permaculture

[Marimike6@cs.com]

Gene writes:

"I'm with Toby on this one.

"It's hard to imagine that anybody seriously thinks that some technical
solution is going to bail us out of this mess, although I know that there
are many out there that think just that. Perhaps it's because they can't
see any other way out? Maybe some hidden alien technology will be revealed
at the last moment to give us unlimited free perpetual-motion energy. Let's
keep up business as usual and look for those solutions. Oh Please." etc.

I think you misconstrue what I'm saying, Gene. 

Of course we'll want to search for every other solution in the meantime. And 
we'll want to conduct our individual lives in a way that minimizes our 
imprint 
on the planet. And we're going to want to teach others, if permaculture is to 
be anything but an obscure lifestyle practiced by a handful of individuals. 

We share the planet with 6,800,000,000 other people, all of them rapidly 
multiplying. And if we look at their cultural values in any great detail, we 
understand that nearly all of them are striving to be American-style 
consumers. 
Plus, the direction of our global economy is to enable them to do just that.. 
up 
to the point where some key ingredient of the lifestyle fails. Oil and gas, 
perhaps. Or the climate.

That's a given. I don't think it's realistic to suppose that all those 
Chinese, Indians and everyone else are suddenly going to "get religion" in 
time to 
avert a disaster that only has another ten to fifteen years to go before 
irreversible consequences set in. I really don't.

So what I was suggesting was that in addition to everything that we're doing 
as individuals now, in learning how to reduce our footprint and telling 
others 
about it.. we as a species are going to have to do something additionally. 
Something very big.

Otherwise the human experiment (technology-based mass culture) doesn't work 
out. We need (IMO) both macro- and micro-solutions in order to survive, 
either 
as individuals or as a species.