Someone should e-mail that diary to John Stossel who thinks it is the free market that is cleaning our air and water. The right has learned to steal the left's thunder. It all started when Reagan took credit for the completely unpredicted fall of the Iron Curtain.

Remember all that equal rights and integration crap those pathetic liberals pushed down the conservative's throats not too long ago? Well, guess what, not only are Rice and Powell black, one of them is female, and George thinks it was all his idea.

My high school sweetheart was from Kentucky. Her parents had photo albums chock full of relatives, lying in their caskets, freshly killed by mine accidents.

In the old days, miners were essentially slaves. The company housed and fed them like they would any slave. They used legal loopholes to keep it from being called slavery--the company money good only at company stores.
From Poison Darts:

The economic systems available to us fall into a spectrum. At one end, you will find unbridled capitalism and the use of slaves. The Greeks, Romans, Mayans, and most everyone else practiced this as a matter of course throughout human history. As you move toward the middle, you will find regulated free markets. This is capitalism with rules in place to limit how badly people with power can abuse those who are making them rich. Anti-trust laws break up companies that have started to swallow all competition. This does not always work. These companies resist and sometimes they succeed, as Microsoft has so far been able to do. There are laws to limit how long you can make your employees work, the conditions they work under, and laws to insure a minimum wage. Workers are called employees at this point, or sometimes wage slaves. Next on the scale comes socialism. Socialism and free market systems begin to blur as taxation and the size of government bureaucracies creep up. Finally, as taxation reaches 100 percent you have a communist system. Experience has shown that a system that sits in the middle somewhere seems to work the best.

"Someone should e-mail that diary to John Stossel who thinks it is the free market that is cleaning our air and water."

that's key -- there's no invisible hand when it comes to this stuff. while I think it's import that environentalists understand how economics works, you have to remember that the catalytic convertor would have sat on the shelf were it not for environmental regulations.

I strongly disagree that this article is anything good.  The part about strip mining proves my assertion that the human ATTITUDE about the rest of the planet is at the root of our problems.  Would anyone be willing to allow a coal company to completely uproot his or her home if the company agreed to put it back exactly as it was found after years of extracting coal?  With the exception of killing for food, if you don't want it done to you, you should oppose it being done to the land, air, water, plants, or other animals.

"With the exception of killing for food, if you don't want it done to you, you should oppose it being done to the land, air, water, plants, or other animals."

Do you really mean that?  

Land: I don't want to have a house built on me, but I'm nonetheless okay with building houses at least some parts of the Earth.  Say, dense-development multifamily composting coops.  Do you oppose any non-transient use of land by people anywhere?

Water: no use of water for anything beyond drinking?  No irrigation?  No water used in, for instance, the factories that make the microchips that, somewhere, are supporting this blog?

Plants: I don't want to be turned into clothing,  but I'm willing to inflict that fate on cotton.   If you oppose any use of anything except for eating, what do you wear?

It's good to have purists to remind us of the importance of principles, but this seems like a hard way to live.  I know from your previous posts that you're a serious uncompromising deep ecologist, but do you really oppose -- in toto -- agriculture, industry, and urbanization of any kind?  If so, what do you recommend we do instead?

Yes, I do really mean that, though there are exceptions as there are with virtually everything.  In order to determine what I recommend, it's necessary to first identify the problems and their causes.  The skinny is that we need to greatly lower our population and move back to living as hunter-gatherers as all other animals do, because it's the only way to live in harmony with the rest of the Earth.  Both of these goals will take awhile; in the meantime, we all need to limit our families to one child and live as simply as possible.

Here are the ecological and environmental problems, causes, and solutions I've identified in order of ecological importance:

Problem 1. Overpopulation.  There are so many people on the planet that the plants and animals do not have enough room to live in a natural, wild, healthy state.  Ecosystems need large areas of wilderness in order to be healthy, with at least 50,000 acres generally being the minimum size for a viable ecosytem, not including the wildlife corridors between ecosystems so that large animals don't interbreed.

