Perhaps one of the reasons why we romanticize indigenous cultures and their relationship to nature is that the only ones that survived to meet the white colonizers were the ones with just such idealistic attitudes towards their natural surroundings.

Jared Diamond in his excellent book Collapse goes into this in detail. As he describes it, civilizations such as the Mayas and the inhabitants of Easter Island overpopulated and destroyed their environment and themselves along with it.

On the other hand, natives of Papua New Guinea, for example, learned how to control their population (sometimes through brutal infanticide). Because of this, however, their civilization was able to survive despite the limited resources found on their island.

What I am saying is that civilizations that did not take care of their environment (and did not expand to take over others) did not live to tell the tale. Those that do survive and take care of their surroundings are not representative of all indigenous cultures out there.

(I may have some of the details wrong, but the point remains the same.)

As I read these comments, I feel that they are just proving Matt's point. I don't expect that someone like Matt would be embraced here at Salon, but cut the guy a little bit of slack and give him a bit of respect. He chose to write this column as a guest at Salon. If you do disagree, do so respectfully. All you are doing is confirming his (and the right's) suspicion of an intolerant left (hey, I thought that was supposed to be an oxymoron).

That being said, let me (respectfully) disagree on a couple of things he wrote:

• I didn't like porn's liberalism. In porn, everything taboo is trivialized and everything trivial is magnified.

  I don't see how this is liberalism. Liberalism, to me, is more about being able to see issues from multiple sides. It's not about trivializing anything.

• Matt is also being disingenuous when he calls his stint in porn "a summer job". My understanding is that he took part in a dozen or so movies.

Perhaps the right is treating him so well because they want to show how "open" and "tolerant" a group they are, and that "they really don't hate gays". Maybe those are all true statements, but based on the comments I'm reading here, it doesn't look like the left adheres to any of these.

The point that biotech is still a new technology and not all of the risks are known cannot be over-stressed. However, dismissing this technology outright because of this would be foolish. Ignoring this would be dangerous.

To date, neither side of the GMO debate has convinced me that they have all of the facts on their side.

I hope that Caruso's book can bring a deeper understanding to this debate through her redefinition of risk. The hope is to be open-minded and not ideological on any issue.

Rinella has a point that the bulldozer is a greater threat to wildlife than the assault rifle. In fact, a little bit of culling can be good for the environment---deer populations can get out of control in human-populated areas because all of their natural predators have been pushed out. This, however, is a side point. My main point is below.

Call me a city freak, but to me there is a simple equation guns = trouble. I grew up in a nice neighborhood in NY in the '80s and '90s. Even so, I saw way too many guns growing up. Thankfully, I never saw any of them fired (but I heard them in parks at night). They were mostly just kids who somehow got one and would try to look tough and show them to people. Many of them were my friends (or at least classmates) at one point until they got into gangs and drugs and drifted away. Remember, this was a *good* neighborhood in a nice part of Queens. Would they have drifted away even if they didn't have guns? Probably, but having guns in the equation just made the stakes higher and more dangerous.

When I hear people talking about the right of everyone to own guns, I just think of all the problems it caused when I was growing up.

The NRA folk see guns as useful tools and the city folk see them only as weapons. Without understanding that fundamental difference, the two groups can never hold a meaningful conversation.

Someone (Xanthro) earlier compared gun control to banning homosexual sex. I think that is an extremely bad comparison.

Much better is comparing gun control to the war on drugs. Some people abuse drugs. Some people would smoke too much marijuana if it became legal. But, why is everyone being punished for what some people are doing?

Should drugs be legalized? Well, that's a different story. My point is that the connection between the thing being regulated and the harm it causes is very clear.

Another comment that is being made often in these comments is that current firearm restrictions aren't working, so therefore no laws will work. Therefore, there should be no gun control.

Does anyone else see a flaw in the logic here?

In addition to that, just about every developed country in the world is a counter-example. Look at Europe and Japan, strict gun control laws that work.

So, either Americans are fundamentally flawed and are just too stupid to be held by gun control laws, or it's the current laws that are flawed. I'd like to think that it is the second.