Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

permaculture - [permaculture] It IS a population issue, Not a tech issue

permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: permaculture

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: "Lance Bermudez" <becnal@hotpop.com>
  • To: "permaculture" <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [permaculture] It IS a population issue, Not a tech issue
  • Date: Sun, 6 Jul 2003 22:31:58 +0200

Our species does not need technology to ensure our durability on this planet.  Humanity has existed for millions of years.  Our population explosion has been going on for only ten thousand years old, contemporaneously with Civilization in the Near East.
 
People need to eat.  And to satisfy that one basic need, humanity is eating the planet alive.  The oceans are being emptied.  Land is being cleared for agriculture.  These are not technology issues. These are basic food and  water issues.
 
If someone saw a guy repeatedly stabbing himself with a small knife, one would naturally suggest to him that what he was doing was harmful to his health.  It would be insane for him to reply, "You are obviously not considering that a breakthrough blood clotting factor may be invented any day now."  We don't need a breakthrough, we need to live in accordance with the laws of Ecology.
 
 
The following is an excerpt from a speech entitled The New Renaissance, by Daniel Quinn.  I beg you all to read the whole speech, which can be found here:  http://www.geocities.com/becnalrio/newrenaissance.htm 
 
"During your lifetime, the people of our culture are going to figure out how to live sustainably on this planet--or they're not. Either way, it's certainly going to be extraordinary. If they figure out how to live sustainably here, then humanity will be able to see something it can't see right now: a future that extends into the indefinite future. If they don't figure this out, then I'm afraid the human race is going to take its place among the species that we're driving into extinction here every day--as many as 200--every day.
 
It's obvious that it costs a lot of money and energy to produce all the food we need to maintain our population at six billion. But there is an additional, hidden cost that has to be counted in life forms. Put plainly, in order to maintain the biomass that is tied up in the six billion of us, we have to gobble up 200 species a day--in addition to all the food we produce in the ordinary way. We need the biomass of those 200 species to maintain this biomass, the biomass that is in us. And when we've gobbled up those species, they're gone. Extinct. Vanished forever.

In other words, maintaining a population of six billion humans costs the world 200 species a day. If this were something that was going to stop next week or next month, that would be okay. But the unfortunate fact is that it's not. It's something that's going to go on happening every day, day after day after day--and that's what makes it unsustainable, by definition. That kind of cataclysmic destruction cannot be sustained."

Again, please read the entire speech.  It isn't very long, and I find it a good read.  http://www.geocities.com/becnalrio/newrenaissance.htm

 
Lance ~~~
 
"I need so much time for doing nothing that I have no time for work."
http://www.geocities.com/becnalrio



Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page