I have never seen this movie. And I am happy about that.
I saw E.T. when it came out in theaters in the summer of 1982 when I was 8 years old. I seem to recall I thought it was sort of boring and I haven’t watched it since. I was nerdy kid who loved Star Wars, Buck Rogers (the cheesy TV show), and Doctor Who (the Tom Baker one), so it’s safe to say that I was the right age and demographic for it. I guess I liked my aliens to be less passive and helpless.
Yeah, seems like a movie aimed at small children and politically liberal single women with cats.
Otherwise forgettable
Cute kid and a quite a good screen test for someone so young.
By contrast, the young Indian kid in the second Indiana Jones movie was just dreadful. Also, I would have liked Spielberg’s remake of War of the Worlds, except that young Dakota Fanning’s high pitched screaming and squealing was just unbearable. She’s has turned in a number to good performances in her youth, so I have to chalk that mistake up to Spielberg’s direction and editing.
I’m not a fan of the movie. But I think the screen test is phenomenal.
Politically conservative single woman here – with lots of cats, feral cat colony caretaker, and TNR supporter as well. I loved ET but I’m not too comfortable with using kids to make big entertainment bucks. Drew Barrymore, especially, had a difficult time after E.T. Having said that, the kids seem to have survived and prospered. That audition video makes me want to see the movie again.
A friend of mine (also conservative) with lots of cats as well, said to me, “Yeah, people make fun of us. But why should we care? We have cats.” Exactly.
}}} Buck Rogers (the cheesy TV show)
Gil Gerard, who played Buck Rogers, regularly does a solo panel @ DragonCon (Atlanta, Labor Day weekend). He’s kinda fun, I often see his panel. It’s mostly him answering questions and reminiscing about his career as both actor and other things he’s done. He lives in the Atlanta area, so he doesn’t need to travel much for it. He’s getting old (70+), so DC is about the only thing he does.
One of the funnier stories he has is where, when he was in college (late 50s or so), he was part of a singing quartet (think “The Four Preps”), popular at the time. They weren’t a wide-ranging group, but they were popular in their own area.
Well, at one point, The Four Preps were at his college, and they actually opened with them, and even joined them for a couple numbers, according to Girard.
Some years later, he’s in the office of Glen Larsen, the producer/creator of Buck Rogers (also associated with a number of other shows, such as Magnum PI, Knight Rider, BJ & The Bear, and The Fall Guy, to name but a few) — he’s being interviewed for the part, mind you — and sees a picture of The Four Preps on his wall, and asks about it. Seems Glen Larsen was one of The Four Preps.
Small world. 😛
ET was ok. What I’ve always despised was when Spielberg “updated” it, to improve the effects to something more modern. He “edited” the FBI agents to remove the guns they were wielding.
Speilberg often does ultra-liberal crap like that.
For Amistad, he did nothing to point out that all the evidence suggests that his “hero”, a victim of slavery, seems to have moved to the West Indies and become a slave trader himself. There are counterarguments, but intellectual honesty would call attention to that.
Similarly, for Schindler’s list — at the end, it has Schindler leaving, fleeing the oncoming allies, with his Jews just sitting there awaiting their fate. The REAL Schindler ARMED his Jews, so they could resist being retaken or otherwise mistreated as helpless victims of whoever came along.
As with so many others of the strong Left, Spielberg is intellectually dishonest about guns.
As to “kiddie auditions”, iirc, the BR of Forrest Gump has the audition for Haley Joel Osment (he played Forrest Jr. — which can win you some bar bets, if you set them up right). Osment later became famous for The Sixth Sense, about 5y later.
He’s aged strangely — his head seems disproportionately large — but he’s still around.
Eva Marie, we just adopted a cat from a Cat Colony. Took awhile to win her trust, but we made a commitment when we adopted her. She is ours, and she is Home with us. Sweet Cat, very affectionate when she thinks it is time to be fed. Other wise, she enjoys laying around, close to us but not too close. Sasha and our other cat Spencer get along great.
I haven’t watched many Spielberg movies, but when I have, I’ve wished the kids would die.
(Fabulous sound track, too: “Take the Fifth, take the Fifth, don’t recall, don’t remember…” endlessly, to hip-hop….)
Eva Marie, conservative cat lover, LOL. Yes, I took a cheap shot (a guilty pleasure) and your riposte is entirely appropriate.
