Business Ecology, Part 2 - Worldviews
11/April/2007 12:01 Filed in: Weekly Column
11 April 2007; Volume 9, Issue 15
PDF copy
Last week we ended with the first side of the bookends on why I coined the concept of Business Ecology in the early 1980s. After I graduated from college, as I said a couple of weeks ago in “The Dark & Light Sides,” I entered into the oxymoron of Military Intelligence. While in Germany I wrote my first popular article on the environment for our unit newspaper. The title was something such as, “Group’s own Ecologist speaks out.”
There were significant differences between that early “clean up the nest” movement and our current global warming catastrophe. The first major difference was that the early environmental spokespeople were mostly trained as ecologists, which are really not specialists but have broad training in a number of fields. Today global warming is driven by specialists with deep knowledge in climatology and mathematical modeling, but without broader understanding of the depth and complexity of natural ecosystems. Of course in the context of global warming, what we are really talking about is dramatic lifestyle changes required to continue the age of materialist stuff.
Secondly, that earlier environmental concern was entirely related to present reality and could be analyzed by methods of descriptive observational science and empirical understanding. For example, during my military training in Massachusetts I got stuck in construction traffic on a bridge over a small stream on a hot muggy summer afternoon. The smell of organic chemicals emanating from this ditch was so foul that I was concerned that I might pass out from the fumes. Today the global warming discussion is about changes in temperatures around the world, but the supporting data comes from a leap of faith into theoretical science of a long uniform earth history of millions and billions of years. Buy definition ice cores from Patagonia or Greenland from which we draw our conclusions must be 6 - 8 hundred thousand years old, because only the flat earth society believes any differently.
The qualifier about the flat earth society is not science but bigotry, worldview bigotry. What the round earth society would like you to believe is that in their atheistic world, it only snows a few feet at a time, over countless thousands of years, and then presto you have an ice age, the remnants you see today in the Arctic Ocean, Greenland, Patagonia, Antarctica and elsewhere. What is really flat earth however, is to not create a model where it can snow 30 feet overnight, followed by maybe 50, or 100 feet the next day, and so on for a winter or two, and then you have an ice age, which would easily follow after a worldwide flood of the Bible’s Genesis Flood account.
We will come back to modeling later as this Business Ecology series continues.
When I got out of the Army, I was given the opportunity to study Environmental Science and Engineering at Washington State University. After that, instead of going to work for some type of consulting firm like all my fellow students, I had the opportunity to work in applied research at a Boeing joint venture, working on developing the world’s greatest and most energy efficient sewage sludge and industrial drying process. Eventually, after changing jobs a couple of times, I found myself shuffled out on the business street, when Ronald Reagan basically shut down the EPA early in his first administration. Using the business expertise I obtained in pursuit of a “Mediocre But Arrogant” (MBA) it was really a logical step into the one man field of Business Ecology, which it remains today, even though today there are beginning steps in planned ecological mimicry by those of the liberal progressive persuasion.
We posted on the Chronicle last week a link to an article describing the American religion as Moralist Therapeutic Deism. Since the article was on a Christian website you can understand the emphasis of God, even though this is not the God of the Bible but a Deity that sort of looks out for things and is there for us if and when we ever get into a real bind. I would say however, just as the Reformation made a point of throwing the idols out of the church to get back to God, in today’s culture the ultimate goal is not a Deity, but the Deity is supposed to help us with the ultimate purpose in life, and that is to collect material stuff. As a consequence building upon that article, I have redefined the American religion as Moralistic Therapeutic Deistic Materialism.
The vast majority of Americans believe in God, and that when they die they will go to heaven, because they are basically good people. Most spin the religion of self worship in some mainline amorphous sect of Christianity, or combining bits and pieces of whatever makes you feel good spiritually. In that respect the religion of whatever, becomes a religious worldview of fate without any absolute values other than personal temporal peace and affluence.
In the whatever religion the Biblical Worldview of continual stupendous change is outside any basis of understanding. Likewise, when your goal is to get a new pair of sneakers, a big screen TV, a fancy car, or to retire early to truly become self indulgent, the concept of global warming because of greenhouse gases is equally a whatever proposition.
