[Darkphibre]

I found the book Rama Revealed by Arthur C. Clarke and Gentry Lee to be an unbelievable and depressing outlook on the short sidedness of man's assault on limited resources.

And then I was driving through Phoenix Arizona, looking out at the concrete landscape and concrete riverways, and realized just how right he was.

[vwoolf]

A large part of the reason Phoenix (the greater metro area) is as large as it is is because most of California restricts new housing construction so severely. I'd not live here if it weren't so much more affordable than California.

The parking-lot sprawl is appalling, and should be reversed, but California policies (like those in New York, Boston, etc.) have a lot to do with the growth of the Phoenix-to-Florida area.

[aporetics]

Interesting, but that’s just a proximal cause.

The question is what will it take for us all, collectively, to refrain from using whatever is it hand for whatever we happen to desire. Out of respect for what?

Most of the time this kind of self restraint does not really seem conceivable. Instead, in debates like this, we’ll defer to emissions and sequestration data, without ever confronting what what it is that led us to blithely create and deploy machines like this and shrug off the damage.

[sitkack]

You blame others for the bed you make and sleep in? What should we do to convince the Faunecians to stay in Cali?