I do have strong opinions against feral cat colonies, of which there are many where I live. The justifications seem to include:
1) “ownership” of animals is inappropriate, they should be free
2) I feel sorry for them living out on their own, but I don’t have resources to allow all of them to live in my house
3) therefore I sustain them with food, some of which goes to undesirable animals (rats in my area)
It can be aggravating for neighbors to have to live with the choices made by the feral cat colony supporters. We get messes in our yard and our kids are bit by fleas. It detracts from the ambiance and it seems like people are forgetting everything we’ve learned about how disease spreads.
It’s also hard on wild birds. If the cats had to “eat or starve” they’d soon come to a balance. Instead the cats are supported with extra rations which give them a higher population level than they’d have in a natural environment. The high level of cats makes for increased predation on the birds.
It’s a “tragedy of the commons” situation. When something is owned, the owner tends to care for it. If something is “owned by the public”, the tendency is for abusive exploitation in order to get one’s share and a bit more.
Is there a defense of feral cat colonies, other than feeling sorry for cute animals?
I freely acknowledge that feeling sorry for cute animals IS a defense, just not one that I personally agree with.
JimNorCal–
Eva Marie noted that she supports TNR, which stands for trap-neuter-return. It involves trapping feral cats in a colony, having them neutered (many vets offer a discount for neutering ferals), and then returning them to the colony. Because there will be no more kittens, the size of the colony will shrink, but no new cats will come in to replace the older ones. I have friends (husband and wife) who live about half a mile from me who took care of a feral colony that started out with about two dozen cats, was down to 12 within two years, and now has just one elderly orange cat. It may be that the folks in your neighborhood feed feral cats but don’t practice TNR.
My friends, incidentally, are bird lovers as well as cat lovers, so have always kept an eye on their colony cats and placed their bird feeders out of kitty reach. And I plead guilty to working with a local no-kill cat shelter. We raise money in order to spay and neuter house cats belonging to people on limited incomes as well as provide TNR for feral cats.
We help cat owners on limited incomes because not all cats in or at the edges of a colony are feral; many are tame cats who were dumped by irresponsible owners. Both of my cats were thrown out by people who didn’t bother (or couldn’t afford) to have them neutered: the male was kicked out because the urine of an intact tomcat has a strong odor; the female was abandoned when she got pregnant. Both were identified as tame house cats when we trapped them– I adopted them and they’ve been wonderful pets. I don’t allow them outside because of coyotes and crazy drivers as well as concern for the local songbirds.
I hope this helps; proper (emphasis on “proper”!) maintenance of a feral cat colony is more than just feeling sorry for cute animals.
JimNorCal: I made my comment because I don’t want to cede the warm and caring ground to the liberals. Long ago ecology was called conservation. Then the liberals took over, renamed it so wildlife management didn’t remind you of conservatives, and pushed extreme measures. So conservatives became repulsed and locked themselves (as well as were locked out) out of the debate.
As far as feral cats are concerned, the only practical solution is feral colony management with strict TNR.
And to everyone reading this, if you love birds, I suggest you get involved. This isn’t something that requires a big federal program. It’s a question of putting your time and effort where your mouth is (if you love birds that is).
Where I live, the pound charges $95 for surrendering any animal and makes people feel like subhumans for doing so.
Finding a vet to put down healthy feral cats, paid for privately, is a soul destroying experience.
Trapping cats is very easy with the aid of a drop trap. In our area they are available for free. I have several and lend them out. In our area spaying/neutering is sometimes free and sometimes costs $25. Then it’s a question of feeding, monitoring and TNRing any newcomers.
There haven’t been any kittens since I started seriously managing my colony.
(Also, in our area, if you TNR a pet, there are no consequences.)
If you think your situation is bad, Google Hawaii’s feral cat problem.
I hear Facebook and it’s constellation of apps have been down for several hours. Something to do with a bad BGP configuration change that was pushed live. Of course people are speculating that it has something to do with the Facebook whistleblower set to testify to congress tomorrow.
It’s the “Return” part of TNR that I object to. Put those cats somewhere that is not in my neighborhood, please!
Thanks for your thoughtful replies
This is good video about a great song off of what is in my opinion the greatest rock record of all time ‘Who’s Next’ by the Who.
JimNorCal: “It’s the Return part of TNR” that you object to. Wouldn’t you rather have a spayed/neutered cat in your neighborhood than the opposite? People are taking the cats already there, spaying/neutering them and releasing them back where they were trapped. I think that’s at least a marginally better solution. If you’re asking them to release them in a different neighborhood, that’s not going to happen. Where I live, it’s illegal (not that it’s stopped people from dumping their unwanted pets.) It’s not a perfect solution but it’s better than having a full blown feral cat mating season.
