Comments on: “our species has engendered a powerful self-deception:”

By: alcaray

alcaray — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 05:20:29 +0000

The only difference with humans is that we have jumped all the fences and can do it to the whole planet at once.

By: bowser

bowser — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 02:23:45 +0000

Who are dead meat, smart enough to develop many, many methods of mass extinction, not wise enough to control them.

Dead species walking, and after such a short time, too.

By: ER

ER — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 00:55:55 +0000

even though the official line is “there is no such thing”.

With less ice in the arctic, for longer periods, they figure it’ll allow more aggressive oil exploration and drilling programs.

That’s like saying “I’m glad I found out I have cancer, now I don’t have to give up smoking.”

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=oli-exploration-ramps-us-arctic

By: bowser

bowser — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 23:04:54 +0000

The Biblical “God granted Man dominion over the Earth” stuff has allowed our sacred and hallowed selves to evolve ourselves out of existence in the near future. We are not able to stop the changes we have started, which will lead to the extinction of Homo Sapiens and that is because we thought we were special, God gave us different rules, and the show was run for us.

Meantime, the inertia of our belief systems coupled with our technological abilities guarantees our extinction. Read the global warming deniers, monitor coal, oil and gas production, watch as the poorer people breed ever faster and then tell me, if you could, what will intervene to make Earth a place which can sustain Human life.

By: ER

ER — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 11:57:30 +0000

From what we know of “primitive” societies, they seem to share a respect for their natural environment. This isn’t necessarily because they are more virtuous than we are, but because exploiting the environment is hard work, and once tribal communities acquire what they need to survive, they tend to reduce efforts at extracting more. There is also less surplus wealth available to be invested in further extractive activities.

In spite of this, even the most unsophisticated hominids exert some pressure on the environment. They burn off rangeland to increase biodiversity, or selectively prey on megafauna, introduce domesticated plants and animals and practices like irrigation for agriculture. Long before the industrial revolution, Man had altered vast sections of the planet, usually without realizing he was doing so.

Still these changes occurred slowly, over generations, and tend to stabilize as the activities are selected for and mitigated by human and natural forces.

It was the introduction of alternative energy sources, such as fossil fuels, that gave us the ability to alter the landscape in short periods of time. And it was the shift from subsistence production, to production for trade, (which occurred much earlier) that gave us the motivation to do so.

A single man or community might be willing to use land management practices that favor sustainable exploitation of a renewable resource; that man or community is concerned about the long term value of that resource for future generations.

But once production becomes an end in itself, a means of accumulating abstract, generic wealth, the producers become essentially absentee landlords, collectivized administrative bureaucracies, with no real personal stake in the resource, who find it more profitable to find new areas and things to plunder than to expend effort and expense in preserving and developing what they already have.

We go from cultivation and husbandry–to mining.