So What,

[chefranden]

Perhaps stagnation is the virtue of Religion.

 

Stagnation of course is a four letter word in todays world. More is better, especially when it comes to food -- right?

 

Usually I list my beef with Science in terms of weapons and poisons. Let's instead turn to something more basic "totolitarian agriculture" since weapons and poisons are basic tools of this method of aquiring food.

 

Before the discussion begins I hope that you will read the following article in spite of its length.

 

Following the food chain back to Iraq

Posted on Friday, July 23, 2004. Originally from Harper's Magazine, February 2004. By Richard Manning.

Sources

 

The secret of great wealth with no obvious source is some forgotten crime, forgotten because it was done neatly.—Balzac

 

The journalist’s rule says: follow the money. This rule, however, is not really axiomatic but derivative, in that money, as even our vice president will tell you, is really a way of tracking energy. We’ll follow the energy.

 

We learn as children that there is no free lunch, that you don’t get something from nothing, that what goes up must come down, and so on. The scientific version of these verities is only slightly more complex. As James Prescott Joule discovered in the nineteenth century, there is only so much energy. You can change it from motion to heat, from heat to light, but there will never be more of it and there will never be less of it. The conservation of energy is not an option, it is a fact. This is the first law of thermodynamics.

 

Special as we humans are, we get no exemptions from the rules. All animals eat plants or eat animals that eat plants. This is the food chain, and pulling it is the unique ability of plants to turn sunlight into stored energy in the form of carbohydrates, the basic fuel of all animals. Solar-powered photosynthesis is the only way to make this fuel. There is no alternative to plant energy, just as there is no alternative to oxygen. The results of taking away our plant energy may not be as sudden as cutting off oxygen, but they are as sure.

 

Scientists have a name for the total amount of plant mass created by Earth in a given year, the total budget for life. They call it the planet’s “primary productivity.” There have been two efforts to figure out how that productivity is spent, one by a group at Stanford University, the other an independent accounting by the biologist Stuart Pimm. Both conclude that we humans, a single species among millions, consume about 40 percent of Earth’s primary productivity, 40 percent of all there is. This simple number may explain why the current extinction rate is 1,000 times that which existed before human domination of the planet. We 6 billion have simply stolen the food, the rich among us a lot more than others.

 

Energy cannot be created or canceled, but it can be concentrated. This is the larger and profoundly explanatory context of a national-security memo George Kennan wrote in 1948 as the head of a State Department planning committee, ostensibly about Asian policy but really about how the United States was to deal with its newfound role as the dominant force on Earth. “We have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth but only 6.3 percent of its population,” Kennan wrote. “In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.”“The day is not far off,” Kennan concluded, “when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts.”

 

If you follow the energy, eventually you will end up in a field somewhere. Humans engage in a dizzying array of artifice and industry. Nonetheless, more than two thirds of humanity’s cut of primary productivity results from agriculture, two thirds of which in turn consists of three plants: rice, wheat, and corn. In the 10,000 years since humans domesticated these grains, their status has remained undiminished, most likely because they are able to store solar energy in uniquely dense, transportable bundles of carbohydrates. They are to the plant world what a barrel of refined oil is to the hydrocarbon world. Indeed, aside from hydrocarbons they are the most concentrated form of true wealth—sun energy—to be found on the planet.

 

As Kennan recognized, however, the maintenance of such a concentration of wealth often requires violent action. Agriculture is a recent human experiment. For most of human history, we lived by gathering or killing a broad variety of nature’s offerings. Why humans might have traded this approach for the complexities of agriculture is an interesting and long-debated question, especially because the skeletal evidence clearly indicates that early farmers were more poorly nourished, more disease-ridden and deformed, than their hunter-gatherer contemporaries. Farming did not improve most lives. The evidence that best points to the answer, I think, lies in the difference between early agricultural villages and their pre-agricultural counterparts—the presence not just of grain but of granaries and, more tellingly, of just a few houses significantly larger and more ornate than all the others attached to those granaries. Agriculture was not so much about food as it was about the accumulation of wealth. It benefited some humans, and those people have been in charge ever since... Please read the rest of it here.

[JGJ@ReligionisBullshit]

I agree with almost everything he says, but I think he must realize without saying that we all can't turn to hunting and gathering as a lifestyle without stripping the world bare. So I suppose what I am asking is, what is his point?

[Fweethawt]

That was a long read.

 

 

I sort of agree with JGJ up there, Cheffy.

 

If everyone, and I mean everyone decided to start living the hunter/gatherer lifestyle, what exactly would the outcome be? Did anyone put any figures together to figure out the percentage of human death involved before such a system "stabilized", or is that the point alltogether?

[pitchu]

From the article:

 

What does a wild animal know that we don’t? I think we need this knowledge.