Eva Marie noted that she supports TNR, which stands for trap-neuter-return.
I thought she was referring to The New Republic, which I began reading in high school, though I haven’t read it much in the 21st century.
Hello. This discussion of managing feral cats is interesting. I don’t live in a place in which it’s a large issue, but if I did, TNR sounds sensible. Probably some of the old ladies around here would object, but too bad. I’ve gotten a little less sentimental about suburban animals than I used to be.
I imagine the ‘R’ part is an important component of the whole thing because, for one thing, if you mix neutered back in with non-neutered, then the return on investment of energy for the toms, for example, is reduced in the aggregate across the colony as a whole, so that will bring down the propagation rates. But further, I suspect that if the neutered cats are returned, it might make the rest of the colony members feel more reassured. I don’t know very much about cat psychology, but I could easily picture a cat colony getting a little nervous over time as members are slowly taken away and disappear permanently. I’d rather have less nervous than more nervous cats around, all else being equal.
“Wouldn’t you rather have a spayed/neutered cat in your neighborhood than the opposite?”
My preference is to have zero unowned domestic pets. Not a choice between virile(?) and neutered.
If I was objecting to packs of feral dogs no one would think twice, I imagine. Since cats aren’t dangerous to humans in general the impetus to remove them is less. They’re still a blight on the neighborhood, a potential disease vector and an imposition of the moral sensibilities of one group onto others.
I guess I’m just Attila The Hun on this issue.
Feral and free range domestic cats’ wails are particularly unnerving. Close enough to the cry of a human child to be extremely creepy when heard at night.
This video of a cat barking at dogs then converting to a “meow” when it realizes a human is behind it is amazing. It’s like a bit from a Loony Tunes cartoon.
Intact versus neutered. I agree with you that no free roaming cats is best. But either through toxoplasmosis or their inherent cuteness, cats are treated differently.
Richard Aubrey posted yesterday that some of our political opposites seem to be virtue signaling to themselves, and there is no term (yet) to describe that. I agree.
Bryan Lovely suggested “self righteousness”, but I think that’s a bit different.
I came up with “self-authenticating”, a form of moral narcissism.
At this point, maybe “virtue signalling to themselves” says it best.
Wesson,
“Self-authenticating” is an accurate, concise way to address the behavior.
}}} Long ago ecology was called conservation. Then the liberals took over, renamed it so wildlife management didn’t remind you of conservatives, and pushed extreme measures. So conservatives became repulsed and locked themselves (as well as were locked out) out of the debate.
Not to denigrate anything, here, but humans vastly overestimate their capacity to really understand “ecologies” as a whole.
One of the better examples is the continual screwups at Yellowstone, one of the longest “managed” ecologies in human history to this point… The late Michael Crichton detailed this history
The other most obvious failures were the two efforts to set up sustained “closed systems” — aka “Biosphere 2” — that were marked literally from the outset with examples of cheating. http://scihi.org/biosphere-2/
OBloody Proofreader Hell,
We humans also tend to greatly exaggerate our ability to impact ecology. We have a human-sized perspective and, therefore, have a bias towards imagining everything as human-sized. It’s a great big planet and we are comparatively tiny.
We also tend to extrapolate our own experiences outward. I live in a somewhat crowded, urban area with lots of pollution, waste and news, therefore we humans are a blight on the planet. There’s a lot more planet than there are humans.
If you live in New York City landfill for human waste is a big problem. If you live in Topeka, Kansas it’s a non-issue. I once read that every living human could be given 1,000 sq. ft. of living space and we would all fit in the state of Texas. It was such an incredible statistic I did not believe it and so I looked up the area of Texas and the population of the world and it’s true!
Now humans can do big things. We can wipe out species, even big species like the American Buffalo. We can wreak havoc on rivers, streams, portions of oceans. We can pollute vast swaths of air, greatly impacting large regions. We absolutely need to be good stewards of the environment, but we tend to over exaggerate the little things we do in our little lives, and our impact on the planet, especially over time.
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I have never seen this movie. And I am happy about that.
I saw E.T. when it came out in theaters in the summer of 1982 when I was 8 years old. I seem to recall I thought it was sort of boring and I haven’t watched it since. I was nerdy kid who loved Star Wars, Buck Rogers (the cheesy TV show), and Doctor Who (the Tom Baker one), so it’s safe to say that I was the right age and demographic for it. I guess I liked my aliens to be less passive and helpless.
