It has been nearly a week since the last rebuttal on an ongoing conversation between colleagues revolving around the common topic of human impact on Mother Earth. Both sides have been well said and smartly opinionated. In my efforts to press my point further I have spent the better part of this last week (taking some time off to enjoy a little long weekend of course) researching my point, pulling as many facts and highly versed opinions as possible in order to build a well-thought, highly researched, and overly referenced rebuttal. I looked up countless websites and read through many peer-reviewed articles, picking and choosing that which would most significantly outline my opinion.

And then it hit me. I was only looking at half of each article. I began to look into my research further and found that, in my haste to build an argument to opinion (something I'd never researched before beginning this blog...I'm used to building an argument for a theory) I was only looking as far as I was blindly willing, not looking at each article for more than I needed it. As I began to reread some of my research, I started to find that each was double-sided, or was just heavily opinionated. The factual, double-sided articles were heavy on two things. We may or may not be devouring all of our natural resources to oblivion and that the determination of this is impossible due to all of the uncertainties. It's hard to know when we'll run out of something when we don't know how much there is or how much we'll continue to use.

Being one who prides himself as being of strong scientific thought I am appalled at how I allowed myself to be driven in such an opinionated journey without thoroughly checking into my sources first. In new light, I am forced to change my view on this subject. I believe that I have a sound hypothesis, as does my colleague, but that neither will be much more than hypotheses until further research on the state of the planet and the current state of the human species is done and thoroughly reviewed. With this, my hypothesis stays the same, but it is reduced to just that. As for a sound argument of what is right or wrong, I must concede to the point that both opinions are valid and that neither holds more validity than the other.