While there are other worldviews that we could look at we will limit this discussion to the religion of Darwinism. This combined with human enlightenment as served as the model for naturalist atheistic materialism. In this worldview there is no god or gods, the supernatural as generally defined does not exist. Everything, given enough time, has an explanation of cause and effect that may be understood by mankind. What Darwinism doesn’t recognize however, is even cause and effect must by definition demand the creation of some sort of a rational philosophy in which chaos generates order, millions and billions of years not withstanding.
The current issue of worldwide global warming is really a morphological hybrid, between Darwinism and Moralistic Therapeutic Deist Materialism. To be a good global warming guru all you need to do is to pick and choose what you like from either worldviews or religions and you have a prescription to save our opulent lifestyle, while giving lip service to save the extinction of other species (of animals), and the world’s human poor, which may not be able to evolve at all outside the once temperate northern hemisphere.
This is where Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” finds its special niche (a true ecological term). If we all give lip service to a whole bunch of things, then we will be able to maintain our lifestyle and pass it on to succeeding generations. Gone however, is the nurturing aspects of Mother Earth that so drove the first environmental awakening. That was basically a back to land, back to roots type of thing. That paganism is now replaced with carbon credits and carbon neutral development, never questioning the fact that progressive development is not a constant, change (sometimes stupendous change) is the only constant. This current sustainability niche is petite bourgeois urban planning to its very core, and has little if any basis, knowledge, or wisdom of the diversity and the resiliency of natural ecosystems.
In that respect let us use the news and my learning experiences from last Friday, Good Friday, to put it somewhat in a Biblical, Business Ecology setting.
First, the really big news was the fact that the United Nations reported that global warming from increased greenhouse gases caused by consumption of fossil fuels was agreed upon by this world saving institution. The world is currently getting warmer, and by theoretical scientific assumptions the culprit is us, you and me. “We have met the enemy and he is us.” as Pogo said. This temperature change has been observed as well as an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide since the beginning of the industrial revolution, nothing earth shattering, except perhaps the fact that fixed carbon fossil fuels most would say were created by living things in a world much more biologically abundant than today. Ergo there had to be higher carbon dioxide levels present in the greenhouse of some distant past. (Perhaps a pre Genesis flood epoch, when even rain, much less snow was unknown.)
Following that on the evening news was a segment on the fact that we had just recently experienced a solar storm some ten times larger than had previously been recorded. The piece then went on to explain how that can cause disruptions in communications, make a beautiful aurora borealis, and even make your satellite receiver in your SUV do funny things. Never questioned was the fact that before these navigational aids in vehicles, people used a more earth friendly navigational convenience known as a map. If hopelessly lost sometimes even men were known to ask for directions, how about that for community building.
What was not brought up in the report was the fact that these solar storms and other changes in the sun, are having significant impacts upon the climate of planet earth. Some of these estimates attribute from 10% up to close to 40% of climate change could be associated with solar activity. But the point here is when you dismiss solar activity as a potential source of global warming you are really dumbing down an already simple model when compared to ecosystem energetics.
Then there was another piece about how the EPA again is reducing particulate emissions from automobile exhaust, and that through the recent Supreme Court ruling, the EPA now has been given the legal authority to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant. Particulate theoretically leads to albedo cooling effects and also as nuclei to aid condensation of water vapor into rain. Carbon dioxide helps maintain heat and by that nature increases the amount of water evaporation which could interact with the particulate, changing global rain fall patterns. These too should be part of your ecological model.
Since this was Good Friday, there was also a segment on the increasing numbers of Christians in China. These rises included the established legal churches as well as the illegal house churches. Now this may not have an effect upon Darwinian models, but if that atheistic concept is not true, and the Bible worldview that God created mankind in His image is true, then that may have a significant role on the world’s consumption of fossil fuels in all aspects. That is especially true when the closing line of the report basically stated, “In a world in which everything revolves around acquiring money and things, the Chinese may be finding that there are more important things in life.” If that miracle should happen in America also, who knows what may be the climatic consequences.
