On Thu, 11 Dec 2003, Tom Bridgeland wrote:

> A very interesting speech about the environment. (Yes, there are a few
> comments about paleo food so I can post this to this list ;--)

I was kind of digging this article until he suggested replacing the EPA
with something like the FDA. <insert long winded rant about how the FDA is
just a stooge of the pharmaceutical industry>.

Regarding DDT. It is my understanding that the use of DDT nearly drove the
Bald Eagle extinct in the United States. The Bald eagle's decline
coincided with the introduction of DDT and the species rebounded with its
outlawed use in the Untited States (of course DDT wasn't the only threat
to Bald Eagles).

I see so many bald eagles now that it is commonplace. Am I to assume that
this was some sort of conspiracy made up by fire and brimstone
environmental fundamentalists?

Crichton seems to be arguing for pure reason, a certain logic that isn't
tainted by pesky sweaty stinky human beings with their irrationality and
emotions. I'd call him a prophet of the religion of the machine.

He also seems to find raw nature to be a very harsh and hostile place,
even a foreign place full of bugs and dangers and disease. Anyone who has
spent enough time in nature knows that it is at once dangerous and deadly
as well as beautiful, exhilarating and a tonic for the human spirit.

One of the very cool things about Ray Audette's book is that he outlays
two views of human nutrition. One is the machine view, and the other is
the "chaos theory" I believe he calls it. That is huge! even revolutionary
I would say. It's the recognition that the human body is not a machine,
but something much more complex and different and most importantly not a
machine.

Crichton of course won't find his utopia of objective reason and logic
until humans are replaced by their machine counterparts. In the machine
view of the world humans are actually obsolete or irrelevant.

Craig