Don’t stick your head in the sand

"None of us care to hear your opinions on anything other than woodworking."

I cannot resist offering a response to this statement, lifted from a reply to one of my previous posts.

I have been thinking a lot lately about the future. Not just the future of woodworking, but the future of things in general. Maybe having a grandson and wondering what kind of world he is going to have to face is a motivation.

Let's take a bit different tack here and assume, for the moment, that the idea of human caused (or at least human affected) global changes are indeed, as one commenter put, it "a democrat agenda" or, as another put it, "a ploy by researchers to acquire grant money." This still leaves us with the fact that we are rapidly depleting resources that took hundreds of thousands of years to create. Oil, gas, water and yes, wood are being consumed or rendered unusable at an alarming rate. At the same time, efforts to develop alternatives are proceeding at a pace that would make a snail look fast. So sorry but this is fact, not rhetoric, and not my "opinion".

Which brings me to the point which is to ask by what authority anyone can claim to speak for all of the readers of this blog. Is there a meeting I am unaware of where "all of us" get together and decide what they do or do not want to hear? I am also going to suggest that the issues I have discussed are not "off topic." While they might not seem to be issues specifically focused on woodworking, they are issues that will effect the business of woodworking as well as the business of everything else. We should be concerned about the health of all business because if people are not experiencing success, they will not be buying our work. If they have no business, we have no business. The head of reality is often ugly which is probably why so many want to stick it in the sand…