Yeah, seems like a movie aimed at small children and politically liberal single women with cats.
Otherwise forgettable
Cute kid and a quite a good screen test for someone so young.
By contrast, the young Indian kid in the second Indiana Jones movie was just dreadful. Also, I would have liked Spielberg’s remake of War of the Worlds, except that young Dakota Fanning’s high pitched screaming and squealing was just unbearable. She’s has turned in a number to good performances in her youth, so I have to chalk that mistake up to Spielberg’s direction and editing.
I’m not a fan of the movie. But I think the screen test is phenomenal.
Politically conservative single woman here – with lots of cats, feral cat colony caretaker, and TNR supporter as well. I loved ET but I’m not too comfortable with using kids to make big entertainment bucks. Drew Barrymore, especially, had a difficult time after E.T. Having said that, the kids seem to have survived and prospered. That audition video makes me want to see the movie again.
A friend of mine (also conservative) with lots of cats as well, said to me, “Yeah, people make fun of us. But why should we care? We have cats.” Exactly.
}}} Buck Rogers (the cheesy TV show)
Gil Gerard, who played Buck Rogers, regularly does a solo panel @ DragonCon (Atlanta, Labor Day weekend). He’s kinda fun, I often see his panel. It’s mostly him answering questions and reminiscing about his career as both actor and other things he’s done. He lives in the Atlanta area, so he doesn’t need to travel much for it. He’s getting old (70+), so DC is about the only thing he does.
One of the funnier stories he has is where, when he was in college (late 50s or so), he was part of a singing quartet (think “The Four Preps”), popular at the time. They weren’t a wide-ranging group, but they were popular in their own area.
Well, at one point, The Four Preps were at his college, and they actually opened with them, and even joined them for a couple numbers, according to Girard.
Some years later, he’s in the office of Glen Larsen, the producer/creator of Buck Rogers (also associated with a number of other shows, such as Magnum PI, Knight Rider, BJ & The Bear, and The Fall Guy, to name but a few) — he’s being interviewed for the part, mind you — and sees a picture of The Four Preps on his wall, and asks about it. Seems Glen Larsen was one of The Four Preps.
Small world. 😛
ET was ok. What I’ve always despised was when Spielberg “updated” it, to improve the effects to something more modern. He “edited” the FBI agents to remove the guns they were wielding.
Speilberg often does ultra-liberal crap like that.
For Amistad, he did nothing to point out that all the evidence suggests that his “hero”, a victim of slavery, seems to have moved to the West Indies and become a slave trader himself. There are counterarguments, but intellectual honesty would call attention to that.
Similarly, for Schindler’s list — at the end, it has Schindler leaving, fleeing the oncoming allies, with his Jews just sitting there awaiting their fate. The REAL Schindler ARMED his Jews, so they could resist being retaken or otherwise mistreated as helpless victims of whoever came along.
As with so many others of the strong Left, Spielberg is intellectually dishonest about guns.
As to “kiddie auditions”, iirc, the BR of Forrest Gump has the audition for Haley Joel Osment (he played Forrest Jr. — which can win you some bar bets, if you set them up right). Osment later became famous for The Sixth Sense, about 5y later.
He’s aged strangely — his head seems disproportionately large — but he’s still around.
Eva Marie, we just adopted a cat from a Cat Colony. Took awhile to win her trust, but we made a commitment when we adopted her. She is ours, and she is Home with us. Sweet Cat, very affectionate when she thinks it is time to be fed. Other wise, she enjoys laying around, close to us but not too close. Sasha and our other cat Spencer get along great.
I haven’t watched many Spielberg movies, but when I have, I’ve wished the kids would die.
John Durham, Go Home…
…but take yer time, take yer time…
https://twitter.com/JohnWHuber/status/1443706518789148679
(Fabulous sound track, too: “Take the Fifth, take the Fifth, don’t recall, don’t remember…” endlessly, to hip-hop….)
Eva Marie, conservative cat lover, LOL. Yes, I took a cheap shot (a guilty pleasure) and your riposte is entirely appropriate.