 

(The sea birds screech warnings when the wave grows absurdly large; birds in trees pick up the warning and warn, in turn, the animals around them, who then warn other animals and all race to high ground. The aboriginal people on one isolated island all survive by following the animals. The trained elephant, even, ignores the commands of the man on his back and rushes to high ground, saving the trainer's life. Only the evolved tourists ignore the warnings of the screeching, howling, running animals and, instead, aim their cameras seaward.)

 

Where we live, there's a lot of organic farming -- small family farms. And there are local cooperatives, farmers' markets, roadside stands and etc. Many in our local communities are concerned about the very things this article talks about.

 

But everything is a battle. At the top of our lake there is now a Cornell University Ag Station specializing in field testing of genetically modified crops. Because of drift, no organic grower can be sure that what s/he grows is any longer organic.

 

Shortly after the initial announcement of the intent to establish the Ag Station, my husband brought suit against Cornell (his alma mater, btw) with the help of pro bono work from a local law firm, demanding that Cornell release safety and client data he'd requested through FOIA. Cornell had claimed they were impervious to FOIA requests. Through many levels of courts of law, husband finally succeeded in obtaining a ruling from the New York State Supreme Court that Cornell was, indeed, obliged to meet the kinds of FOIA requests to which they'd claimed immunity. People from all over the world contacted husband and followed this case, because it set a precedent for information release from all Universities, everywhere, which were in league with agri-businesses and which operated in hyper-secrecy.

 

So he won. In a way. But it was three years later. The plants were already in the ground.

 

I don't know what we're supposed to do about it, Chef. I don't know how we're supposed to fight the one percent which holds forty per cent of the wealth -- meaning almost all of the power.

[chefranden]

I agree with almost everything he says, but I think he must realize without saying that we all can't turn to hunting and gathering as a lifestyle without stripping the world bare. So I suppose what I am asking is, what is his point?

 

That was a long read.

 

 

I sort of agree with JGJ up there, Cheffy.

 

If everyone, and I mean everyone decided to start living the hunter/gatherer lifestyle, what exactly would the outcome be? Did anyone put any figures together to figure out the percentage of human death involved before such a system "stabilized", or is that the point alltogether?

 

From the article:

 

What does a wild animal know that we don’t? I think we need this knowledge.

 

(The sea birds screech warnings when the wave grows absurdly large; birds in trees pick up the warning and warn, in turn, the animals around them, who then warn other animals and all race to high ground. The aboriginal people on one isolated island all survive by following the animals. The trained elephant, even, ignores the commands of the man on his back and rushes to high ground, saving the trainer's life. Only the evolved tourists ignore the warnings of the screeching, howling, running animals and, instead, aim their cameras seaward.)

 

I don't know what we're supposed to do about it, Chef. I don't know how we're supposed to fight the one percent which holds forty per cent of the wealth -- meaning almost all of the power.

 

One thing I know there won't be AN ANSWER. The search for the "one right way" to do tolalitarian agriculture is the problem. Look, back when we were animals, we knew what to do with a wide range of options just like Pitchu points out in her post. One option was to die when it was time. Now, we recoil in disgust -- that's what animals do! Lions and Tigers, and Bears, but not Humans, oh my! Now that we are no longer animals our options are few. We have 3, wheat, rice, and corn, or 4 wheat, rice, corn, and death. Oddly enough these are the 4 things science is really good at providing. Science is much better at providing these four horsemen than Religion ever was. At least Religion was slow and inefficent.

 

This fight is not against the wealthy few. They are in the same prison we are. They just have nicer cells. The fight is against Mother Culture and her "one answer", her "one right way". "All you have to do is find it my Children, and everything will be ok. Lullaby and good night... "

 

If only we could find the "one law" that would make those weathy behave! If only we could institute the right program to snatch the destitute from demon poverty. If only we could find the right energy source. If only people would be nice. If only people believed in the right God. Don't you see? It is all the same! "Lullaby and good night...", sings mom. This is why I say we are insane. We've done the same thing over and over for 10,000 years, and every time we expect a different result.

 

If we don't go extinct, there will be 100,000 answers to "how shall we then live?" -- just like back in the olden days. We don't know what those answers are. We forgot them 100 generations ago, give or take. We forgot them when we were compelled to come in from the high places to the city, to civilization, to Mom, the Whore of Babylon.

 

One of the 100,000 answers is that a large majority of us will have to die. We could concievably do that humanely by dieing of old age, but I don't think we are smart enough to get out of Mom's grasp long enough to accomplish that. More likely we will kill ourselves with famine, war, and plague.

 

Aren't I pleasant?

[chefranden]

We believe that the move from Religion to Science as the dominant paradigm that answers the question how shall we live is someplace on a continuum of progress. We would be hard pressed to define what we mean by progress, but what ever it is it is good. Science is able to provide more progress than religion therefore it is better than Religion. It is closer to the mythical truth, or at least a better route to the mythical truth than Religion ever can be.

