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permaculture - Re: [permaculture] How to Feed 9 Billion - cont.

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  • From: georg parlow <g.parlow@gmx.at>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] How to Feed 9 Billion - cont.
  • Date: Fri, 23 Nov 2012 21:59:37 +0100

Interesting and difficult post, Toby. Without claiming that I know anything better, I will add some slightly different angles to this view.

They are not necessarily coming. They are not here. They don't have to be here. That's just an eternal growth mindset, which is the heart of the problem. It's a terrible kind of circular logic: More people are coming, so we need more food. But it is "more food" that creates those births!

For decades I was thinking that to simply not have kids would be the solution. Now I see this as a purely theoretical solution, because it is real people who have the kids. We are hardwired to really try to multiply our genes. Who is happily abstaining from procreating and do so without any control measurements on all the others so that they give up having offspring too? A nonviolent realization of this scenario with the kind of people we have now is IMHO purely illusional.

And while apparently there is a connection between food supply and population growth, I do not believe it to be as simple as you present it here. It is the poor people who have the most kids, not those drowning in ressources. How do you explain this apparent contradiction?


We could have faced our fate 30 years ago and stopped at 5 billion, and then hundreds of species, and millions of habitats would still be intact. But we did a technological fix via Norman Borlaug's horrific Green Revolution--billed as the modern way to solve the food problem, which should sound familiar: Just replace "modern" with "sustainable." And it had hideous, shameful ecological consequences on a planetary scale. And now the pro-growthers, some of them very well meaning like Borlaug was, want to do another techno fix. Do we not see the predictable pattern here? So let's not continue with "humanity must grow--it's inevitable!" any more. It's not inevitable. I pray we are smarter than that.

Praying is a good idea, I think. However, I do not bet on humans being 'smart' enough to come up with a plan and implementing power to create some kind of heaven on earth. But I do trust in God/Life/Cosmic Intelligence to have a plan with all this - something along the lines of Bruce Lipton's 'Spontaneous Evolution' - if the real pressure and the amount of communication and interaction and other aspects intensify maybe enough of us 'die' as individuals into a more sane hive mind or some form of higher order of intelligence that makes it as easy to do the right thing as it is now easy to continue to increase the pressure.


How much more can the Earth stand?

The earth is not threatened here, but life as we know it is. Life on earth has done fine without oxygen, and the appearance of O2 was a catastrophy for those who lived then. My late father, a geologist, used to say that man is an index fossil for a quite short period. And even if we manage to outgrow the current crisis and hang on for another million years he will propably be right.


Mit freundlichen Grüßen,

Georg Parlow
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g.parlow@gmx.at
1230 Wien, A-Baumgartnerstr. 4/B1/013
+43-650-8899345






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