FREE Where We Stand - A Surprising Look at the Real State of Our Planet, Seymour Garte, Ph.D.

Where We Stand - A Surprising Look at the Real State of Our Planet, Seymour Garte, Ph.D.

One of the triggers that prompted me to write this book was my attendance at a small symposium in New York on technology and democracy. The panel members were, by and large, liberal academic social scientists who talked about the loss of empowerment of ordinary people in making decisions regarding their own futures vis-a` -vis technological developments. One of the speakers concluded his remarks by saying that it is always a mistake to think that problems caused by technology, such as pollution, loss of biodiversity, or damage to the ecosystem, could ever be ‘‘fixed’’ by technological solutions. Only widespread and complete social overhaul (not defined in any further detail) could accomplish this. The speaker then went on to say that in fact ‘‘there have never been any successful attempts at reversing the declining
trend in environmental quality and public health, and therefore technology
simply cannot be trusted.’’

Not that these books are wrong. All these problems are real. But is that all there is? Hasn’t anything good happened? Where do we really stand in terms of our quality of life, both in an absolute sense and in relation to our recent past? If things have actually been getting so much worse for so long, why aren’t we all dead already? According to many environmentalists of the 1960s and 1970s, by now we should all be either dead or living in a horrible world without light, air, or natural resources. In school and college curricula, courses on ecology and environmental science are often little more than catalogs of natural catastrophes.

click this to download