[TVCasualty]

Hey wait a minute... where did visualosophy go?? It was your thread, man!

My attitude is that if we really do like our comfortable civilization, then maybe we should be very carefully assessing how we might sustain it for the long term, as things are not liable to arrange themselves that way spontaneously. If we just grab all we can and consume it at our whim, we'll deplete the necessary elements of our comfort faster than they can be replaced, and we will lose that comfort.

When we have money, we can burn through it all very quickly and have a great time, but ultimately end up at the homeless shelter, OR we can think it through and try to live off the interest. We can save the principal for the lean years which always come eventually. That means living a little bit beneath our means, which we are currently not doing. A society that is tons-o-fun but lacking the resilience born of saving for hard times is precarious at best. "Hard times" could just be a severe drought; for all our technological progress we still require rain, rain depends on the climate, and we are messing with that climate without a clear idea of the consequences. To me, this shows a faith in the resilience of our planet's ecosystem greater than that of most fundamentalists' faith in Jesus.