Reply #55: Re

[yebrent]

The world has plenty of room

for what? 6 billion? 12 billion? how many extinctions are acceptable? how many extinctions until ecosystems begin to collapse?

and we've long since learned about rotating crops, and birth control.

what does this mean? how will rotating crops prevent an eventual population crash? what happens when there are a few billion people starving and no one want to wait patiently for land to rejuvenate for crop growth? Birth control may have an effect, but this seems to work only with increasing standards of living. Once resources become more scarce, standards of living will actually decrease, causing less incentive for using birth control, and less means for production of birth control. Natural birth control wisdom is all but gone from human culture.

I didn't say there was no need for concern...I said there was no need for giving up, on the premise we are all doomed anyway.

Who said anything about giving up?

Most of your messages come across as "this talk of collapse is all nonsense, just go about your daily routine" Whether this is your intention or not, it is how I read your posts. And I'm not sure where you were during the Clinton administration, but there were a lot of people trying to raise the awareness of our unsustainable ways of living.

To say The planet itself is no different than it was four years ago, when you were all optimistic. Other countries have gone on with their lives, and are leading perfectly normal ones. is just ignorant BS. I wasn't even a democrat four years ago. I was a member of the Green party that got tired of losing and instead decided to see what effect I could have on the Democratic party. I was talking about this stuff four years ago. Perhaps you are noticing more of this stuff in the news because the drum beat is getting louder. The danger greater.


The world wasn't 'doing quite nicely' without us. Neither is any other planet in our solar system.

Our neighbors in the community of life were evolving, and perhaps if we stopped trying to manage things so much, several of them would continue to evolve to our level of consciousness. Who made humans the be all and end all of human creation? Perhaps the bear or gorillas are next in line for our level of self awareness or greater. But instead, the bears and gorillas will have no ecosystem with which to evolve in.

We have never had a belief we can 'manage our environment'. We've believed we can fight and subdue it.

We had better START learning to manage it.

IMO this will surely lead to failure. For the first couple of hundred thousand years of homosapiens existence we believed we were part of the world. The last 10,000 or so years we grew to believe we could fight and subdue it. Now we think that we can fix all the damage by managing it. You can't measure the outside of a box from the inside. In other words, you can't understand every aspect of a system you are part of in order to manage is successfully. We are not the gods.

We must give up managing and begin to once again participate. We were thrown out of the garden for eating the fruit of the god's knowledge. How about we spit out the fruit and walk back in the garden?