 

What do we believe Science will do for us, besides provide an interesting backyard hobby. I think that Ingersoll summed it up pretty well back in 1895:

 

To love justice, to long for the right, to love mercy, to pity the suffering, to assist the weak, to forget wrongs and remember benefits -- to love the truth, to be sincere, to utter honest words, to love liberty, to wage relentless war against slavery in all its forms, to love wife and child and friend, to make a happy home, to love the beautiful; in art, in nature, to cultivate the mind, to be familiar with the mighty thoughts that genius has expressed, the noble deeds of all the world, to cultivate courage and cheerfulness, to make others happy, to fill life with the splendor of generous acts, the warmth of loving words, to discard error, to destroy prejudice, to receive new truths with gladness, to cultivate hope, to see the calm beyond the storm, the dawn beyond the night, to do the best that can be done and then to be resigned -- this is the religion of reason, the creed of science. This satisfies the brain and heart.

 

This is what we have hoped and still hope that Science will provide where Religion has failed. However, it seems pretty clear after another 111 years that Science is not going to come through.

 

The champions of Science tell us that Science deals with reality. There are some good arguments for that. However, the arguments miss the fact that Science deals with reality in a piecemeal fashion. In order to work the method has to ignore gobs of reality in order to get at one smallish bit. It is assumed that once Science assembles the bits into a whole that we will be able to make the world work. Once Science is able to get all the necessary buttons and dials on the control panel then the world will chug along as nice as you please with a minor twist and poke here and there.

 

But wait! The world did once chug along as nice as you please with no Scientists (and no Religionists) poking and twisting. It’s true that we didn’t have any computers or even steel knives, but apparently we didn’t need these things to have a life.

 

As Scientists we still act as if this world is not our home. We still act as if we are some sort of outside agent put here to control the joint, without noticing the reality that the joint knows/knew how to take care of itself. It was a self managing entity of which we are only a small part. The reality that we need to come to grips with is that we are not other. When we kill the world, we kill ourselves.

[pitchu]

Jeez, what a much better record the output of science would have had if only this one admonition of Ingersoll's had been assiduously followed:

 

...to discard error...

[chefranden]

This interview with Jared Diamond is instructive about collapse of civilization. Collapse is a worthwhile read.

 

 

Easter Island, C'est Moi

 

By Terrence McNally, AlterNet. Posted July 11, 2005.

 

What caused some of the great civilizations of the past to collapse into ruin, and what can we learn from their fates? Jared Diamond explains how we can avert catastrophe. Tools

 

Easter Island

 

In his Pulitzer-prize winning book, "Guns, Germs, and Steel," Jared Diamond examined how and why Western civilizations developed the technologies and immunities that allowed them to dominate much of the world. Now in "Collapse: How Societies Choose To Fail Or Succeed," Diamond probes the other side of the equation: What caused some of the great civilizations of the past to collapse into ruin, and what can we learn from their fates? From the Polynesian cultures on Easter Island to the flourishing American civilizations of the Anasazi and the Maya, and finally to the doomed Viking colony on Greenland, "Collapse" traces the fundamental patterns of catastrophe.

 

TERRENCE MCNALLY: What called to you about the new book, "Collapse"?

 

JARED DIAMOND: What called to me was a romantic interest going back to when I was in my 20s and began reading Thor Heyerdahl's books about the settlement of Easter Island and the great stone statues and how they were erected and why they were overthrown. It's a question that's been on my mind for a long time.

 

Twenty years ago we really didn't know why the islanders ended up in this barren landscape overthrowing their statues. It also wasn't clear why the Maya had abandoned their great cities. But thanks to recent archeological excavations we now have better understanding of these collapses. It's now possible to write a unified book on collapses.

 

You put forth a five-point framework of factors that tend to contribute to collapse. Could you tell us what they are, in terms of one of the actual cases in the book?

 

Let's take a full five-factor collapse that involves a European society (collapses happen not just to exotic people like Polynesians or Native Americans, they happen to blue-eyed, blonde-haired Europeans like Norwegians). The Vikings settled Greenland around C.E. 1000. They built cathedrals and stone churches. They were literate, they wrote Latin and they wrote in runes. But after about 500 years they were all dead. Still, the Norse lasted longer in Greenland than Europeans have lasted in North America today.

 

Number one: human environmental impacts. Many societies unwittingly destroy the environmental resources on which they depend. The Greenland Norse chopped down their forests in order to clear land for pastures and to have firewood and construction timber, but that resulted in erosion that gradually removed land that could have been used for productive pastures.

 

Number two: climate change. Today we're causing climate change, but in the past the climate has naturally gotten colder or hotter or rainy or drier. In the case of the Greenland Norse, it got colder. If it's colder, you grow less hay to get your cattle through the winter and your cattle start dying.