Earlier in the week I tuned across another channel where the speaker was talking about the fact that the American food supply was consumed 2000 miles from where it was produced. Way more calories are expended in food transport than present in the food being transported. Our entire food distribution system relies entirely on cheap energy. It may be nice to have fruits from Chile and New Zealand in our winter season, but if one were going to seriously talk about carbon deficits, one good place to start would be in the energetics of our food distributions system. However, from there it is just a short step to look at the carbon deficit of producing sneakers, or TV’s in China, than producing them in the good old USA. Globalism just doesn’t make much sense in a carbon neutral economy, or in any economy where people are respected as humans, not production machines.
Finally, I heard on a DVD I watched at a church home fellowship, that Steven Hawking, the gentleman with Lou Gehrig’s disease, who helped to give us the Big Bang and Black Hole cosmology can be sometimes seen near evangelical churches in England. I find that more than interesting because, I use his teaching from “A Brief History of Time” on dark matter to explain how heaven (his dark matter) may not be all that far away. Heaven or Dark Matter has an ecological effect on planet earth also helping to maintain our orbit around the sun.
If the Bible is the true revelation of God to this world as it claims for itself, then since the natural world was created by God through highly complex informational diversity, it would seem that this model would be still too difficult for us to simulate even in our most sophisticated computers. It would compare all of Microsoft’s software to a BB rolling around inside a basketball. Now to really make this modeling concept absurd, when we try to calculate numbers based not upon data gained from descriptive operational science, but instead we base those calculations of what we think happened hundred thousands of years ago and project them into a short term future, the one sure bet is that the numbers are off, seriously off more than likely by orders of magnitude in either direction.
The Bible states unequivocally that God controls the future, we do not. The current worldviews active in the global warming debate are pretty much alined either Darwinism, which states there is no God, or Moralistic Therapeutic Deistic Materialism, that believes that as long as I keep my stuff, everything will be just grand. Both of these worldviews seem to be true exponents of the flat earth society, since whether you believe the Bible says the earth is a sphere, in reality of the earth is a sphere. The Bible centered worldview does however provide the best explanation of a world in which an ice age follows a Biblical flood that completely altered the face of the earth and gave us fossils on the top of Mt. Everest. Try as you like, it is truly a leap of faith to get your Everest summit intellectually, with a uniformitarian Darwinian worldview, or a whatever religion.
PDF copy
Last week we ended with the first side of the bookends on why I coined the concept of Business Ecology in the early 1980s. After I graduated from college, as I said a couple of weeks ago in “The Dark & Light Sides,” I entered into the oxymoron of Military Intelligence. While in Germany I wrote my first popular article on the environment for our unit newspaper. The title was something such as, “Group’s own Ecologist speaks out.”
There were significant differences between that early “clean up the nest” movement and our current global warming catastrophe. The first major difference was that the early environmental spokespeople were mostly trained as ecologists, which are really not specialists but have broad training in a number of fields. Today global warming is driven by specialists with deep knowledge in climatology and mathematical modeling, but without broader understanding of the depth and complexity of natural ecosystems. Of course in the context of global warming, what we are really talking about is dramatic lifestyle changes required to continue the age of materialist stuff.
Secondly, that earlier environmental concern was entirely related to present reality and could be analyzed by methods of descriptive observational science and empirical understanding. For example, during my military training in Massachusetts I got stuck in construction traffic on a bridge over a small stream on a hot muggy summer afternoon. The smell of organic chemicals emanating from this ditch was so foul that I was concerned that I might pass out from the fumes. Today the global warming discussion is about changes in temperatures around the world, but the supporting data comes from a leap of faith into theoretical science of a long uniform earth history of millions and billions of years. Buy definition ice cores from Patagonia or Greenland from which we draw our conclusions must be 6 - 8 hundred thousand years old, because only the flat earth society believes any differently.
The qualifier about the flat earth society is not science but bigotry, worldview bigotry. What the round earth society would like you to believe is that in their atheistic world, it only snows a few feet at a time, over countless thousands of years, and then presto you have an ice age, the remnants you see today in the Arctic Ocean, Greenland, Patagonia, Antarctica and elsewhere. What is really flat earth however, is to not create a model where it can snow 30 feet overnight, followed by maybe 50, or 100 feet the next day, and so on for a winter or two, and then you have an ice age, which would easily follow after a worldwide flood of the Bible’s Genesis Flood account.
