Posted on 08/23/2010 3:11:14 PM PDT by Past Your Eyes
Let's say you love the Earth. You see an article in a magazine about a guy who built a "green" house using mostly twigs, pinecones and abandoned bird nests. You want to build a green home, too. So you find an architect, show him the magazine and say, "Give me one just like this." Good luck with that. Your architect only knows how to design homes using materials that his local planning commission is likely to approve. But he wants the job, so he tries hard to talk you out of using twigs, pinecones and abandoned bird nests. He tells you that no builder will build it. He tells you it won't get approved by the city. He tells you it won't stand up to earthquakes, hurricanes or termites. But you persist. You're saving the Earth, damn it. No one said it would be easy.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Sounds like a good firestarter.
Doesn't anyone worry about Big Bad Wolves anymore?
People want to appear to be virtuous. Actual virtue is not required. Being green is the currently popular substitute.
Scott Adams is a good writer. You posted this without reading the whole article again, didn’t you?
If he really want’s to save the earth, build an underground house.
You can live as a slave to your ideals or you can, as Scott Adams clearly delineates, go only so far as remains in your practical limits.
My personal view is that part of the stress of modern life is that each generation has an ever increasing fan of choices that frequently have no clear differentiation between good and bad. Our ancestors, unless of privileged aristocracy, had almost infinitely fewer choices to make on a day-to-day basis. They may? have been happier with the fewer choice list somply in terms of mental peace!
Good piece.
I was commenting on the base materials listed in those first few paragraphs: twigs, old bird-nests, etc.
It sounds just like the stuff that my [Army] class on survival was talking about looking for when you want/need to start a fire; of course there was a time when that stuff was quite rightly termed common-knowledge.
He is probably more interested in selling articles. That’s his living. I’m sure he has some interest in it.
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