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  • From: PermacultureNo1@aol.com
  • To: nafex@egroups.com
  • Subject: Re: [nafex] global warming
  • Date: Mon, 22 Jan 2001 11:31:30 EST


In a message dated 1/19/01 3:08:41 PM, vrolson@micron.net writes:

<< It seems to me that we always talk around the real problems. In this case
too
many people. I suppose it will be when we are standing on top of one another
that we finally decide to control population. I don't understand why we all
think we have a right to just reproduce with no sense of the ultimate
responsibility. I fully realize it is against animal nature to not repoduce
our
species as fast as possible, but think we are more advanced.
vern >>

I have to agree with you vern, up to a point. But it is really population
times the level of materialism. Each new American baby will destroy as much
resource as a new African village. But also in the "affluent" countries we
have wiggle room to change our ways without real want. Not that there isn't
serious poverty in every country. but in the "affluent" countries, we are
mostly enslaved by debt instead of want. And so many people, perhaps most,
are trapped into doing, one way oranother, acts that they know are bad for
the big picture. Of course we also have plain wallowing in materialism, in
which saving resources or recycling actually offend people. I remember a
class I taught in the Philippines where all 30 people though I was telling
tall tales when I reported that Americans buy new plastic bags in order to
contain things they are throwing away. No one is that irrational, they
believed. And back in the USA, my mother in law would not believe that the
Filippinos would not believe such a thing. Materialism devours also our
sense of reverence and responsibility, which leads to force, including
violence, to replace these internal gyroscopes. We allow ourselves to be
forced to do things by employers, we force others to do things, and our lives
become increasingly concentrated at the surface, hard hollow shells.
Destitution in conditions of hopelessness is worse, of course. We get tied up
in externalities, making things the way we want them to be, which of course
is beyond our power (which we have bartered for goods anyway), not becoming
the best people we can be according to the gifts given to us by the Universe,
attending to our internal landscape. Of course it is people who do that,
Thoreau, Ghandi, King to name one chaine of influence, that genuinely change
the world. But they do it by becoming themselves, throwing out the internal
stuff of which they personally disapprove, and taking private actions,
meaning now necessarily reclusive actions but internally governed actions,
which radiate Power, almost or entirely inadvertently. Of course as we get
jammed closer together, territory and want and greed are amplified by
crowding response and we fight and manipulate for control. This is not
change, whatever technology we bring to bear--it is sameold sameold stuff
from the base part of ourselves that separates us from most other animals in
degree (particularly intensity), if not kind. Is this what you mean, Vern?
I though it was sort of obvious.

Dan H
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