We will come back to modeling later as this Business Ecology series continues.
When I got out of the Army, I was given the opportunity to study Environmental Science and Engineering at Washington State University. After that, instead of going to work for some type of consulting firm like all my fellow students, I had the opportunity to work in applied research at a Boeing joint venture, working on developing the world’s greatest and most energy efficient sewage sludge and industrial drying process. Eventually, after changing jobs a couple of times, I found myself shuffled out on the business street, when Ronald Reagan basically shut down the EPA early in his first administration. Using the business expertise I obtained in pursuit of a “Mediocre But Arrogant” (MBA) it was really a logical step into the one man field of Business Ecology, which it remains today, even though today there are beginning steps in planned ecological mimicry by those of the liberal progressive persuasion.
We posted on the Chronicle last week a link to an article describing the American religion as Moralist Therapeutic Deism. Since the article was on a Christian website you can understand the emphasis of God, even though this is not the God of the Bible but a Deity that sort of looks out for things and is there for us if and when we ever get into a real bind. I would say however, just as the Reformation made a point of throwing the idols out of the church to get back to God, in today’s culture the ultimate goal is not a Deity, but the Deity is supposed to help us with the ultimate purpose in life, and that is to collect material stuff. As a consequence building upon that article, I have redefined the American religion as Moralistic Therapeutic Deistic Materialism.
The vast majority of Americans believe in God, and that when they die they will go to heaven, because they are basically good people. Most spin the religion of self worship in some mainline amorphous sect of Christianity, or combining bits and pieces of whatever makes you feel good spiritually. In that respect the religion of whatever, becomes a religious worldview of fate without any absolute values other than personal temporal peace and affluence.
In the whatever religion the Biblical Worldview of continual stupendous change is outside any basis of understanding. Likewise, when your goal is to get a new pair of sneakers, a big screen TV, a fancy car, or to retire early to truly become self indulgent, the concept of global warming because of greenhouse gases is equally a whatever proposition.
While there are other worldviews that we could look at we will limit this discussion to the religion of Darwinism. This combined with human enlightenment as served as the model for naturalist atheistic materialism. In this worldview there is no god or gods, the supernatural as generally defined does not exist. Everything, given enough time, has an explanation of cause and effect that may be understood by mankind. What Darwinism doesn’t recognize however, is even cause and effect must by definition demand the creation of some sort of a rational philosophy in which chaos generates order, millions and billions of years not withstanding.
The current issue of worldwide global warming is really a morphological hybrid, between Darwinism and Moralistic Therapeutic Deist Materialism. To be a good global warming guru all you need to do is to pick and choose what you like from either worldviews or religions and you have a prescription to save our opulent lifestyle, while giving lip service to save the extinction of other species (of animals), and the world’s human poor, which may not be able to evolve at all outside the once temperate northern hemisphere.
This is where Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” finds its special niche (a true ecological term). If we all give lip service to a whole bunch of things, then we will be able to maintain our lifestyle and pass it on to succeeding generations. Gone however, is the nurturing aspects of Mother Earth that so drove the first environmental awakening. That was basically a back to land, back to roots type of thing. That paganism is now replaced with carbon credits and carbon neutral development, never questioning the fact that progressive development is not a constant, change (sometimes stupendous change) is the only constant. This current sustainability niche is petite bourgeois urban planning to its very core, and has little if any basis, knowledge, or wisdom of the diversity and the resiliency of natural ecosystems.
In that respect let us use the news and my learning experiences from last Friday, Good Friday, to put it somewhat in a Biblical, Business Ecology setting.
First, the really big news was the fact that the United Nations reported that global warming from increased greenhouse gases caused by consumption of fossil fuels was agreed upon by this world saving institution. The world is currently getting warmer, and by theoretical scientific assumptions the culprit is us, you and me. “We have met the enemy and he is us.” as Pogo said. This temperature change has been observed as well as an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide since the beginning of the industrial revolution, nothing earth shattering, except perhaps the fact that fixed carbon fossil fuels most would say were created by living things in a world much more biologically abundant than today. Ergo there had to be higher carbon dioxide levels present in the greenhouse of some distant past. (Perhaps a pre Genesis flood epoch, when even rain, much less snow was unknown.)
