Protein and Gold: Gore's Generation of Environmentalists Circuitous Path

"I believe in global warming"

"I don't believe in global warming"

These two statements seemed to starkly define a generation.  They become emblems of environmentalism, or environmental skepticism.   Many use one of these statements to define who they are.   The first is more popular, perhaps, because it's emblematic of compassion, and people dig compassion.

I believe extinction, the consumption of diverse species, is the simplest measure of our society's place in history of the planet.  Any other measure - carbon, or prayers, temperature, or wealth - is a distraction from what future people will care about that we did today.  What drives our impacts today?   Protein and Gold.

I dig baby elephants.  And I want baby elephants to have papas and mommies.  It's a simple faith in nurture, and it doesn't make me an environmental scientist.  But because I don't want elephants, or frogs, or tigers, walruses, or seals to be extinct, I work in recycling.  And it has nothing at all to do with landfills, or with carbon.   To save these species, we must alter our love of metals, especially expensive metals like gold.   And if you think teaching humans to consume less energy is challenging, try teaching people to let go of gold.

This is not a statement about the science of global warming.  It's a statement about human psychology, and the way media tries to educate society about need for change.  When we need society's consumption to change - and I'm convinced more than ever that we do - we need to understand our own psychology, our own cognitive dissonance, our own appetite for opinion change, and to invest in messages which opinion research indicates will make a darn difference one hundred to one thousand years from now.

For now, the loudest discussions, if not debate, are over global warming and climate change (thanks Mr. Gore).   There is no denying that there are many, many sophisticated arguments humans engage in to support either position at the top on belief in global warming.   There is also no denying that public discussion of the issue focuses primarily on the psychology and assessment of the opponent.

Merely referencing dry scholarly work on the shrinking (or not) of Mars poles, as an indicator of the average temperature on Mars, demands an apology.  From Yahoo answers discussion, links to these two papers are presented with a disclaimer... "I'm not a denier but evidence shows that they (Mars plar caps) are melting." 

http://sirius.bu.edu/withers/pppp/pdf/bo... 
http://depts.washington.edu/marsweb/pape... 

The discussion of global warming here on earth is usually hedged today with similar qualifiers.   "It's undeniable that even if the Earth is warming for other reasons (solar or celestial energy), that humans are producing more carbon, and carbon will exacerbate the rate of global warming."

Term Paper #3: Environmental Justice, a Little Drop of Poison

I'm going to put this up temporarily with a Tom Waits song (a little drop of poison) and then delete it in a few days.  It's below the fold...

Well a rat always knows when he's in with weasels...

1) Mining and smelting investments are driven away from property values;  they create most of the poison, species and habitat loss, carbon, etc.  It's an ugly business.  Most of the "harm" your computer will ever commit to the earth was done before you brought it home from the store and opened the box.

2) Labor value is found in high density in ghettos (lighter blue) and "emerging" neighborhoods.  It is a resource, and it is agnostic... it does not recognize whether metal is "Mined ore" or "Recycled Ore", and putting a label of "waste" onto urban ores has had unintended consequences.   In the past few years, the term "waste" has been abusively applied to material which is "in surplus" in one geographic location (e.g. working CRT monitors) and sold, added value intact, to a market where the goods are not in surplus.  An alien would not understand how recycled metal is regulated differently from virgin metal, the wealth or nationality of the previous scrap metal owner would be undetectable.

But the alien de Tocqueville would be able to see material moving around, and see the economic value of the property that people were living in, and see the regulatory functions were associated with property value.

The Spock de Tocqueville would observe People trying to feed their siblings hungry kids will do a lot of things.  "Useless Lists of Jobs Beneath Wealthy People" and "E-Waste Poster Child" blogs were my attempts to treat people doing "e-waste", primitively or immaculately, in a position as an equal.

Below is a chart which I have trouble fitting here, but it's my attempt to show the jobs people have moving value and creating value out of the various land value areas.

If you follow the movement of material and value through the digestive system of adolescent nations, you learn that the free market has a lot of environmental credit.