Quote without (much) comment

[Stan Gorodenski]

The discussion on this subject has taken a decided turn.  I offer the
following for consideration without having an opinion for or against. 
It was written by an individual in another discussion group quite some
time ago.  It appears (as an impartial observer) that it _may_ be the
basis for at least some of anti-environmentalist sentiments I have seen
expressed.

"Of course introducing politics into what is an amateur scientific arena
is a
bad precedent....HOWEVER, any one who even remotely believes in the
environmental Doomsday mumbo jumbo.....to you there is no saving!
:->
For those on the fence however(and I believe that that is perhaps most
here)I urge you to read Ayn Rand's 'The Anti-Industrial Revolution' --
In
particular those essays in which she exposes the environmental movement
as
the next great attempt by the 'socialists/statists' to topple capitalism
and
essentially destroy the rights of man(for on a philosophical level, the
two
are inseparable)which the USA is the flag bearer and enforcer across
this
unstable planet.
For fear of this being interpreted as a sermon, I shall finish....."

End of quote.
Stan

Kenelm Philip wrote:
> 
>         Paul Ehrlich's name has come up a couple of times recently on
> Leps-L. I thought the list might be interested in three quotes from the
> Presidential Address he gave last year to the Association for Tropical
> Lepidoptera.
> 
>         For those who might not know the approach to butterfly studies
> he's been advocating for the last 30 years and more--he recommends that
> people should carry out intensive work on taxonomically limited groups
> (which he calls 'model systems') rather than diluting their efforts by
> taking a "non-scientific 'shotgun' approach to nature".
> 
>         Here are the three quotes I found interesting:
> 
>         "Too much effort has been expended on the useless taxonomic des-
> cription of subspecies......, something with which I wasted some of my own
> time in my youth. In the United States, subspecies are important tools for
> preserving biodiversity, because of the structure of the nation's laws
> protecting endeangered organisms, but nobody should be deluded into think-
> ing the naming of subspecies is of scientific significance."
> 
>         "It is quite clear that the lesser interest in, and much greater
> diversity of moths gives them very few of the advantages that butterflies
> enjoy as a model group. There is little scientific reason to do further
> work on them."
> 
>         "I think that it would be wonderful if _Homo sapiens_ took the
> necessary actions to preserve present day biodiversity for a millennium
> or so, to permit it to be reasonably completely described. Or, humanity
> might allocate enough resources to get a rough describing/cataloguing
> largely done in a few decades, especially since the technical ability to
> do so is increasingly in hand. That would be fine if it did not compete
> with the funding of the much more important work on model systems."
> 
>         These quotes have been lifted out of context. Anyone who wants to
> check context should find a copy of the ATL 'Lepidoptera News', June
> 2001 #2.
> 
>                                                 Ken Philip
> fnkwp at uaf.edu
> 
> 
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