Memories of the 28th Century

I recently saw posters looking for canvassers to collect money for Clean Water Action. I suspect that this is a scam, because in the U.S.A. surface water is cleaner now than it was before Europeans started to settle here. There are a few particular places where the water is polluted, but just fifty years ago much of the surface water was polluted. I still wouldn’t drink from most streams, but that’s because I know what giardia is, and there are problems around farms and after rain storms, but there has always been pollution from ground stuff after rain, and giardia is endemic in beaver and very common in bears.

After thinking about that a bit I started to wonder if people have forgotten how much dirtier the world was just a few years ago. Most people have read about London fogs in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but it hasn’t been mentioned as much that all cities in the developed world had a brown cloud above them until some time in the 1970’s. There still are some cities with clouds, but those are not common, because chimneys don’t pour smoke into the atmosphere constantly, and automobiles rarely produce any noticeable amount of smoke.

I am writing in the U.S.A., but the same is true in most of the world; although China still does pour out a reasonable amount of air and water pollution. We should keep this in perspective. It wasn’t just factories and machinery that produced pollution; it was pretty much everything that humans did. Heating and cooking have traditionally been done on smoky fires of coal, oil, or wood. And it hasn’t just been domestic and industrial fires and processes.

Until a few hundred years ago the American Indians regularly burned large areas of forest, either complete or or just ground fires, that cleared between the trees. Those fires were so extensive that the smoke was sometimes smelled in Europe. Similar burning is still common in South America and parts of Africa. The ashes make the soil much more fertile, and without the burning there wouldn’t have been much agriculture in those areas.

To get back to the beginning, I wonder what Clean Water Action acts about. There isn’t much more that can be done to clean up water in the U.S., except to make sure that the regulations are followed. I looked at their website (link below), and there isn’t much about action to clean water, just a bunch of cheering for clean water. If they were doing something about the plastic bags floating in the oceans, then I might take them seriously, but no one has yet figured out how to handle those bags.

But there is one kind of pollution that has increased in the last few decades: noise pollution. And not much is being done about it. Personally, I hate noise. There are times when the birds are completely drowned out by things. Even though automobiles are quitter, in great numbers they create a lot of noise. Air conditioners make more noise than anything should. And just the teeming billions of humans make noise. In machinery noise indicates that energy is being wasted. Maybe we should do more to quiet things down.

There are laws against making excessive noise, but they aren’t enforced. Then there are some people who seem to like making noise. I sometimes fin it amusing that motorcycles make noise like someone having extremely bad gas as they tear down the roads. At least they don’t also produce that fragrance. Someone has come out with some quiet blowers for moving trash on sidewalks, etc., but such technology hasn’t been applied to other machinery. Maybe I should have listened to more loud music, then nothing would be loud anymore.

Another kind of pollution that has increased as time has passed (or maybe I’m just becoming more cynical) is thought pollution. I was thinking about people being conned into believing conspiracy theories that are just distractions from the real problems. Maybe there is a conspiracy behind that. And it turns out that I’m not the only one who has thought about thought pollution. That blog that I found is about the author venting his spleen about someone being wrong about climate change, but the author is the one who is wrong (I posted to his blog, so it’s O.K., see copied post below), but he introduced the idea of there being “good” and “bad” epistemology. I am far from an expert on epistemology, but I think that it refers to knowledge, rather than to opinions, and I posted to that effect. It’s something that we should all think about, epistemology that is. We may never understand why we know what we do, but it is good to think about such things.





http://www.cleanwateraction.org/

I’m not the only one who has thought about thought pollution.
http://thehumanist.com/magazine/marc...ught-pollution


You really put your foot into it. Your epistemology is bad (to put it in your terms). The evidence is that "climate change" that we have seen in the last several decades is part of a normal and ordinary cycle in climate. There are so many cycles involved in climate that it is impossible to determine which is contributing what. You might want to look at this article
http://www.citylab.com/weather/2014/...arming/374807/

The article clearly says that the changes in the last few decades were caused by cycles, but it asserts that human activity has caused climate change, as if that were a repetition of a religious formula.

But I like your concept of good and bad epistemology. I don't claim to be a great expert on epistemology, but it had been my impression that it is the study of knowledge, or something like that. It had been my understanding that fallacies are not knowledge. One might mistakenly believe a falsehood, but it isn't knowledge, or is it? Maybe I should look into whether a false belief is knowledge; it would fit my blog.