Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Tommy Tolson <healinghawk@earthlink.net>]

Dan wrote an impressively intelligent post, but I think he misses the evolutionary point.  Humans have overshot our ecosystem's carrying capacity by a factor of going on four, meaning nearly four out of five humans now alive are not ecologically supported in a world without cheap oil, the substance providing the ghost acreage upon which the unsupported nearly four now live.  Those who will say put the figure at roughly two billion humans that a world without cheap oil will support. 

Biodiversity loss is The Problem.  Biodiversity is literally what the planetary life support system (Gaia) is composed of, and human actions drive three species per hour into extinction.  Peak Oil and global warming, serious as they are, amount to minor irritations compared to biodiversity loss.  We can survive Peak Oil by transitioning to carbon negative lifestyles that, in turn, mitigate global warming, but we can not survive the collapse of the planetary life support system.     

Those who evolve into ecological consciousness will be selected for.  Those who don't will perish.  If only it were that simple this far into overshoot.

Unless we shed a few layers of complexity that we can no longer afford and organize ourselves into ecologically sound human settlement patterns like Transition Towns (www.transitionus.org), focused on securing water, food, and shelter for everyone who survives Peak Oil and climate change, we will be quickly overwhelmed by so many people dying all at once and the pestilence resulting from dead bodies laying everywhere may take out the rest of us.  Through organizing Transition Town sorts of settlements now, voluntarily, before nature forces the issue, we may, through tightening our belts while building food production infrastructure that gives back to the land more than it takes, use humane measures to bring our population out of overshoot in a manageable and relatively trauma-free manner, leaving a future worth living to our children.

Otherwise, we're probably extinct.  If we simply keep doing what we're doing, extinction is assured.  Nature does not tend to forgive species for violating her laws long enough for her to become aware of it.  Who's willing to get in the position of needing to be the first species to be forgiven?  Shouldn't we avoid that, since we know it lies ahead, and how to avoid it? 

There's still time, if we go for it now.  For the first time, perhaps ever, self interest now coincides with the greater good.  Those of us who get it have the tough task of being "our brother's keeper" if any humans are to make it out of this century. 

Smiles.
Tommy 

On 6/4/10 1:07 PM, Dan Conine wrote:

4C0940E5.6080908@bertramwireless.com" type="cite">I've heard that statement a lot, and tried to understand how it can be reconciled with the state of things. We can't have it both ways. Either the imagination (including all that we regard as 'human civilization and reason') is part of nature's needs, or it is not. If it is a beneficial part of the natural world, then it will survive somehow. If it destroys the natural world that spawned it, then that will be the end of even the possibility of our re-populating the earth with 'kinder, gentler' people.
Humans have rarely been able to control their own physical desires for 'more, better, faster', and the arguments about how we should all 'just get along' or about how we are 'special' and preserved are all based on anthropocentric views. A holistic view doesn't paint humans in any favorable long-term light. Our occupation of the Earth is short-lived and self-destructive. The evolution of destructiveness is natural. That doesn't mean it has to continue, or that it is a sustainable prospect for a species. Any species that evolves in such a way that it overcomes its environment goes extinct or shrinks in size through attrition and evolution.
Humans use their imagination and ego to prop up an artificial environment with long-buried energy and resources that are poisonous to living creatures.
No, we are not exactly 'separate' from nature in physical form, but we have separated ourselves from nature in our minds so that we can justify conquering and exploiting everything that we have imagined to be separate from us (an imaginary separation to nature, but not to modern human conquerculture).
Thus, in the human idea of existence, we created the separation (justified by 'God's Word, or Manifest Destiny, or Free Markets or Democratic Choice'), yet some would use the pre-sapiens connections to nature to 'fix' the artificial 'civilization' of the human imagination.
The "civilized" human is insane as far as the uncivilized world's systems are concerned.