Re: Anti-immigration assumptions

Eric,

You raise an interesting paradox in your critique of the "only human
suffering counts." We might ask, "what else counts?" The response would
be, "the environment of course." Yes, true, but that goes right back to
human suffering, since it is to save people from the calamity we face in
the pending ecological holocaust to save the planet. This reveals
immediately the fallacy of counterposing "anthropocentrism" to
"ecocentrism" within the environmental community, since any real concern
for people means a concern for the environment (let's be honest, it's
really only an academic turf-cutting device, anyway). This doesn't work so
well the other way around, though, when lunatics advance the idea that
people ought to off themselves so that other critters can have a go at it.
The point is that socialist democracy within a framework of environmental
concern is the solution and it at once an anthropocentric and ecocentric
direction. I'm with Batman on this one: people come first (but only
because putting people first means saving the planet from capitalism - a
point that Bruce Wayne would, philanthropic pretensions aside, disagree
with).

Andrew Austin
Knoxville, TN