The Gaia concept and reverence for Mother Earth aren't working. We need a self-interested human perspective. We're shitting in our livingrooms and ignoring it.

We subvert nature's laws when we overbreed and push out other species from their environments, thereby impoverishing our environment and threatening our survival as a species. Species cooperate to produce a surviveable, even comfortable environment. The more species in a given environment, the more stable and productive it is. It is unfortunate that we have no natural enemies, other than ourselves, to keep our specie in check.

I'd like to live in a world that has about half the population that it has now, and zero population growth mandated by law. We need negative population growth right now. Children should be born only to those whom society can certify would be good parents. Children are human beings and should be accorded all the rights and opportunities as adults. They shouldn't be brought into the world without careful consideration of how they will be raised, otherwise their rights may be violated. Parents don't own their children, but they often act that way and will only teach them what they believe. This can be child abuse. The decisions of only one or two parents are too limiting on the lives of children. It takes more than Hillary Clinton's village to raise a child; it takes a whole society. Society should set standards on how children are to be raised, taking into consideration all the diverse elements within it. No one group's views should prevail.

Perhaps you don't realize it, but the higher cost of living, pollution, more diseases, global warming, famines, wars, etc., are a direct result of overpopulation. We are competing among ourselves for ever scarcer resources. We seem not to want to face this crucial situation. Unfortunately, our religions don't offer any solution; they often are the problem that forces us to breed like rats, flies, rabbits. Without the pressure of population we could all have more at less cost and not threaten the biosphere. Our lives could be slower with more time for pleasures and self-improvements of all kinds. It saddens and angers me that we're destroying the wilderness and using up natural resources just to breed more of us, and for what reason?

We can't fully own our property. If you own land often the water and mineral rights are restricted by government or owned outright by others, usually large companies. And you can't buy them. Neither can you prevent them from ruining your land if they choose to exercise their rights to take these resources. And you must pay property taxes to government or risk losing it. How did we lose these rights?

Water rights are a more complicated issue because underground water, unlike minerals, runs under the land and may vary due to weather conditions or other uses of the aquifer at some distance. Thus it becomes a public resource that can't be owned or restricted by individual entities. Yet each individual owner must have some usage rights guaranteed to the water under their land.

There has been an ecological and economic suggestion that large tracts of land owned by individuals, families or corporations should be taxed at higher rates for the public good, but this might lead to these tracts being sold off and broken up because the owners can't afford to pay these taxes. It would seem that unused, undeveloped tracts of land should be considered a valuable national resource. Breaking them up and offering them for development is ecologically unsound.

Or as with many tribal peoples, should no individual be able to privately own land? It seems that owning the earth is ridiculous; that it might as well own us. Or that we share it. After all, we're only here for a short time - we come from it and go back to it.

America's national lands policies have been a travesty for centuries. We collectively own these lands that have been leased out to the lowest bidders at our expense. For well over a century lumber, mining and water companies have been allowed to glean resources from these lands at costs far below the market value because they have successfully lobbied Congress to create favorable contracts, for example, some in effect for 99 years. So, the biggest offender is our own government authorities who have sold off our birthright of national resources and impoverished us while businesses reap large profits by selling the finished goods back to us at highly inflated prices. This may not be the worst result; the mismanagement of these lands by selling their resources has wreaked ecological havoc. Our national forests have been considered nothing more than lumber and ore resources, rather than environmental resources and a birthright for all the people for posterity. They should be made to last as long as there is an America.

Let's use volcanos for recycling - they're already existing incenerators, and we wouldn't need to burn precious fuel. Just chuck that old VCR and computer into the caldera and watch the fireworks!

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