DurianJoe says: "for whatever reason, it does take a crisis to get people to wake up".

The reason is natural selection. The fallacy here is the notion that a crisis - natural or man-made civil disobedience - somehow will trigger a permanent sea-change. No matter how extreme the crisis, people will eventually relax from their alert status.

Rather than relying on any permanent revolution - of the left or of the right - a sustainable civilization requires numerous small changes in the simple boring logistics of governance. Markets don't fail because of greed - greed is simply a fact of life. Markets fail because the appropriate feedback and controls weren't engineered into the system.

The lesson the right wing takes from the Tragedy of the Commons is that ownership should extend to the very oceans and atmosphere. The marketplace will then ensure that overfishing is punished since each fish will have a self-enlightened owner. The lesson the left wing takes is to stage another appeal to people's better natures - maybe this time the Republicans will cut a fair deal. An engineer might instead suggest that someone be hired to keep track of the community's fish to prevent overgrazing.

The solution to overfishing is to police the oceans and stops the violators. Relying on corporate good behavior is laughable. For citizens of rich countries to forgo fish in their diet may be the correct personal choice, but is simply not a scalable solution. Organizations like Greenpeace have a role in this, but ultimately a coalition of world governments have to actually spend enough money to solve the problem.

For those who demand a free market answer to every question - the fundamental problem is that corporations never pay - and customer never expect to pay - the full life cycle cost of any item. The degradation of the oceans has a cost. The price of cleaning it up should be shared between the consumers of every fish stick, shrimp and shellfish.

You describe a couple of technical issues that have ensured that the extreme right retains a completely unwarranted veto power. Then you proclaim: "But in the long run, to overcome its structural problems, it must transform some of its most cherished values."

Rather, the only way to overcome structure problems - as in architecture - is to repair the structure. The anti-democratic reality of "citizen" initiatives is notorious in my state, too. Restrictions should be placed on such initiatives such that special interests can't ram through insane mandates. And a 2/3 budget rule is a guarantee of gridlock.

The CA legislature should drop all other business - which it obviously can't complete anyway - and revise these two rules. Perhaps there are others.

The problem has nothing to do with "values". Fix the laws, fix the government.

The telephone provides individual-to-individual communication. Individuals must be invited in some fashion to participate even in a group telecon.

A blog, however, is a soapbox. They are generally open to all to listen. Sometimes "all" only means open to a specific community - but no invitation is needed in any event.

The status of soapbox speech has not, however, been artificially enhanced online. I tend to ignore such speakers on the campus quad, and I ignore most online. It is truly fascinating how annoyed the traditional media appears to be about this form of speech. That which can't be ignored must represent some new force in our social interaction.

On the other hand, wikis are tools of collaborative workgroups. You need an invitation to get through the door, but then they are open to all to listen and to talk. Such a communication paradigm requires a high level of trust to succeed. There appear to be more wikis and blogs than there is trust to go around :-)

These are only a few of the many new paradigms enabled by networked media. Someone asked about novels - look at lulu.com. The vanity press has been reinvented to remove the gatekeepers who previously blocked aspiring novelists. Will anybody buy their books? If not, the reason is now much more proportional to the quality of the writing.

Those who broadly criticize online communities - via comments posted online - are the most entertaining of all.

And yes - Barry Diller qualifies as an elitist :-)

Reading the first few pages of the book (http://www.amazon.com/Balance-Nature-Ecologys-Enduring-Myth/dp/0691138982) makes it clear that this is a "since the dawn of time" book. The author starts with the Big Bang and ends with the Earth a cinder. Over that time scale it is certainly pointless to speak of a balance of nature.

Looking through the other end of the telescope, on a moment-by-moment basis the universe is governed by a rich set of differential equations. Give nature a push in one place and surprisingly dramatic things can happen somewhere else. The only balance here is the balance of a complex multi-dimensional teeter-totter with sometimes very intolerant boundary conditions.

A question of balance is a question of regression to a mean. As Laurie Anderson says:

You're walking. And you don't always realize it,

but you're always falling.

With each step you fall forward slightly.

And then catch yourself from falling.

Over and over, you're falling.

And then catching yourself from falling.

And this is how you can be walking and falling

at the same time.

What applies to our ever deferred kinesthetic collapse applies to the collapse of all those wave functions vibrating in our neighborhood. Satellites don't so much orbit as fall with style (and sideways).

Is there some timescale over which balance (in the sense of homeostasis) asserts itself? Lots of bad science fiction, not just lots of naive dogma says yes. The Gaia Hypothesis says yes.

The Rare Earth Hypothesis says no. No need to drag Natural Selection and the Uncertainty Principle into it. The (weak) Anthropic Principle is enough to emphasize how lucky we are to be here.