Saturday, June 27, 2009

Having dinner ...

... with The Bard of Berkeley. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The group has worked in some 60 countries, he says, to help prevent the kind of cultural and environmental devastation caused by projects like the Three Gorges dam on China's Yangtze River.

Suppose some grand natural event had occurred to dam up the Yangtse, causing similar "cultural and environmental devastation." Would that be OK? And since humans are one more product of nature, isn't the dam, by extension, a product of nature, as an enormous termitary would be? We deplore man's action in one case - building a dam - and extol it in another - environmentalists resisting same. I'm just posing questions. I know nothing about the Three Gorges dam. It is the ambiguity of the underlying reasoning that interests me.

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