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Why are ecologists and environmentalists so feared and hated? This is because in part what they have to say is new to the general public, and the new is always alarming.

Garrett Hardin

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Garrett Hardin
Age: 88 †
Born: 1915
Born: April 21
Died: 2003
Died: September 14
Biologist
Demographer
Ecologist
Statistician
University Teacher
Dallas
Texas
Garrett James Hardin
Garrett J. Hardin
Environmental
General
Public
Ecologists
Part
Environmentalists
Always
Alarming
Environmentalist
Feared
Hated

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Fundamentalists are panicked by the apparent disintegration of the family, the disappearance of certainty and the decay of morality. Fear leads them to ask, if we cannot trust the Bible, what can we trust?
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Education can counteract the natural tendency to do the wrong thing, but the inexorable succession of generations requires that the basis for this knowledge be constantly refreshed.
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Religious reasons, which is no reason. I notice Skeptic had a review of Dennett's book, Darwin's Dangerous Idea. Religious reasons amount to what Dennett terms skyhooks. Do you believe in skyhooks? I don't.
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Value is a relative concept: the value of each action is determined by comparing it with other possible actions.
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To say that we mutually agree to coercion is not to say that we are required to enjoy it, or even to pretend we enjoy it.
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You can never do merely one thing. The law applies to any action that changes something in a complex system. The point is that an action taken to alleviate a problem will trigger several effects, some of which may offset or even negate the one intended.
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Using the commons as a cesspool does not harm the general public under frontier conditions, because there is no public, the same behavior in a metropolis is unbearable.
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In a competitive world of limited resources, total freedom of individual action is intolerable
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In an approximate way, the logic of commons has been understood for a long time, perhaps since the discovery of agriculture or the invention of private property in real estate.
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Economists (and others) who are satisfied with nature-free equations develop a dangerous hubris about the potency of our species
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Every plausible policy must be followed by the question 'And then what?'
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Moreover, the practical recommendations deduced from ecological principles threaten the vested interests of commerce it is hardly surprising that the financial and political power created by these investments should be used sometimes to suppress environmental impact studies.
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The greatest folly is to accept expert statements uncritically. At the very least, we should always seek another opinion.
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Incommensurables cannot be compared.
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People are the quintessential element in all technology... Once we recognize the inescapable human nexus of all technology our attitude toward the reliability problem is fundamentally changed.
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The population problem has no technical solution it requires a fundamental extension in morality.
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A finite world can support only a finite population therefore, population growth must eventually equal zero.
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Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons.
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