I’ll try not to get too involved with the straw man stuff.

<Admittedly, the moon is a rock. But bear in mind that anything we do to it will last a long time. There's no erosion to speak of and no bio-degradation going on.
If I go outside right now and break a ten-pound rock in half, that rock will still be broken, barring a major geological upheaval, a million years from now. < b > agreed. And? < /b >Is this pollution? < b > no < /b> Would it still be pollution if the rock had been broken by an earthquake? < b > no < /b> What's your point?

< b > Point is just what I said: the moon does not erase what man does over time, the way the earth does. There is no grandiose ulterior meaning in my statement. </ b >

The Moon is a dead, lifeless, radiation-bathed, rock. A ROCK. It's not even a pretty rock, like jade, or opal. It's a gray, dirty, dust-covered, battered rock. < b > 1) Nobody knows anything about the moon’s appearance, except for a negligible percentage of its surface. 2) To my mind, the pix of the surface I have seen are stunningly beautiful. Heck, I used to backpack in the Sierras on a regular basis. One of the main draws is the beauty of the granite. It’s not jade or opal, either.< /b >

So what? Bear in mind that there's even less in leo and geo than there is on the moon (except that thankfully there is erosion of a sort, as in radiation, and colliding gas and junk). But still we've managed to pollute those environments, and continue to do so. When we first started throwing junk up there, we could not conceive of orbit as an environment deserving of protection. Now we know otherwise.
Orbit is not an "environment." It is a vacuum. < b > “Orbit is not an environment.” I can’t get this statement to make sense, no matter how many times I say it. < /b >Orbital "pollution" is a traffic-control problem, not an environmental issue. < b > semantics. Call it what you want. < /b >Let's not muddy the term "environment" any more than we already have. I have heard people seriously discussing lunar "ecology." < b > Well, there’s no ecology, yet. But we will probably bring one with us when we go in force.< /b >
What's to keep a lunar colony from bulldozing radioactive waste a mile from their base and leaving it there for posterity? Why even bother to seal it? What happens when you dump barrels of human sewage on the moon or waste chemicals (if we are ever so unwise as to define anything on the moon as "waste")?
Use your head. Who the hell is going to be killed by radioactive waste on the Moon? Moon sparrows? Bury it under a couple of feet of dirt and mark it. Is it going to leak into the ground water? The Moon is already steadily bathed in radiation, including deadly solar storms. Human sewage dumped on the Moon would be so much colored sterile dust in about a week, assuming anyone was idiotic enough to dump that much recyclable water and plant nutrients out on the surface. I'm not sure where one would come up with any kind of a chemical industry on the Moon, unless one struck oil somewhere. Io, maybe. < b > We’ve got a disconnect here. The only reason to take good care of the moon is for our own benefit. I never said otherwise. You want junior tracking greasy, glowing stuff that smells like crap all over your airlock?< /b >
Are there sites on the moon that should be preserved for esthetic reasons? Historical, certainly: I'd be pissed if the Chinese drove a tractor over Armstrong's footprints.
Our kids could hate us for screwing up the moon if we go in with the attitude that there's nothing we can do to it that matters.
I agree with you on preserving historical sites. There's an awful lot of Moon to go around without having to mess up Tranquility base.
You are falling into a perception trap that has been laid by the environmental movement. < b > nonsense < /b > When the movement first started, "pollution" was things that harmed people and animals, damaged ecosystems, or created unsightly eyesores like wrecked automobiles dumped in national parks.
Gradually, this "evolved" until any change whatsoever made by humanity on any part of nature became "pollution." < b > There are some folks with extreme views on anything you can name. If, using the generalization fallacy, you conclude that people who associate with environmental movements think that man should never develop anything, then you are wrong. If you actually count the folks who believe this then I predict that you will find very few individuals.< /b >Building a house, however beautiful. Cutting down a tree, whether one replanted or not. And doing anything at all to change the current appearance of any part of nature. This is what the "don't pollute the Moon" people are screaming about. < b > Maybe. I can’t speak for them, only for myself.< /b >
Any reasonable person could see that, assuming there was any reason to, one could stripmine the hell out of the Moon long before any visible change from Earth would be there. < b > Fine. My belief is that a lot of people will one day live there. They will have to live around or clean up whatever messes are left there.< /b >One good large meteor hitting the surface changes the Moon more than fifty years of human activity ever could. < b > Not necessarily true (depending on how big “good large” is.) Certainly man has wrought more change than that down here, in 50 years. < /b >There may be real pollution issues some day: if there are isolated ice deposits, one would certainly not want to bury radioactive waste in them. Astronomers may be concerned about processes that dump large amounts of gases that over many years could actually create enough of an "atmosphere" to affect sensitive optical systems. But these issues are few and far between. < b > Tentatively agreed. The thing is, we typically don’t know what sin we commit till after it’s committed, and people are living with the aftermath. Part of the reason for that is that we don’t want to know. It interferes with our business. Could anyone have predicted the ill effects of CFCs in the upper atmosphere? Did anyone ask the question?< /b >
Outer space is the ideal place for an industrial revolution. We have a chance to move some of our major industries away from Earth and out where they will finally be harmless. < b > I don't think this assertion is as silly as the dispose-of-nuclear-waste-in-the-sun idea, but it's in the running. < /b > Don't let the nihilists define your parameters for you. < b > provocative nonsense < /b >

< b > From Webster for future reference: en·vi·ron·ment
1 : the circumstances, objects, or conditions by which one is surrounded
2 a : the complex of physical, chemical, and biotic factors (as climate, soil, and living things) that act upon an organism or an ecological community and ultimately determine its form and survival b : the aggregate of social and cultural conditions that influence the life of an individual or community
3 : the position or characteristic position of a linguistic element in a sequence.

Note that #2 is a new-fangled application of the word.
< /b >