I do have strong opinions against feral cat colonies, of which there are many where I live. The justifications seem to include:
1) “ownership” of animals is inappropriate, they should be free
2) I feel sorry for them living out on their own, but I don’t have resources to allow all of them to live in my house
3) therefore I sustain them with food, some of which goes to undesirable animals (rats in my area)
It can be aggravating for neighbors to have to live with the choices made by the feral cat colony supporters. We get messes in our yard and our kids are bit by fleas. It detracts from the ambiance and it seems like people are forgetting everything we’ve learned about how disease spreads.
It’s also hard on wild birds. If the cats had to “eat or starve” they’d soon come to a balance. Instead the cats are supported with extra rations which give them a higher population level than they’d have in a natural environment. The high level of cats makes for increased predation on the birds.
It’s a “tragedy of the commons” situation. When something is owned, the owner tends to care for it. If something is “owned by the public”, the tendency is for abusive exploitation in order to get one’s share and a bit more.
Is there a defense of feral cat colonies, other than feeling sorry for cute animals?
I freely acknowledge that feeling sorry for cute animals IS a defense, just not one that I personally agree with.
JimNorCal–
Eva Marie noted that she supports TNR, which stands for trap-neuter-return. It involves trapping feral cats in a colony, having them neutered (many vets offer a discount for neutering ferals), and then returning them to the colony. Because there will be no more kittens, the size of the colony will shrink, but no new cats will come in to replace the older ones. I have friends (husband and wife) who live about half a mile from me who took care of a feral colony that started out with about two dozen cats, was down to 12 within two years, and now has just one elderly orange cat. It may be that the folks in your neighborhood feed feral cats but don’t practice TNR.
Here is a short (3-1/2 minute) video about TNR: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IarsSTLUdTw&ab_channel=AlleyCatAllies
My friends, incidentally, are bird lovers as well as cat lovers, so have always kept an eye on their colony cats and placed their bird feeders out of kitty reach. And I plead guilty to working with a local no-kill cat shelter. We raise money in order to spay and neuter house cats belonging to people on limited incomes as well as provide TNR for feral cats.
We help cat owners on limited incomes because not all cats in or at the edges of a colony are feral; many are tame cats who were dumped by irresponsible owners. Both of my cats were thrown out by people who didn’t bother (or couldn’t afford) to have them neutered: the male was kicked out because the urine of an intact tomcat has a strong odor; the female was abandoned when she got pregnant. Both were identified as tame house cats when we trapped them– I adopted them and they’ve been wonderful pets. I don’t allow them outside because of coyotes and crazy drivers as well as concern for the local songbirds.
I hope this helps; proper (emphasis on “proper”!) maintenance of a feral cat colony is more than just feeling sorry for cute animals.
JimNorCal: I made my comment because I don’t want to cede the warm and caring ground to the liberals. Long ago ecology was called conservation. Then the liberals took over, renamed it so wildlife management didn’t remind you of conservatives, and pushed extreme measures. So conservatives became repulsed and locked themselves (as well as were locked out) out of the debate.
As far as feral cats are concerned, the only practical solution is feral colony management with strict TNR.
And to everyone reading this, if you love birds, I suggest you get involved. This isn’t something that requires a big federal program. It’s a question of putting your time and effort where your mouth is (if you love birds that is).
Where I live, the pound charges $95 for surrendering any animal and makes people feel like subhumans for doing so.
Finding a vet to put down healthy feral cats, paid for privately, is a soul destroying experience.
Trapping cats is very easy with the aid of a drop trap. In our area they are available for free. I have several and lend them out. In our area spaying/neutering is sometimes free and sometimes costs $25. Then it’s a question of feeding, monitoring and TNRing any newcomers.
There haven’t been any kittens since I started seriously managing my colony.
(Also, in our area, if you TNR a pet, there are no consequences.)
If you think your situation is bad, Google Hawaii’s feral cat problem.
I hear Facebook and it’s constellation of apps have been down for several hours. Something to do with a bad BGP configuration change that was pushed live. Of course people are speculating that it has something to do with the Facebook whistleblower set to testify to congress tomorrow.
It’s the “Return” part of TNR that I object to. Put those cats somewhere that is not in my neighborhood, please!
Thanks for your thoughtful replies
This is good video about a great song off of what is in my opinion the greatest rock record of all time ‘Who’s Next’ by the Who.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKoSnFGVsCw
JimNorCal: “It’s the Return part of TNR” that you object to. Wouldn’t you rather have a spayed/neutered cat in your neighborhood than the opposite? People are taking the cats already there, spaying/neutering them and releasing them back where they were trapped. I think that’s at least a marginally better solution. If you’re asking them to release them in a different neighborhood, that’s not going to happen. Where I live, it’s illegal (not that it’s stopped people from dumping their unwanted pets.) It’s not a perfect solution but it’s better than having a full blown feral cat mating season.
