[FreedomPoster]

A somewhat long read, but an interesting viewpoint to apply to enviralmentalism and enviralmental whackos.

[MayDay72]

"Let me tell you about this planet. Our planet is four and a half billion years old. There has been life on this planet for nearly that long. Three point eight billion years. The first bacteria. And later, the first multicellular animals, then the first complex creatures, in the sea, on the land. Then the great sweeping ages of of animals - the amphibians, the dinosaurs, the mammals, each lasting millions upon millions of years. Great dynasties of creatures arising, flourishing, dying away. All this happened against a background of continuous and violent upheaval, mountain ranges thrust upand eroded away, cometary impacts, volcanic eruptions, oceans rising and falling, whole continents moving... Endless constant and violent change... Even today, the greatest geographical feature on the planet comes from two great continents colliding , buckling to make the Himalayan mountain range over millions of years. The planet has survived everything in it's time. It will certainly survive us."

"Suppose there was a radiation accident. Let's say we had a really bad one, and all the plants and animals died, and the earth was clicking hot for a hundred thousand years. Life would survive somewhere - under the soil, or perhaps frozen in arctic ice. And after all those years, when the planet was no longer inhospitable, life would again spread over the planet. The evolutionary process would begin again. It might take a few billion years for life to regain it's present variety. And of course it would be very different from what it is now. But the earth would survive our folly. Life would survive our folly. Only we think it wouldn't."

"If the ozone layer gets thinner, there will be more ultraviolet radiation reaching the surface. It'll cause us skin cancer. So what? Ultraviolet radiation is good for life. It promotes mutation, change. Many forms of life will thrive with more UV radiation. Do you think this is the first time something like this has happened? Don't you know about Oxygen?"

"Oxygen is actually a metabolic poison. It's a corrosive gas, like fluorine which is used to etch glass. And when Oxygen was first produced as a waste product by certain plant cells - say, around three billion years ago - it created a crisis for all other life around the planet. Those plant cells were polluting the environment with a deadly poison. They were exhaling a lethal gas, and building up its concentration. A planet like Venus has less than one percent oxygen. On earth, the concentration of Oxygen was going up rapidly - five, ten, eventually twenty-one percent! Earth has an atmosphere of pure poison! Incompatible with life!"

"My point is that life on earth can take care of itself. In the thinking of a human being, a hundred years is along time. A hundred years ago, we didn't have cars and airplanes and computers and vaccines... It was a whole different world. But to the earth a hundred years is nothing. A million years is nothing. This planet lives and breathes on a much vaster scale. We can't imagine its slow and powerful rhythms, and we haven't got the humility to try. We have been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we are gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us. Let's be clear, the planet is not in jeopardy. We are in jeopardy. We haven't go the power to destroy the planet - or to save it. But we might have the power to save ourselves."

- Michael Crichton,
'Jurrassic Park'

[RightWhale]

what more and more groups are doing is putting out is lies

Chrichton's writings stand because they are based on scientific and medical fact. You don't see any great environmentalist literature, not that they don't try. All it takes is one sour note in a novel and it drops from a NYT best-seller to a trade publication--1000 copies printed, 4 sold.

[StriperSniper]

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[Issaquahking]

A must read!!! Glades Guru, after reading this, I was walking on air!

[wife-mom]

This is a great article! It is very wise and full of insight, honesty and common sense.

P.S. I'm a religious fundamentalist, a philosophy which he somewhat denigrates, but he still hit the ball out of the park with this speech/article.

[StopGlobalWhining]

I would vote for this posting as one of the "FR Top 10 Postings of 2003"!

If we don't have such a list of best posts of the year here, we should, but I'm not about to make a vanity posting.

[Atlas Sneezed]

The speech has been pulled from Crichton's site and from the Commonwealth Club site.

Here is another link.

http://www2.gol.com/users/coynerhm/michael_crichton_remarks_commonwealth_club.htm

[treeker]

Hi all, I'm new to the forum...so excuse me if i've posted incorrectly...

I just wanted to make the point that although Crichton advocates the abandonment of the religion of environmentalism, his vision for a return to the SCIENCE of environmentalism itself appears to take on a similar omnipotent messiah-like quality. My issue is not with the arguments he raises in relation to the need for a new framework for environmentalism, but rather with what I view as his simplistic and naive perception of science as "truth". There are respected scientists on both sides of many environmental issues who use science to argue their hypotheses...to suggest that one scientist might be more or less driven by a religious-like belief in their world view than another scientist is problematic. Throughout history science has been used and abused to a variety of disparate ends. At the end of the day, who's there to referee the process? In reality the "science" of "science" is a lot more subjective than we may like to admit.

In conclusion, i think Crichton's claim that environmental science should replace the 'religion of environmentalism' is one that relies heavily on the idea that science in its pure form is purely objective...there's an interesting parellel there with this "pure science" model and his notion of idealised nature as held in the Eden-myth of purity.

Actually, another thought occurs to me...while certainly, under the banner of "environmentalism" i beleive there are many cases that contain less hard facts and more sentimentalities there are also many cases in which well researched, intelligent and I beleive scientifically correct facts are presented (by the way, there is I believe a place for spirituality and emotion in our perception of ecology anyway)... My thought is this....does Crichton's perception of these "other views" as a religion, become a way of discrediting their alternate ideas in one big sweep of the board?

Are we simply swinging from environmental-eden-isms to scientific ones?