 

The third factor was enemies. Most societies have enemies, and can fight off their enemies until the society gets weakened for whatever reason. The Roman Empire weakened and then was overrun by barbarians. In the case of the Greenland Norse, as they weakened, their enemies, the Inuit or Eskimos, probably played a role in exterminating them.

 

Factor number four: friends. The Greenland Norse depended upon Norway for essential resources, particularly iron and timber, and for cultural identity. Norway began to decline, and the trade from Norway to Greenland was impeded by sea ice.

 

And number five: every society responds or fails to respond to its problems. The Greenland Norse failed to respond successfully.

 

I find their failure very instructive. What happened?

 

It's a very interesting question, why a society doesn't even notice or doesn't successfully respond to problems that look obvious. You would think, not a good idea to chop down all the trees and cause soil erosion. They needed timber and pastures, how could they be so dumb?

 

But let's just suppose that 50 years from now there's still a complex society left on earth. What do you think they're going to say when they look back on the United States in 2005, with its well-known energy problems, continuing to waste energy? Not dealing with its population problems or its water problems, how obvious. Soil problems, how obvious. Climate change problems, how utterly obvious.

 

The Norse were unwilling to learn from the Inuit who preceded and outlasted them.

 

That's right, the Inuit are still alive today. It's like a controlled laboratory experiment. The red test tube and the blue test tube: the Inuit and the Greenland Norse. The Inuit hunt whales and seals. The Greenland Norse grow sheep and goats and cows, but refuse to hunt whales and seals. It seems obvious if you're short of food during the winter, it's a good idea to hunt whales and seals. How could the Norse be so stupid?

 

Well, the Greenland Norse were medieval Christians. They despised the pagan Inuit. Modern Americans have also been known to despise other people. The Greenland Norse refused to learn from the Inuit and they all ended up dead as a result.

 

There were no fish bones found in their remains, right?

 

My first night in Greenland, a blonde Danish tourist walks into the kitchen of the youth hostel with two big chard weighing about two pounds. She saw these fish trapped in a pool in a river and grabbed them with her hands. It doesn't take high technology to catch big fish in Greenland, but the Norse didn't eat fish.

 

On the other hand, Americans don't eat goats, as Mexicans do. We don't eat frogs as the French do. We don't eat spiders and rats as my New Guinea friends do. We don't eat horses as the Irish used to do. We're not starving as a result, but someday who knows.

 

The Anasazi lasted quite a long time in a very inhospitable environment, in what is now the American Southwest. Is there something to learn from their success as well as their failure?

 

From their success we learn that societies who master difficult environments for a long time have no guarantee they'll last forever. The Anasazi built great cities--the tallest skyscrapers in North America until Chicago of the 1870s. They thrived in parts of New Mexico and Arizona where nobody is making a living by agriculture today. That was quite a success story.

 

Eventually, they and other Native American societies in the same area succumbed to climate change and human environmental impacts. The Pueblo Indians, however, came up with a solution that worked. They developed a mixed economy in large settlements a little above the flood plain. The Pueblo Indians have been carrying on successfully in this difficult environment for something like 600 years.

 

Pueblo Indians today say about Europeans, particularly when the wonders of modern technology are pointed out, "We were here long before you came and we expect still to be here long after you are gone."

 

It seems to me that in the good times people eat well, populations grow, societies become more complex. The resulting larger, more complex, more comfortable society is less able to respond when bad times come.

 

In the case of the Anasazi, the Maya and the Easter Islanders: when times were good and there was plenty of rainfall, they occupied marginal lands that previously had been too dry. Then, when it got dry again, they found themselves with a large population they could no longer support.

 

Take the world today. We've got 6.5 billion people, and there are many who say our population will build up to only 9.5 billion, so the world is in the process of solving its population problems. But with the climate turning against us -- with global warming and with many parts of the world getting drier -- there are 2 billion today who are close to starvation. What are we going to do a few decades from now when we've got another 3 billion people?

 

Let's turn to the Maya. I was surprised to learn of their enormous population: estimates from 5 to 50 million people, perhaps the current population of California. I'd always thought of them as a quaint civilization with a few pyramids. Was their enormous population a factor in their demise?

 

One hundred years from now modern California may look like that quaint population no bigger than the Maya who made a few skyscrapers but didn't pay attention to the problems they were getting into.

 

The Maya suffered from problems of climate change. When there was enough rain for them to grow corn to feed 15 or maybe 50 million, their population grew. They also chopped down their forests like the Anasazi and the Easter Islanders, causing soil erosion. Then came a drought.

 

The Maya population shrank by something like 90 percent through some combination of starvation, fighting each other, and not reproducing in numbers comparable to the death rate. By the time it was all over, the great Maya cities had been abandoned. In the 1500s when Cortez marched through the Yucatan peninsula, he didn't know that he was only two miles from what had been the great city of Tikal. It was completely overgrown by jungle.

