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Two different media rants


The Waterloo Chronicle thrives on articles like this one: some local busy-body is horribly offended by something trivial that the city is nominally responsible for. Intrepid ace Chronicle reporter then wades through the bureaucracy to get to the bottom of it--all for the public good! Lame, bureaucratic excuses inevitably ensue, and the busy-body reaffirms their dissatisfaction. Story ends.

Does anything useful ever come of these?

Here, the crisis is that the demonstration organic garden in Waterloo Park isn't being adequately cared for. And, as the owner of (what is now) an (overgrown, mostly) organic perrennial garden, I sympathize. I haven't been to the park to look at it in years, but I think the community demonstration garden is a good idea, and a good way to motivate people to do something positive is to demonstrate that it's possible. However, didn't anybody think to ask Ms. Stortz, the busy-body in question, if she'd consider lending her vast, 19 years of organic gardening experience to the project? This is a volunteer-run affair, after all, and by the sounds of it, the only problem is there isn't enough volunteers. If not actually taking the time and getting her hands dirty, maybe offering some advice to those volunteers who are willing to work on the project? And furthermore, if the Chronicle really wants to fix the situation, isn't it in the perfect position to tell people in the community who are movitated to act, rather than just complain, who they can contact and where they can go to help out?

You know, I'm not entirely sure what to think of all the full-length, left-wing American feature documentaries that have been popping up in the last few years. On the one hand, I usually sympathise with the cause, but they seem almost entirely impotent as a way to influence real political change, and I spend way too much time thinking "Yeah, but..." when I'm watching them. I'm sure there'll be more, though. And that's not what I wanted to rant about.

Even with my misgivings about the genre, I think I'd kinda like to see An Inconvenient Truth. At the very least, I think it's generating the right sort of discussions. And a few of the wrong sort. But discussion is discussion.

Case and point, when Al was on Larry King last night (not that I actually watched it), Larry pointed out that the great and powerful Stephen Hawking has said (and I'm paraphrasing for effect) that Earth was a write-off anyway and the only way that humanity is going to survive is by going into space.

Uh, okay.

While I don't deny that space exploration and colonization isn't a laudible goal, as an argument against doing anything about global warming, this fails in some very important aspects:

  1. Earth's already very good at supporting human life. Out of the other options we have in our solar system, nothing comes close. Coaxing some pocket of real estate somewhere in our vicinity of the universe where it is possible for humans to survive (far less expand and thrive), is going to be a massive undertaking of environmental and social engineering. To be frank, keeping the Earth in this state is utterly trivial in comparison. In short, if we can't manage it here, we're fucked if we think we can try somewhere else. The omens bode ill, as they say. Furthermore, keeping any human settlements going is going to require a rich and abundant Earth to sustain it for a very, very long time in the future.
  2. Stephen, how long do you think it would take to get to another Earth-like planet, even supposing we actually knew where one was? Come on, brain boy, this should be an easy one. Right. A fucking long time. Now, is there anything that human civilization has ever produced that even lasted that long, far less continued to function? Even if we could get to another suitable planet in, say, the length of time the pyramids have existed (and I'm being optimistic here), those are rocks piled on one another. Very nice rocks, admittedly, but rocks are several orders of maginitude less complciated than a spaceship that has to carry the seeds of humanity across uncharted space. I mean, it's a nice dream, but unless you can pull a wormhole out of your ass (and since you're so brilliant, I'm not ruling it out), we're not getting out of this solar system any time soon.

I could go on. But I think we'll leave it at that.

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