From: gil@Gilsys.DIALix.oz.au (Gil Hardwick)
Newsgroups: sci.environment
Subject: Historic levels of methane by bison (was Re: Perot ad
Distribution: world
Date: Sat, 07 Nov 92 06:14:18 GMT
Organization: STAFF STRATEGIES - Anthropologists & Training Agents


In article <1992Nov4.124648.26720@news.acns.nwu.edu> len@schur.math.nwu.edu writes:

 > limiting emissions in the first place.  Of course, presumably one 
 > nation or a small group of nations could decide to act unilaterally,
 > but that I think would eventually lead to chaos.   In fact, the only
 > way I could see international agreement to try to `correct' things
 > like methane concentrations is if there had already been serious
 > agreement to limit greenhouse emissions as much as possible, and
 > that had failed. If so, the political mechanisms for the human race
 > to act on a global scale would at least be in place.

Len, there already is chaos.

Nobody trusts anyone else sufficiently to hand the responsibility of
making global environmental decisions over to someone else. Again taking
the risk of being accused of "amerika bashing", as merely one example
(without going on and on about your involvement in Africa or South
America, or the Middle East) having witnessed your military having so
enthusiastically bombed and defoliated Vietnam while it took such a
massive radical political effort at home to stop them from doing it,
does not lead the world to believe that you are at all capable of any
sort of fruitful negotiation on environmental issues.

Neither does anything I read here on sci.environment lead me to trust
you or believe anything you have to say on the matter. None of you
have even begun to demonstrate any consideration of other people even
as human beings, much less partners in a global management strategy of
the environment.

Perhaps you are not even aware that your arguments are very probably
being monitored by perhaps all of the 72 countries now on the Internet,
and so have no idea how egregiously insulting some it is to people of
other nationalities. Unless you are prepared to voluntarily reign in
some of the idiots you have given access to this forum, I doubt that
anyone will accept your overtures as being in good faith.

Most countries simply do not care any more about what chaos the US
fears, or what strategies you might want to put in place to keep your
precious "political mechanisms for the human race to act on a global
scale". You have managed to destroy any credibility you might have had
as an environmentally responsible world power all by yourselves, and
there is no point grating against what awful things poverty stricken
villagers might be doing in their struggle just to survive.

For them, and for a lot of your own people for that matter, life's a
bitch and then you die.

Most of us just want go it alone on our own patch, thank you very much,
where we only have to argue against our own local opposition instead of
the entire US military/industrial complex.

--
Gil Hardwick                                      gil@Gilsys.DIALix.oz.au
Independent Consulting Ethnologist                            3:690/660.6
PERTH, Western Australia                                 (+61 9) 399 2401
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