Eva Marie noted that she supports TNR, which stands for trap-neuter-return.
I thought she was referring to The New Republic, which I began reading in high school, though I haven’t read it much in the 21st century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Republic Some interesting editors…
Hello. This discussion of managing feral cats is interesting. I don’t live in a place in which it’s a large issue, but if I did, TNR sounds sensible. Probably some of the old ladies around here would object, but too bad. I’ve gotten a little less sentimental about suburban animals than I used to be.
I imagine the ‘R’ part is an important component of the whole thing because, for one thing, if you mix neutered back in with non-neutered, then the return on investment of energy for the toms, for example, is reduced in the aggregate across the colony as a whole, so that will bring down the propagation rates. But further, I suspect that if the neutered cats are returned, it might make the rest of the colony members feel more reassured. I don’t know very much about cat psychology, but I could easily picture a cat colony getting a little nervous over time as members are slowly taken away and disappear permanently. I’d rather have less nervous than more nervous cats around, all else being equal.
“Wouldn’t you rather have a spayed/neutered cat in your neighborhood than the opposite?”
My preference is to have zero unowned domestic pets. Not a choice between virile(?) and neutered.
If I was objecting to packs of feral dogs no one would think twice, I imagine. Since cats aren’t dangerous to humans in general the impetus to remove them is less. They’re still a blight on the neighborhood, a potential disease vector and an imposition of the moral sensibilities of one group onto others.
I guess I’m just Attila The Hun on this issue.
Feral and free range domestic cats’ wails are particularly unnerving. Close enough to the cry of a human child to be extremely creepy when heard at night.
This video of a cat barking at dogs then converting to a “meow” when it realizes a human is behind it is amazing. It’s like a bit from a Loony Tunes cartoon.
https://youtu.be/aP3gzee1cps
Intact versus neutered. I agree with you that no free roaming cats is best. But either through toxoplasmosis or their inherent cuteness, cats are treated differently.
Richard Aubrey posted yesterday that some of our political opposites seem to be virtue signaling to themselves, and there is no term (yet) to describe that. I agree.
Bryan Lovely suggested “self righteousness”, but I think that’s a bit different.
I came up with “self-authenticating”, a form of moral narcissism.
At this point, maybe “virtue signalling to themselves” says it best.
Wesson,
“Self-authenticating” is an accurate, concise way to address the behavior.
}}} Long ago ecology was called conservation. Then the liberals took over, renamed it so wildlife management didn’t remind you of conservatives, and pushed extreme measures. So conservatives became repulsed and locked themselves (as well as were locked out) out of the debate.
Not to denigrate anything, here, but humans vastly overestimate their capacity to really understand “ecologies” as a whole.
One of the better examples is the continual screwups at Yellowstone, one of the longest “managed” ecologies in human history to this point… The late Michael Crichton detailed this history
Fear, Complexity, & Environmental Management in the 21st Century
http://www.blc.arizona.edu/courses/schaffer/182h/Climate/Fear,%20Complexity,%20&%20Environmental%20Management%20in%20the%2021st%20Century.htm
The other most obvious failures were the two efforts to set up sustained “closed systems” — aka “Biosphere 2” — that were marked literally from the outset with examples of cheating.
http://scihi.org/biosphere-2/
OBloody Proofreader Hell,
We humans also tend to greatly exaggerate our ability to impact ecology. We have a human-sized perspective and, therefore, have a bias towards imagining everything as human-sized. It’s a great big planet and we are comparatively tiny.
We also tend to extrapolate our own experiences outward. I live in a somewhat crowded, urban area with lots of pollution, waste and news, therefore we humans are a blight on the planet. There’s a lot more planet than there are humans.
If you live in New York City landfill for human waste is a big problem. If you live in Topeka, Kansas it’s a non-issue. I once read that every living human could be given 1,000 sq. ft. of living space and we would all fit in the state of Texas. It was such an incredible statistic I did not believe it and so I looked up the area of Texas and the population of the world and it’s true!
Now humans can do big things. We can wipe out species, even big species like the American Buffalo. We can wreak havoc on rivers, streams, portions of oceans. We can pollute vast swaths of air, greatly impacting large regions. We absolutely need to be good stewards of the environment, but we tend to over exaggerate the little things we do in our little lives, and our impact on the planet, especially over time.