Since the 1970s, it’s become ever more popular to condemn humans for disturbing nature. It started with the belief that resources are being rapidly depleted, and future generations won’t have the standard of living we were enjoying today. This is refuted by the fact our earth is a sphere of potential resources some 8,000 miles thick…into which we’ve only poked a few sporadic holes.  Further, all that has ever been mined and extracted with the exception of a few pounds sent to space is still on the earth and available for reuse any time we find a better use for it. 

Another lie the doomsayers want us to believe, the amount of industrial pollution our affluent society generates is making the water undrinkable and the air unbreathable.  Now, when most industrial pollutants are no longer going out of the effluent pipes, we’re told the elixir of plant life, CO2, is distorting the air’s ability to re-radiate solar heat from the earth and ‘well-done’ as in cooked is the best way to describe our future. Given that atmospheric CO2 has risen by 40% over the last 100 years and the fearful ‘warmers’ claim that a degree of temperature rise will bring global catastrophe, their argument proves to carry little heat.

Keep also in mind, that without CO2 all life on earth would end.

But just to be sure nothing is being missed or that somehow you failed to be convinced by the previous scary projections, animal rights activists say cuddly creatures we share the earth with, the squirrels, bears, and bugs are being trampled by mankind’s carbon footprint and need protection.

It’s said the root of the problem is, our disrespectful treatment of nature, and our willful determination to continually modify the world we’re born into.  We must learn to live with nature we’re told and not modify it at every chance we have. We have the ‘Garden of Eden’ lobby group, the unthinking social engineers, to thank for many of our restrictions. These people are blind to the innumerable benefits man-made goods bestow on us. They also, invariably, use the products generated by our industrial society while condemning that very society. Yes, while feasting from the bounty a modern, industrial society places on the table, they demand a halt of all industry. But even more, pointedly, they want to deny you the right to modify nature in support of your life.

And that got me thinking about life in general and the modifications of nature needed to sustain that life because each living thing needs to act to stay alive. That action, in turn, involves taking in sustenance from the adjacent environment.

Consider a tree, its roots firmly planted in the earth, and a trunk supporting the green leafy foliage some distance up in the surrounding air. The roots take in water and minerals, the warming rays of the sun heat the leaves and through evaporation that mineral mix is drawn up the trunk. The chlorophyll in the leaves draws in CO2, then chemically alters that mineral mix, expelling oxygen and sending the modified minerals, now processable nutrients, to all its living cells to add to the growth of that tree.  That tree is altering the molecular mix in its vicinity. It transforms the minerals and water and carbon dioxide and rearranges those molecules into the building blocks, the cells that make a tree.

The same can be said of a beetle that lands on that tree, bores a hole and burrow under the bark into the sap layer, then lays eggs and dies. The grubs from the hatched eggs, chew their way into adulthood at the expense of the tree, processing the tree’s molecular structures into a life-sustaining mix of their own, for their own growth. And the woodpeckers that eat those grubs, drink water and breath air modify those molecules in their bodies and eject the waste.

All living things take in some group of molecules, rearrange them and discard those having no use in sustaining their particular life. So the question then becomes, what about man? Why is the rearranging of molecules by men condemned by some other men? If every living entity on this earth grabs the molecules near them, processes those molecules and rejects the ones they find superfluous, why are some humans condemned for doing the same thing?

Well, the problem is that a lot of people are taught how to write eloquent prose, but not how to think. Thinking being the art of non-contradictory evaluation, there is a very tight constraint on truth, a constraint utterly ignored by so very many people.

More elaboration to come – on the idea that all of us live by modifying molecules, some on the microscopic and others on the macroscopic.

Note added: See my article “Property Rights” on my essay page where I elaborate on, how all that we ever do is rearrange molecules.