Dave Pollard recently reviewed Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond, and links to several reviews and interviews. I have criticized Dave recently about his lack of external links, so I am compelled to give him credit for the extensive linking in his review. He does an excellent job of reviewing the book and has convinced me to put the book on my already-too-long reading list.
Dave calls Lomborg “the wacko discredited eco-holocaust-denyer [sic]”, “the discredited and unqualified Davos poster-child” and refers to supporters of Lomborg—a group I am not a member of—as “Clowns like environmental holocaust-denyer [sic] Lomborg” and his ideas as “the folly of Lomborgian eco-holocaust denial”. There are no links either to Lomborg's work in any of Dave's references to him, nor are there any links to articles discrediting him. Until he does either, or both, I cannot take his criticisms of Lomborg seriously.
As just an Ecology and Evolut
ben — Mon, 2005-01-17 12:21As just an Ecology and Evolution PhD, I'd have to say that I find the concept of a current 'eco-holocaust' profoundly misrepresentational of both the current state of the environment and the intention of the holocaust.
This sounds like a topic sentance that should be followed by an explanation of each, but I think it is clear on its face, if one stops to think about it.
Regarding the gwai lo,
I agree that we need more rigorous statistics. Environmentalists, conservation biologists, and ecologists are in a sense in the same boat, but they are all taking different approaches. Ecologists struggle daily with the concepts of diversity, stability, and change. These are hard things to measure, hard to conceptualize, and fundamentally necessary for our understanding of what is happening in the environment. Conservation biologists have stopped struggling with some of these concepts, but continue to struggle with how to use them in an engineering fashion, toward internalized goals of 'conservation' however they personally (or institutionally, for those hired by agencies) concieve of what should be saved, where, and at what cost.
Environmentalists appear to care not a whit for any of the concepts, nor do they typically understand that there are challenges and problems. Population thinking has not trickled down to these people yet, nor has a sound grasp of taxonomy and its complexity, nor statistics, nor evolution. Not that someone who understood these couldn't decide to follow the precautionary principle (as flawed as I think that strategy to be), or that they couldn't become an eco-terrorist (as flawed as I think that strategy to be as well), but that they should at least grasp the framework of why intelligent people can disagree on the interpretations of the data without being willfully blind.
I hope that eventually the ecologists will figure out what is going on, before things get really messed up. I hope the conservation biologists will be well employed, because they have a great heart and enthusiasm, and usually are willing to submit to extensive training in whatever field they work - if only there were things to teach them, things that were known by the ecologists. As for the environmentalists, I hope they don't go waste more precious resources by destroying more stuff, or hurting more people, or wasting their own lives and the resources put into maintaining them.