“The conservation crusade required the adoption of a revolutionary new vision, one that would see Nature neither as menace nor as a trove of inexhaustible resources, but rather as a fragile life-support system.”

So the air, water and numerous resources we require to actually live` are not actually, in fact, our life support system?
Science? Environmentalist?
Looks and smells a lot more absolute crap.

Continues to amaze how bloody minded ignorance passes for wisdom in these parts.

The consolation of course is that your need to rubbish on about all this, reflects the real growing movement towards the Greens fairer, more informed and realistic understanding of the place of contemporary human life and culture, in current circumstance.

In running with ignorance you are just displaying your prejudices. Go and look up the Puritans perhaps start at wikipedia. Puritans and aircon – now that comment gave me a belly laugh.

If you just continue with your ignorance then other people will be able to control you.

Your metaphor is much like the three blind fakirs and the elephant parable, when the first, on holding the elephant’s trunk announced it to be a python. No, no, exclaimed the second blind fakir, while holding onto the elephant’s leg, I am telling you, it is a tree we have here. Then at the rear of the elephant we finally hear No, no, both of your are very wrong, as he holds onto the elephant’s tail, I am telling both of you that we have a lion.

This parable highlights the errors that happen when we become too specialised in our interpretion of nature, and is the hallmark of the deductive method when used in the absence of empirical data.

Take the simple statement : The sun rises in the east and sets in the west.

This is an objective fact.

However some interlocutors will seriously question this observation and insist that it is the earth which rotates causing the illusion of the Sun rising in the east and that the previous statement is thus wrong.

In one sense the interlocutor is correct, but only in a strict physical sense, but in terms of the original observation, quite irrelevant for what was not under discussion was the mechanism producing the illusion but the fact of simple observation.

It seems to me, from personal experience, that Greens, perhaps those of a more intense hue than normal, think llike the interlocutor two paragraphs above. I would suggest that what we might be witnessing is another difference in epistemology between Aristotle and Plato, or his successor Socrates (bearing in mind that Socrates had to commit suicide for losing an argument).

But the fact remains that the sun is observed to rise in the east, as presently defined, and if asked, any observant individual would answer the question correctly by pointing to the position along the observed horizon of the Earth.

It’s when we discover contradictions to this fact in historical documents or portrayals of celestial observations on the ceiling or walls of old monuments, care must be taken not to dismiss those observations as errors, and therefore “primitive” misinterpretations of present assumed “facts”.

I though a Puritan was someone who was concerned that someone else was having some fun or pleasure, but the sense of your description seems to fit this intepretation.

Malthus: like Ehrlich, Holdren etc – the Population Bomb.
Puritans: we know better than you, your ways are evil and you must change – stop using airconditioners, cars, planes etc
Mao: totalitarian – Jim Hansen and democracy “isn’t working”

Do you start to get the picture?

Well that’s just flat wrong for a start. When do the Liberals ever receive Greens preferences?

About the only time it happens is when the Greens do a split ticket, and that’s only ever in seats where it’s not likely to make a difference to the outcome anyway.