 

What's going to happen 70 years from now when some extraterrestrials march past what had once been Los Angeles?

 

Easter Island is such a romantic and tragic case. What happened there?

 

Easter Island is the most remote habitable scrap of land in the world -- an island in the Pacific Ocean about 2,000 miles off the coast of Chile to the west and about 1,500 miles east of the nearest Polynesian island. It's known for gigantic stone statues up to 70 feet tall and weighing up to 270 tons.

 

They didn't have any machines or wheels or draft animals. Using just human muscle, they dragged these statues up to 12 miles and tilted them upright. How did they do it? You can be sure that whatever they did required trees for sleds or for sledges and levers. Yet when Europeans arrived on Easter Island in 1722, there were no trees.

 

Over the last 20 years archeologists and paleontologists discovered that when Polynesians first arrived in C.E. 800, Easter Island had been covered by a subtropical forest -- including the world's biggest palm tree. The Polynesians chopped down trees to clear land for gardens, for wood for canoes to go fishing and harpooning tuna and dolphins, for houses, and for the sleds and levers used in erecting statues.

 

Around the year 1670, they chopped down the last tree on the island. Without forests to protect the soil, they ran into problems of soil erosion. Once they couldn't construct canoes to go fishing, the only large animal left on Easter Island as a source of meat was each other. Easter Island society collapsed in an epidemic of cannibalism. The worst insult that an Easter Islander could say in those days: the flesh of your mother sticks between my teeth. Easter Island society collapsed ultimately due to deforestation.

 

I've heard that you were originally going to open "Collapse" with Easter Island, but the book now starts in Montana. Why did you make that choice?

 

I realized if I begin the book with Easter Island and then go to the Maya and Anasazi, my readers will get the idea this is about past societies: dumb Polynesians and Native Americans doing stupid things that we smart Americans with our technology would never do.

 

Montana is considered the most pristine state in the lower 48. It's got a low population and half the area is national and state forest. So you would think that Montana is the state with the fewest ecological and environmental problems. But scratch the surface of Montana and you find a very different story.

 

Because of global warming, the snow pack that provides the water for the irrigation agriculture of Montana is melting. In 20 years Glacier National Park will have no glaciers, and Montana won't have irrigation agriculture. Montana has problems of soil erosion and salinization, destruction of soil by too much salt. The state now spends a couple of hundred million dollars every year trying to control introduced weeds. Montana has increasing problems of population in certain parts of the state. Eastern Montana has probably the worst toxic waste problems in the United States because Montana was the copper mining state.

 

So I began my book with what seems to be the most pristine part of the richest country in the world, but you look carefully at Montana and you find all of the problems that bother these remote romantic people of the past.

 

One of the things I noticed in several of the cases is that during good times when everybody has plenty to eat, the political and religious elites fatten up, but when hard times hit, people seem less willing to indulge the ruling class's power trips. Where do you think we are today?

 

As I came toward the end of work on my book, I asked myself what are the deep lessons? I realized that in successful societies the governing elite could not or did not insulate themselves from the problems of the rest of society. They suffered along with everybody else, and so were motivated to solve the problems.

 

You can then ask yourself, in the United States today, are our elites suffering the problems of the rest of society? Within the last 10 years we've had an increasing phenomena of what's called the "gated community" in which rich people do their very best to insulate themselves. Instead of worrying about the water supply, they drink bottled water. Instead of worrying about the public police force they've got their private security guards. Their children don't go to public schools. They're not worried about the social security system because they've got private pensions. They're not worried about Medicare because they've got private health insurance. That is a blueprint for trouble.

 

The notion of democracy is that all people who vote have equal power. Yet especially over the last few years we've seen the elite passing laws like the recent bankruptcy law that protects corporations and the very rich, while making it tougher and tougher on working people. At the same time, you point out in the book that China has stopped deforestation, and my flip answer is that it helps to be a dictatorship. It's tough to pass that law here. Lobbyists don't have much sway over there.

There are successful and unsuccessful democracies, successful and unsuccessful dictatorships.

 

When you've got a dictatorship, you can take potent actions fast -- potent bad actions as well as potent good actions. In 1998, 240 million Chinese, one-fifth of the population, were affected or uprooted by floods caused by deforestation on the slopes. So the Chinese government, which is, let's put it frankly, something of a dictatorship, passed the law, bang, right there. There will be no more deforestation of old growth forest in China. That's what a dictatorship can do.

 

The subtitle of the book is "how societies choose to fail or succeed" -- what are the choices we need to make?

 

For the United States the two overarching things would be for our elite not to think that they can save themselves while everybody else goes down the tubes. The elite have to think long term about the rest of American society and they have to think long term about the other societies in the world.

 

The United States can't insulate itself from the problems of remote, ravaged countries like Afghanistan, Somalia and Iraq, because nowadays remote countries have ways of creating problems for us. They can send terrorists, they can unconsciously send emerging diseases, they can send unstoppable waves of immigration.

