio, ¿cómo me puedo poner en contacto contigo? Un saludo, gracias!