Overpopulation also exacerbates almost every other ecological and environmental problem.  Some examples are pollution (the fewer people, the less pollution from the same activities, not that polluting is OK) and overconsumption (even if everyone only consumed what she needed, with far too many people humans would still grossly overconsume).

When humans lived as hunter-gatherers, there were only 10 million people on Earth.  If human population is not greatly reduced, all other attempts at solving environmental problems will be like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Cause: Overpopulation was originally caused by moving out of tropical Africa, then by discovery and use of agriculture.

Solution:  While I agree with dense development as a stopgap solution, densely populated areas will become ecological sacrifice zones, so this is not a permanent solution.  It now seems that where women are empowered, they choose to have 0-2 kids.  (Imagine that, the vast majority of women don't want to spend their lives pregnant, in childbirth, and raising kids; can't imagine why.) So empowering women seems like the solution to overpopulation, though some sort of one-child policy might also be needed.

Problem 2. Destruction of ecosystems.  Humans have destroyed the large majority of forests and grasslands, and around half of the wetlands and coral reefs, on the planet.

Cause: Destruction of ecosytems is caused both directly by overpopulation and by lack of proper respect for other life, including not acknowledging that the Earth is alive, which leads to destruction of natural areas by things like logging, mining, cattle and sheep grazing, and development.  The cause of destruction of coral reefs is not clear to me, though the fishing indsutry is clearly at least partially to blame.  Again, industrial fishing would not even exist if not for overpopulation.

Solution:  Again, population must be greatly reduced, but humans need to respect our Mother and all life on her.  If they did, they would not engage in the destructive activities listed in the preceeding paragraph, or at most in only a minimal amount of them.  Ditto if humans lived as hunter-gatherers.  In the meantime, we need to greatly simplify our lifestyles so that we don't consume any of the products produced by destruction of ecosystems, or at least consume as few as possible.

3. Human-caused extinctions.  We are in the sixth great extinction, the first one to be caused by a species.

Cause:  First, humans overhunted animals about 40,000 years ago when they moved out of Africa.  Aside from overhunting, human-caused extinctions are now caused by destruction of habitat (see No. 2), pollution, and invasion of non-native species brought in by humans.

Solution:  A) Stop killing of anything we don't eat; B) Stop destroying habitat for any reason; C) Get rid of all unnaturally polluting industries (beginning with the nuclear, oil, and other chemical industries); and D) stop all of this unnecessary international trade and travel that brings harmful, invasive species into habitats in which they don't belong.  In our personal lives, this means not consuming stuff that comes from these activities, or at least limiting consumption as much as possible.

4. Pollution.  Humans have polluted every bit of land, air, and water.

Cause:  Unnatural activities, such as mining, that began long ago, but that greatly increased with the industrial revolution.  Root cause is again lack of respect for the Earth and other life.

Solution:  We must get over industrial society.  It's not sustainable, even if you don't care about all of the other life it kills just to exist.  It's time to evolove spiritually and mentally, and move past the gross materialism that's destroying all life on Earth.

Specifically regarding your questions about use of 1) Land: throwing up a few huts is one thing, but paving over the earth with concrete foundations is unacceptable.  Overpopulation is also a problem here, as a much lower population would not destroy anywhere near as much land; 2) Water: if we lived as hunter-gatherers and got rid of industrial society, we would not use water for any of these purposes; and 3) Plants: the reason people need clothing is that they were meant to live in the tropics (i.e., no fur).  Wearing skins of animals used for food is fine, but cotton requires agriculture and much water, and is a relatively very environmentally destructive crop.

Sorry this is such a long post, but it's the only way I could really answer your questions, which were totally legitimate.  I've thought about this stuff for years, and these are the conclusions I've come to.  I empathize with all life and know that everything is alive, so that I see clearly that the human race fits the medical definition of being a cancerous tumor on the planet (i.e., an out-of-control growth that consumes the host), as a medical doctor once told me.  The solutions I've outlined would change that horrible situation.

and into obscurity, just wanted to say thanks for taking the question seriously.  I agree with you on most of the diagnosis; not so much on the solutions.  (Though keeping families small and living simply is a good start.)  In any case, I still think there's a lot to learn from and value in the original Kos post.