Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Dan Conine <dconine@bertramwireless.com>]

"Crying 'overpopulation' is another way to shift the blame from the rich 
to the poor."  - George Monbiot

I think that too many discussions about resources don't go to the bottom 
line of what we DO with the resources, and instead stay in the 
anthropocentric context.
If humans live so that they give more to the land than they take, rather 
than just thinking about how they can make more humans, then the 
problems work themselves out.
(You can't increase population beyond a certain point AND properly care 
for the land at the same time, but you also can't properly care for the 
land without enough people on it).

The Invisible Hand concept controls our thinking far too often. We tend 
to think, "We have always been consumers and will always be consumers, 
until we run out of resources to consume, so if resources are running 
out, there are too many people."
This is the practice of questioning only the bust phase or the failure 
mode of our growth cycles, rather than questioning whether we should put 
so much effort into economic (population) growth for growth's sake as 
the center of our logic.
The belief that humans have some magical purpose that they aren't 
supposed to question is the problem with population and resource use in 
general.
Animals in nature don't have to know their purpose of giving more than 
they take: the natural process of symbiosis takes care of that. Humans 
eliminate the competition and the symbiotic links and then believe they 
have "conquered" nature as though it is our enemy, somehow separate from 
us, and let our own populations grow unchecked.

Population control is a good idea, but first we have to figure out how 
to decide what the population of a particular place needs to be, rather 
than (like China) trying to moderate population across a broad spectrum 
and failing to consider the needs of each geographic part of nature, and 
what people can be doing to improve it, not just how many are consuming it.

We've replaced the usefulness of people with buttons and cheap energy, 
and forgotten how to utilize people to serve the future (the soil), 
rather than just themselves.

This is the fundamental question to be addressed before deciding on the 
population level.

What are people FOR? What CAN they be good for?

Dan C.
Belgium, WI



On 6/5/2012 11:00 AM, livingontheland-request@lists.ibiblio.org wrote:
> --
> From: "John D'hondt"<dhondt@eircom.net>
> Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] Can Anything Save the Drying Southwest?
>
>
>
>    So yes the mideast is more careful about water but it isn't going to save 
> them. Just like compact lightbulbs and pumping up your tires aren't going to 
> make other resources appear in abundance. All good ideas, but not serious 
> solutions.
>
>
>    The bottom line seems to always be population. No matter how people dice 
> it, no matter how careful they want to be there just isn't enough water to go 
> around.
>
>
>
>    --pete