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  • From: Tommy Tolson <healinghawk@earthlink.net>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Design-Bioregional-Energy/overpopulation
  • Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2007 13:21:10 -0500

Charles de Matas wrote:
I think that overpopulation is a real problem. It's just another one of those things no one, especially politicians, likes to talk about. The new limits to growth scenarios seem to indicate that the human population may have already overshot the carrying capacity of the planet. We've done this using relatively cheap food produced by fossil fuel inputs in agriculture. I don't think anyone is recommending mass extermination programs. It may not even be necessary to do much intervention. In many countries, including where I live in T&T, falling sperm counts in males are contributing to much reduced fertility levels. I'm not sure what is causing this, maybe certain hormones fed to animals, or chemical pollutants like plastics.
I think all the things being mentioned are important to restore sustainabilty: population control, reducing levels of consumption, non-growth economics, buying locally produced foods etc etc. It may not be effective just to focus on one strategy.
Cheap oil purchased what Ecology calls "ghost acreage," where an acre produces more than it possibly can. We have overshot our ecosystemic carrying capacity by a factor of between three and four.
Without cheap oil, Earth supports perhaps two billion humans. Even then, we threaten biodiversity, the engine of life.
We now have six billion humans on Earth.
We no longer have cheap oil and we will not see its return. Oil is now so expensive that it produced the cash flow for the oil industry to purchase outright the government of the US. No other energy source is as efficient as oil at producing usable power.
Estrogen- and androgen-mimicking chemicals in the ubiquitous organochlorine soup that the environment has become due to the political power of the chemical companies have been implicated in falling sperm counts and increasing hermaphroditic births. By 1998, half the birds on the Thames were hermaphrodites, as I recall. Now, in the US, so many of the common songbirds we used to see in our landscapes are gone that it has caused status quo Science to awaken from its slumber and begin to sound the alarm.
Life on Earth is in deep trouble and the biggest problem is human ignorance and denial of the ecological crisis we are in.
Permaculture needed to hit the ground running before Bill and David introduced it.
Permaculture was too utterly weird.
We wasted more than thirty years of critical time.
The future is grim, and grows grimmer each day that people cling protectively to the mortally wounded remains of their Volitional Potentials (their souls, in shamanic parlance) instead of ecopsychologically healing themselves and setting about turning the world back upright.
The Five-Fold Path is key: healing, consciousness change, resistance, alternatives, and creating community. None can be neglected. We must heal our souls, our political selves. We must develop ecological consciousness. We must resist the forces of death that have overrun us. We must create viable alternatives to dominion's ecocidal institutions. We must create sustainable community that supports and renews us. We must do it all now. Our designs must advance the Five-Fold Path. The Five-Fold Path is how we avoid extinction.
We are running a race with ignorance and death.
Will we win?

Tommy Tolson
Austin, TX




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