Following that on the evening news was a segment on the fact that we had just recently experienced a solar storm some ten times larger than had previously been recorded. The piece then went on to explain how that can cause disruptions in communications, make a beautiful aurora borealis, and even make your satellite receiver in your SUV do funny things. Never questioned was the fact that before these navigational aids in vehicles, people used a more earth friendly navigational convenience known as a map. If hopelessly lost sometimes even men were known to ask for directions, how about that for community building.
What was not brought up in the report was the fact that these solar storms and other changes in the sun, are having significant impacts upon the climate of planet earth. Some of these estimates attribute from 10% up to close to 40% of climate change could be associated with solar activity. But the point here is when you dismiss solar activity as a potential source of global warming you are really dumbing down an already simple model when compared to ecosystem energetics.
Then there was another piece about how the EPA again is reducing particulate emissions from automobile exhaust, and that through the recent Supreme Court ruling, the EPA now has been given the legal authority to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant. Particulate theoretically leads to albedo cooling effects and also as nuclei to aid condensation of water vapor into rain. Carbon dioxide helps maintain heat and by that nature increases the amount of water evaporation which could interact with the particulate, changing global rain fall patterns. These too should be part of your ecological model.
Since this was Good Friday, there was also a segment on the increasing numbers of Christians in China. These rises included the established legal churches as well as the illegal house churches. Now this may not have an effect upon Darwinian models, but if that atheistic concept is not true, and the Bible worldview that God created mankind in His image is true, then that may have a significant role on the world’s consumption of fossil fuels in all aspects. That is especially true when the closing line of the report basically stated, “In a world in which everything revolves around acquiring money and things, the Chinese may be finding that there are more important things in life.” If that miracle should happen in America also, who knows what may be the climatic consequences.
Earlier in the week I tuned across another channel where the speaker was talking about the fact that the American food supply was consumed 2000 miles from where it was produced. Way more calories are expended in food transport than present in the food being transported. Our entire food distribution system relies entirely on cheap energy. It may be nice to have fruits from Chile and New Zealand in our winter season, but if one were going to seriously talk about carbon deficits, one good place to start would be in the energetics of our food distributions system. However, from there it is just a short step to look at the carbon deficit of producing sneakers, or TV’s in China, than producing them in the good old USA. Globalism just doesn’t make much sense in a carbon neutral economy, or in any economy where people are respected as humans, not production machines.
Finally, I heard on a DVD I watched at a church home fellowship, that Steven Hawking, the gentleman with Lou Gehrig’s disease, who helped to give us the Big Bang and Black Hole cosmology can be sometimes seen near evangelical churches in England. I find that more than interesting because, I use his teaching from “A Brief History of Time” on dark matter to explain how heaven (his dark matter) may not be all that far away. Heaven or Dark Matter has an ecological effect on planet earth also helping to maintain our orbit around the sun.
If the Bible is the true revelation of God to this world as it claims for itself, then since the natural world was created by God through highly complex informational diversity, it would seem that this model would be still too difficult for us to simulate even in our most sophisticated computers. It would compare all of Microsoft’s software to a BB rolling around inside a basketball. Now to really make this modeling concept absurd, when we try to calculate numbers based not upon data gained from descriptive operational science, but instead we base those calculations of what we think happened hundred thousands of years ago and project them into a short term future, the one sure bet is that the numbers are off, seriously off more than likely by orders of magnitude in either direction.
The Bible states unequivocally that God controls the future, we do not. The current worldviews active in the global warming debate are pretty much alined either Darwinism, which states there is no God, or Moralistic Therapeutic Deistic Materialism, that believes that as long as I keep my stuff, everything will be just grand. Both of these worldviews seem to be true exponents of the flat earth society, since whether you believe the Bible says the earth is a sphere, in reality of the earth is a sphere. The Bible centered worldview does however provide the best explanation of a world in which an ice age follows a Biblical flood that completely altered the face of the earth and gave us fossils on the top of Mt. Everest. Try as you like, it is truly a leap of faith to get your Everest summit intellectually, with a uniformitarian Darwinian worldview, or a whatever religion.