 

The other broad issue is reappraising deeply set values. Among past societies the ones that succeeded were ones that were willing to undertake painful reappraisals as Japan did with the Maji restoration, and as Europe has in the past 50 years in getting away from nationalistic states that have caused so much misery.

 

You write: "We need the courage to make painful decisions about values. Which of the values that formerly served a society well can continue to be maintained under new changed circumstances?" Whether it's the fundamentalist Muslims attacking on 9/11 or the kinds of morality fights that are going on in America right now, it seems that there's a digging in of the heels around "don't touch my values."

Yes, but there are also powerful forces working towards changing values. Within the United States an encouraging development is the environmental movement, which didn't exist 50 years ago. And there are plenty of people in the United States who are beginning to take seriously the problems of the rest of the world.

 

When I was born in 1937, the United States was isolationist and we could afford to be isolationist. We didn't even enter World War II until Pearl Harbor. After World War II we did not relapse into isolationism, but for the last couple of decades we've had the fantasy, that what happens out there in Nepal and Indonesia and the Philippines is sad for them, but what does it mean for the United States?

 

Well, every country has its crazy terrorists. The United States had its Theodore Kaczynski and Timothy McVeigh, but United States citizens are not desperate enough to support them. But when it happens in poor and environmentally ravaged Afghanistan, the people have a way of communicating their unhappiness to the United States.

 

I'm a cautious optimist, and the media is my main source for hope. We've got an enormous advantage that those Easter Islanders and the Maya did not have. We turn on our television sets in the morning and we see what happened today in Somalia or Nepal. We have the possibility to learn. Easter Islanders, when they were chopping down their last tree in 1670, couldn't turn on the TV set and see Japan in 1670 solving its deforestation problems.

 

Our other great advantage is our archeologists. Easter Islanders didn't have archeologists to tell them that the Maya had messed up 850 years earlier or that the New Guinea Highlanders had succeeded 700 years ago.

 

You say long-term thinking is a critical value. If you could place yourself in the future and look back, did humanity turn things around and if we did, how did we do it?

 

I'm now 67 and my twin sons are about to be 18, so I was nearly 50 when they were born. Let me fast-forward 50 years to the year 2055 when they will be the age that I am today. The worst-case scenario is a whole world like Rwanda, but let's ask what's the best-case scenario. Looking back from 2055, my sons would say that around the year 2005, enough people finally began to be concerned and the balance tipped towards solving problems instead of ignoring them.

 

Not just Americans but people around the world concluded: We have to halt the world's population growth. We have to halt global warning. We can't go on mining the world's topsoil and forests. We have to reduce our energy consumption and switch away from fossil fuels towards wind and solar and nuclear and cleaner fossil fuels. We've got to do it fast. We've got to deal with the world's water problems, not by having wars between Syria and Turkey but by conserving water.

 

My sons will look back in the year 2055 and say there was some kicking and screaming, there were people who didn't want to do it, and there were setbacks, but we finally did it. We've essentially solved our population problems, we have rational energy policies, and we've halted the increase of global warming.

[JGJ@ReligionisBullshit]

I've read this book...hey, there it is still on my shelf... and it gave me the idea that we are all DOOMED! We are constantly sterilizing our world and circumventing natural selection. Anti-bacterial soaps, sterilizing our air in the home, etc., as well as gene therapy, treatments for diseases that would normally kill, organ replacements, anti-biotics, etc. etc. One day it will all come crashing down. And there will be a cleansing. We have weakened our immune system and are continually polluting the gene pool with failed DNA by letting people reproduce who would have normally died before reproducing.

 

Now, don't get me wrong. I am all for keeping people alive by whatever means necessary. But there will come a day when all the things that we have available now will not be available and natural selection will come crashing down with avengence. The first to go are those those who depend on medicine and treatment to keep them alive. Your regular Joe who doesn't know how to survive without his 'amenities' will go next followed by those who have weakened immune systems and are unable to live when exposed to the natural world. Then those who were reproduced with comprised DNA and are unfit for the natural world will follow. This will leave only the strong who will then contest for dominance.

 

What could do this? Besides the obvious; electing another Republican President who is controlled by Karl Rove *joke*, let your imagination run with it. Terrorism and dirty bombs, economic collapse, failure of power grids from EMP's, etc.

[kellyb]

See, the way see it is, science is like a panopticon.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon

We have all these little rooms where the scientific departments are doing their thing, and everyone assumes that there's a guard behind the window...watching...connecting the dots...tieing things together and averting catastrophe....but there's not.

There is no guard behind the window in the dark room.

I think if we took the greatest minds humanity offers and assigned them the role of "guard", we might have hope.

 

Then again, that might be just another shitty answer like all the other ones out there.

