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May 15, 2002

The bugs of Mars I love Ken Layne’s stuff, because I’m a pushover for people who are consistently funny and slightly unhinged. But this is is below par. The Glenn Reynolds column he’s linking to is an entirely reasonable overview of the environmental issues entailed in exploring Mars. Layne manages to make it sound like a what-will-those-eco-crazies-think-of-next soundbite, complete with imaginary “lawsuits” that Ken appears to have pulled out of his own ass.

Smart people have been thinking hard about this issue for decades, and trying to talk sense about it despite a news media whose consistent impulse is to yuk it up. Like his friend Matt Welch, Layne is at his best when he impatiently pushes past stale old left-right, red team-blue team gameplaying and says, look, there’s a much more interesting problem over there, so howsabout all the smart people pack up and go play with it instead. Here, on the other hand, he’s taking a complicated, challenging issue we’ll be dealing with some decades from now (if we’re lucky), and jokingly reframing it as a boring controversy from 1979. Okay, whassamatta, ain’t I got no sensa yuma. No, said the penguin, it’s just ice cream.

UPDATE, May 16: Ken responds, hotly setting forth his “Liberal Environmentalist Credentials.” But I wasn’t yanking his chain in defense of “liberal environmentalism.” I was yanking his chain in defense of science. (Remember, we’re entirely serious around here, 23.9345 hours a day. Quant suff!) [09:34 PM]

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Comments on The bugs of Mars:

Bob Webber ::: (view all by) ::: May 16, 2002, 06:55 PM:

To paraphrase a former thesis supervisor of mine, "The problem with the term `environmentalism' is that an `environment' is a context, and when we say, `environmentalism' we are thinking of `our' environment and treat it as if we are entitled to control it as if its other inhabitants were `ours' to do with as we please."

Not sure how this fits in with all the being "funny" that's going on, except that we can't be environmentalists on Mars until we get there, by this thinking.

David Moles ::: (view all by) ::: May 20, 2002, 08:37 PM:

Odd -- I thought "environmentalism" was a term generally applied to those who believe we are not entitled to control our environment as if its other inhabitants were ours to do with as we please.

Then there's the question of how far "our environment" extends. Take the Stephen Baxter or Greg Egan approach, for instance; the distance from Earth to Mars doesn't even register on that kind of scale. :)