Despite the fact that most adults, including my parents, can’t find the escape key on their computers, they almost unanimously accept technology. On my morning jogs, I always pass a number of grown-ups who are plugged into their iPods, more interested in their music than in saying a polite “good morning.” It’s as if technology were someone they just met, whom they nevertheless feel they’ve been best friends with forever.
I don’t know how to explain it, but it seems as if our parents are going to continue loving what we invent. That’s fine with me — after all, isn’t one of the reasons we invent new technology to amaze old-timers, who still consider theirs the golden generation?
And yes, for those who were wondering, I do have my mother on msn Messenger. I don’t think it’s weird, just another step forward.
St. John’s, Newfoundland
Bushwhacking
Patrick White’s “Red Rush” (April) offers an excellent example of one more nail in Canada’s resource-management coffin. By ignoring ecosystem science and asserting short-sighted, narrowminded, and self-serving political agendas, Canadian policy-makers have overseen the destruction of one of the world’s largest fisheries (the northwest Atlantic cod) and are in the process of rapidly depleting the world’s secondlargest oil reserve while contributing to the climate-related destruction of our forests. By failing to protect our natural assets, they are also destroying the community livelihoods so dependent on these riches. Quite a feat, when you think about it.
From what I understand, the BC government is set to replant the forest with more pine-beetle food, and the federal government is helping keep temperatures nice and warm so the rest of our forests can die. This, alongside talk of processing the infested wood and piping it to the tar sands, where it can be used to fuel more oil extraction. Perhaps, in some warped way, this is what they mean by sustainability.
Bruce Lourie
President, Ivey Foundation
Toronto, Ontario
In Alberta, we also have a lot of aging, vulnerable pine forest, and it’s now being hit by the mountain pine beetle. Learning from the BC experience, loggers here are colluding with the government to go the same route, ramping up the cutting and going into forests that have been off limits up to now. Our minister of “sustainable development” was on the radio recently, defending plans to let a favourite company clearcut around Bragg Creek, despite the vocal objections of residents, on the grounds that doing so might stop the beetle. It won’t, of course.
As I say on page 455 of my Handbook of the Canadian Rockies,
Comments (1 comments)
warrenwormhole: Andrew, what I find astounding as I read the countless "refutations" of Harris catalogued by you and others is the obvious and blatant fact that you have not read "The End of Faith" closely enough to realize (or even acknowledge) the completely satisfactory treatment of all the points you raise in your article. Use the Bible as our source of morality (or the Quran, or whatever)? Which passages should we take and which should we cherry-pick? Why the absolute need for people who subcribe to your beliefs on morality to cherry-pick? Precisely because morality has been, IS and always will be subject to drift. During the millenia before Christ, Muhamed and the FSM I am sure you are willing to admit that we as humans were still faced with the difficult problem of morality. Thanks to an ever increasing reality-based view of the Universe, we move ever closer to jettisoning the baggage of religious dogma. Why? It's usefulness as an absolute reference on morality can only be taken seriously by an ever diminishing group of people that cling to the existence (unable to face the alternative) of a divine creator/suppier of absolute moral law. As Harris points out, there may be many reasons to cling to such beliefs, but those reasons have little to do with truth claims of such a being's existence nor of the need to have an externally imposed morality. The problem has been and is still is difficult-a secularly defined moral code-and one that might never be ultimately achieved. This does not constitute an argument for clinging to fairy tales.
May 13, 2007 00:34 EST