[chefranden]

See, the way see it is, science is like a panopticon.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon

We have all these little rooms where the scientific departments are doing their thing, and everyone assumes that there's a guard behind the window...watching...connecting the dots...tieing things together and averting catastrophe....but there's not.

There is no guard behind the window in the dark room.

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I think if we took the greatest minds humanity offers and assigned them the role of "guard", we might have hope.

 

 

I think that this is rather perceptive, Kelly.

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This used to be God's job. No human or group of humans is going to be any better at it than God was.

 

We peons hope that the elite (the philosopher kings) know what they are doing. They don't.

[Ouroboros]

We peons hope that the elite (the philosopher kings) know what they are doing. They don't.

Because the Emperor have no clue.

[spamandham]

Who here is willing to be among the 99.9% who must die to do away with agriculture, or even the 98% who must die to do away with modern agriculture?

 

"Not I" says the meaty one. Idealism is something you force others to do, not something you seriously engage in yourself.

[kellyb]

Who here is willing to be among the 99.9% who must die to do away with agriculture, or even the 98% who must die to do away with modern agriculture?

 

"Not I" says the meaty one. Idealism is something you force others to do, not something you seriously engage in yourself.

Well, there is an absurdly fucked up, but small, movement in academia to kill off most of the population with a virus or bacteria.

(I'll find the links later.)

No, I don't want to die, or especially have my child die.

I truly believe humanity is capable of working through this.

Even if it requires "science" to totally revamp it's MO.

[kellyb]

Check this out.

http://www.sas.org/tcs/weeklyIssues_2006/2...re1p/index.html

[chefranden]

Who here is willing to be among the 99.9% who must die to do away with agriculture, or even the 98% who must die to do away with modern agriculture?

 

"Not I" says the meaty one. Idealism is something you force others to do, not something you seriously engage in yourself.

 

I would be willing, but then I'm old.

 

It won't require volunteering though. When we manage to make the environment collapse it will be the luck of the draw. I think that this is the probable outcome. Concievabely we could do it via natrual attrition if we start soon, but I doubt our ability to pull that off.

[pitchu]

Kellyb, thanks for that link. I think. That's truly horrifying, if accurate. I just don't know what to make of a "scientist" who thinks like that.

[Lycorth]

Check this out.

http://www.sas.org/tcs/weeklyIssues_2006/2...re1p/index.html

 

I'm appalled, but not surprised. The typical mentality of far-left, human-hating whackjobs who liken their own species of beings to a cancerous poison. This is very similar to the notion rabid Xian crusaders had when they decided to force their faith on non-xians; extreme measures had to be taken to rid the earth of something eeevil and pestilent. You take the hardcore environmentalist belief that humans are a cancer on the face of the earth to its logical extreme, and you get scum like this Pianka turd.

 

It's all a great argument for balance, rationality, and common sense as the end guide to our ethical conduct. When you take an extreme notion to its logical, whacked-out end, this is what you get.

[spamandham]

Who here is willing to be among the 99.9% who must die to do away with agriculture, or even the 98% who must die to do away with modern agriculture?

 

"Not I" says the meaty one. Idealism is something you force others to do, not something you seriously engage in yourself.

 

I would be willing, but then I'm old.

 

Would? Doesn't that imply you don't take the problem as seriously as you profess? Like I said, idealism is something you force on others, not something you seriously engage in yourself. If there really is a problem Chef, take the action you say you "would".

[chefranden]

Would? Doesn't that imply you don't take the problem as seriously as you profess? Like I said, idealism is something you force on others, not something you seriously engage in yourself. If there really is a problem Chef, take the action you say you "would".

 

Idealism Ah yes, that is the problem isn't it. This one idea (in this case Science) will save the world.

 

I'm not presenting the solution. The very idea of the solution is problematic. In fact it is the problem. Totalitarian agriculture is the solution brought to its zenith by Science. Has it ended misery and poverty in the world like the preachers of the Green Revolution predicted? No, It has increased misery by about 3 billion experiences, and already has us fighting over who will have the last drops of oil.

 

I said I would volunteer for the army of the departing, since I'm going soon anyway. However, there won't be one. Like you said who would volunteer? Only a few nut cases like me. Rest assured that such an army as the solution to the solution will fail, unless the remainder gives up the idealism of "one way to live."

 

However, there will be no need for volunteers. When the entire environment is fucked so are we.

[RankStranger]

Chef- I've followed a few of your threads along these lines- we discussed Ishmael a bit when I was posting as unchainedhillbilly.

 

I still don't neccesarily disagree with you... in theory. Let me see if I understand you correctly:

 

We're fucking up the environment faster than ever with our newfound scientific ways. Soon, we're going to tip the balance and most of us will die. The only way to prevent this is for most of us to die.

 

Now, that MAY very well be true... lots of people have made a very good case for it. So if I can't prevent this impending doom without dying... and this impending doom just might kill me...

