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Sorry but there is no scientific basis for that comment, many environmental issues are based on poor grasp of science in general.

You're a microbiologist. Are you telling me that you'd like to live in a place where the drinking water is polluted with human waste? You certainly are familiar with cholera and dysentery. Would you want your children to live in a city where the air quality is so poor that children, the elderly, and the infirm can't venture outdoors? You deny any connection between pure air, water and food and human health?

I don't believe in global warming. I believe there are cycles in the earth's weather, perhaps controlled by solar activity, that make some periods warmer than others. I do not deny that there is a lot of bad environmental science out there. But that only means we need to differentiate between the bad and the good, not get rid of all efforts to protect the environment.

I live in Florida, where the water table is only feet below us. I've seen beautiful lakes die in a matter of years because of improper treatment of runoff. As the state's population has grown, the state's natural resources have deteriorated. Does that mean we halt population growth in Florida? Absolutely not! I believe that wise growth is possible and necessary. Wise use of our resources is imperative.

The Dust Bowl in Oklahoma is another good example of how a terrible drought combined with poorly managed use of resources resulting in environmental catastrophe which caused massive human suffering. Does that mean farming was evil? Absolutely not! But wise soil conservation techniques have helped protect the land since then.

Do you know the history of Yellowstone national park? Husbanding the environment caused more damage than good. They destroyed the habitat until the realized they needed to burn portions of the woodland in order that the environment could sustain itself and create new growth. They prevented beavers building dams and flooding tracts until they realized this was also bad for the environment and a necessary attrition mechanism.

Have there ever been misguided attempts in which "protecting" the environment was actually harmful? No question. But as population grows, especially in population-dense areas, population puts a strain on the resources. We need wise practices to manage and protect these resources so that they will be around for future generations. Teddy Roosevelt said it better than I ever could:

Conservation means development as much as it does protection. I recognize the right and duty of this generation to develop and use the natural resources of our land; but I do not recognize the right to waste them, or to rob, by wasteful use, the generations that come after us. I ask nothing of the nation except that it so behave as each farmer here behaves with reference to his own children. That farmer is a poor creature who skins the land and leaves it worthless to his children. The farmer is a good farmer who, having enabled the land to support himself and to provide for the education of his children leaves it to them a little better than he found it himself. I believe the same thing of a nation.

"You're a microbiologist. Are you telling me that you'd like to live in a place where the drinking water is polluted with human waste?"

You are missing the point many of the mechanisms that make this drinking water healthier are causing pollutants to be released into the environment. According to many environmentalists cleaning our water so that it is a source of water for consumers is not "natural" Let them drink the "natural water " I say.

"Would you want your children to live in a city where the air quality is so poor that children, the elderly, and the infirm can't venture outdoors? You deny any connection between pure air, water and food and human health? "

Yes but only if the means to provide the clean air where viable and based on hysterical and non scientific policy. For the record my daughter is acutely asthmatic she has to be nebulised at least twice a month.I have a respirator at home and am checked out to use it. I understand the issues around this better than most.

"I do not deny that there is a lot of bad environmental science out there" Almost all of it is bad as far as I have seen

"I don't believe in global warming. I believe there are cycles in the earth's weather"

Then you are on the same page as most scientists in the field. :-)

"As the state's population has grown, the state's natural resources have deteriorated. Does that mean we halt population growth in Florida? "

That would be an environmentalists solution, reducing the population would not be the objective rather reducing the pollutants would be the objective. Do you start to see the problem yet?

I will give you an example of poor environmental knowledge and good intentions:

In the UK animal rights activists released hundreds of American Minks into the wild as an act of liberation. these animals had been caged and processed to make fur coats in the UK.

the result of this activity has wreaked havoc in the UK ecosystem, shrew has almost become extinct as has the English water vole. The otter unable to compete with it's aggressive cousin has also declined to the point of extinction, there are cases of minks killing otter kits in their den because of predatory competition instincts.

Minks have also decimated rare bird colonies in the UK, a documented case of a mink swimming from the mainland UK to a coastal island housing many rare seabird species. Where a mink and its mate systematically killed hundreds of protected bird species their chicks and eggs in one nights bloody lust.

The mink has no predator in the UK to keep it's numbers under control, it was a devastating idiotic destructive step to have taken based on ignorance and a desire to "do good"