permaculture

[georg parlow <g.parlow@gmx.at>]

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
************
g.parlow@gmx.at
1230 Wien, A-Baumgartnerstr. 4/B1/013
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