 

Then why should I care at all? I can either die or be killed. Or I can choose to ignore the impending doom, put my faith in science, and hope for the best. At least science provides a chance (however slim) that we apes will continue to multiply and live indefinitely.

 

Are you offering a suggestion here other than "save the planet: kill yourself"?

[jjacksonRIAB]

What if overconfidence in Religion has replaced underconfidence in Science?

[chefranden]

Chef- I've followed a few of your threads along these lines- we discussed Ishmael a bit when I was posting as unchainedhillbilly.

 

Cool, Hi.

 

I still don't necessarily disagree with you... in theory. Let me see if I understand you correctly:

 

We're fucking up the environment faster than ever with our newfound scientific ways. Soon, we're going to tip the balance and most of us will die. The only way to prevent this is for most of us to die.

 

That appears to be our options. Option #2 doesn't have to be violent. If the majority of people woke up to what we are doing, there is the possibility that we could voluntarily use natural attrition, by drastically lowering the birth rate for a century or so and then only allow replacement rates. We can do this with deer and cows, but not with humans, because our culture will not permit it.

 

Another way to do is to voluntarily reduce the food supply. No one would have to go hungry even, if what we produced was evenly distributed. Less food automatically means less people, but our culture will not permit that either.

 

These sorts of population reduction ideas would seem logical. However, we are not really logical beings. We decide via emotion. Our emotions are dictated by our culture which is based on the meme that only humans have a right to life. That is the meme that will kill us.

 

Now, that MAY very well be true... lots of people have made a very good case for it. So if I can't prevent this impending doom without dying... and this impending doom just might kill me...

 

Then why should I care at all? I can either die or be killed. Or I can choose to ignore the impending doom, put my faith in science, and hope for the best. At least science provides a chance (however slim) that we apes will continue to multiply and live indefinitely.

 

I don't know what would make you care. "What will I get out of it," is a cultural artifact. It is the dominionist mandate that we attribute to Religionists, but that we haven't repudiated along with the religion. Science makes us ever more efficient at changing the biosphere into human flesh until we reach the edge of the petri dish, but it doesn't challange the mandate.

 

Can you put future generations and other life forms into your moral system? I don't know about you personally, but my guess is that not enough people will be able to do it. Daniel Quinn thinks that it could happen.

 

The choice of ignoring is there for you. You won't go to hell for making it. You might get some hell here, or your kids, or your grandkids. You could also choose to go around poking people to see if they wake up. I'm guessing they won't, but I'm poking anyway.

 

Are you offering a suggestion here other than "save the planet: kill yourself"?

 

You will not save the planet by killing yourself.

 

Here is my main point: We have made the assertion in the face of religion that we are animals like any other, nevertheless we still assume that we can and ought to remove ourselves from the cycle of life that gave us life and supports our life. We hold to this absurd meme even though it has become increasingly clear that it is our doom.

 

Christians say to themselves, "I am a Christian soul, how shall I then live?"

 

Realists like many here say to themselves, "I am an animal like any other," but we don't ask ourselves, "how shall I then live?" Or rather we answer that pretty much the same way the Religionist would and treat the earth as if it were not our home.

 

We don't even know what it means to be an animal. We have forgotten. I will make the guess that Science is not even looking for that lost knowledge.

 

 

What if overconfidence in Religion has replaced underconfidence in Science?

 

jj,

 

I'm too tired tonight, later.

[kellyb]

I still think my idea of assigning some people as "guards"...given that they were the real cream of the crop, the highest IQ types, maybe balanced by an ethics commitee (not sure how they'd be chosen) could get us out of this.

 

*sigh*

I don't consider myself some part of some super intellectual elite, but I have no faith in humankind as a whole to act responsibly.

Every time we institute some big bureaucracry to oversee our problems, it gets both corrupted by politics and becomes incompetent by virtue of it's largeness.

I have some friends that moved into the middle of nowhere on some land with a creek and live quite pleasantly in a house powered by solar/hydro sources.

Technically, I think they're freaks, but threads like this make me wonder...

[Asimov]

If most of us have to die in order to save the planet...then what are we dying for?

 

Each humans individual interests should include their own survival...for that will be the cause of humanity itself to survive.

 

If I die to save the planet...I'm not going to care anymore when I die, so what's the point? If I go someplace that's better than Earth, then again I'm not gonna care. So what's the point?

 

The problem isn't science. That's like saying that knowledge is a bad thing.

You confuse the application of science with science itself.

 

The problem is this amazingly strange idea that humans have to be "united" together in some kind of conglomerate corporation of humanity in order to be "human".

 

When you focus from individualism to uniformity, you create an entity that destroys not only itself but it's environment. One could liken it to a virus or parasite who kills it's own host.

 

Humans as individuals aren't a virus...humanity as a global community trying to spread and come together in a "one big happy family" is the virus. It's the concept of humanity that's the problem.