I come to this forum to be ______.

I check this forum daily, it is a form of self torture sprinkled with moments of joy. I wanted to know why others who check this forum put themselves through this torture.

I do want to be informed even if that information depresses the hell out of me.

and the others who post regularly.

:yourock:

But I stay to be informed!

:thumbsup:

I am happy to see people talking about these issues. I do not find it depressing at all!

education, outrage and depression are just fringe benefits.

On Edit: I picked up this thread off the front page and thought it was in reference to DU as a whole. I come to the EES forum in hopes of getting a bit more educated but mainly end up depressed.

To read the posts and stories, from people who exercise their right to question their governments actions. The people in West Texas are so eat up with Bush it is unbeleivable. They call people who question the man unpatriotic. I am a patriot, men and women have died to ensure I have the right to do this. Our fore fathers gave us this right, in the Constitution and when they wrote the Declaration of Independence. They did not like King George's rule then and I can not abide with our King George now. The people left England to escape having to join the Church of England, and now they are trying to cram the Religious right down our throats. England was getting rich off taxing the colonies and now we have Halliburton getting rich off American citizens. When you think about it there are a lot of comparisons to then and now. It really worries me people are allowing it to happen.

Okay enough of the soap box.

I come to find people discussing environmental policy. Unfortunately, it's principally a list of enviro-related news stories and politics. I'd like to see some discussion of what policy ought to be, rather then news commentary and politics. That's generally why I don't post much.

~AbM

Check out my post from yesterday, http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x6648

It contains some thoughtful links, imho, about farm policy and, by extension, environmental policy.

.... as we sit down to the cornucopia of beautiful food from these people in the months ahead, it might serve us spiritually and materially to exercise some traceability and concern for the labor that bestowed these gifts of the Earth upon us. Fair prices and fair markets are key to family farmers' survival. Government policies restoring fair prices and fair markets to rural America would revive the principle of economic democracy without which, as Thomas Jefferson reminds us, we cannot have political democracy.

on this forum.

One of the other things I do here though, is repeat myself.

because I do not know much about the environment.

becuase the majority of science i see here comes from newspapers or national geographic.

i only stop by here about every other month after i become comfortable with life and need reason to grind my teeth in my sleep.

There's lots of interesting articles in scientific journals, but in most cases they aren't political and access requires expensive subscriptions.

in nature, the Environment/Energy/Science is (should be) based upon Environment/Energy/Science.

I can go anywhere for bs junk science.

re: the availability of journal articles - if you use google to search for your topic of choice; soil science, entimology, biology, biogeochemistry, hydrogeology - and add a archive search term such as "Pergamon" or "elsevier" (two expensive article databases) you can get many, many articles. all are free and i have literally thousands of them on hardcopy that i have used for study. otherwise, if we're that interested in educating folks about such topics, it might actually pay to have a subscription of "limnology and oceanography", JSTOR or BIOone.

if we want to discuss science related topics (the topic of this particular room), we should use science to discuss it; not heresay, hyperbole or other nonsense. i want to see standard error, CI95's and funding sources in the references. I want citation references and institutions rather than bylines.

For instance; I see topics with titles such as "increasing CO2 causes faster growth of rainforest" from news articles on here that dont conisder the well-documented ramifications of increased plant growth upon the geochemistry and nutrient qulaity of supporting soils and soil biota or the long-term consequences to the local ecology from such rapid growth. this isnt completely posters fault - as reporters should probably bear some responsibility for this.

the majority of posters here are well educated and i think we should use our 'critical thinking' skills to consider these important topics.

i dont necessarily think that news articles are the way to disseminate science, and the majority of news articles i read or see cited here do not include the information to critically consider them as science related material.

I am a science snob, but only when discussing science.

...or, perhaps the whole discussion is just pointless and i should just go stick my nose back in my books like normal.

either way, this is why i get frustrated...

I see plenty of reasonably high level science discussed here, sometimes backed up with reference to referreed journals, but citations of such articles should hardly be the goal of this forum. The purpose of this particular forum in my view is not merely to provide abstracts for science snobs, but to help the interested general public to discuss and understand what they read.

A "science snob" can always sit in the library and scan journals of interest if that is what he or she is looking for. One can chat with colleagues. While I agree with the statement that media reporting of scientific and technological can border on the abysmal, it is hardly a corrective if people come here and exchange references beyond the comprehension of the ordinary citizen. It is rather the function of the scientifically literate here to interpret what is reported by the general media, to put it in perspective, and balance the issues, doing so at as appropriate a level as one can manage.

Like it or not, the public sphere, as we see in the malignant Bush Administration, has a profound impact on the future of science. Further, in a time where the environment is under the most extreme assault in human history, an understanding of science will be critical to public acceptance and support for the alternatives we must review collectively as a species. Scientists are well served to deign to discuss these issues with the general public, the scientifically literate and illiterate alike.

;)

firstly, many thanks to hatrack!
It bothers me some that this forum sees so little traffic. Seems to me that the environment is The Bottom Line that intelligent progressives should be paying attention to.
The various energy/tech posts I've found informative as being a luddite I don't normally read that stuff.
Biodiversity is red meat to me, though to be honest there's so little good news there that comprehensive coverage of the issue could lead to madness.
I also enjoy mixing it up with lomborgian/libertarian types. They suck.