Discuss: Multiplication Saves the Day

“We must take control, speak with authority and give an absolute plan for them to follow.”

Sounds like environmental fascism, the new Brownshirts of social engineering.

“...and do whatever it takes to move the people in the right direction.”

Who among us is certain they know precisely the “right direction”? And let us not forget Thomas Merton’s warning that the frenzy of the activist is another form of violence.

I’m among those who find this article inspirational. And I’d like to quote the late, great David Brower in this same context:  “Politicians are like weather vanes.  Our job is to make the wind blow.”  Three cheers for wind power (plus)!

“Politicians are like weather vanes.  Our job is to make the wind blow.”

Exactly. Politicians can turn only on their fixed axis - a little to the right or a little to the left. The axis is fixed by the entrenched power structure of the nation.

What we need is not more hyperventilating, trying to effect a slight shift in direction, but to build a new weather vane that turns on the authentic needs of the web of life.

Dear Friends,

Science is indisputably the finest source for gaining an adequate understanding of the way the world we inhabit actually works and for accurately enough grasping the “placement” of the human species within the order of living things on Earth. But, as others have noted with such clarity and coherence, too many world-class scientists have treated the human overpopulation of Earth as a taboo topic and, even worse, perniciously participated in the politicization of the science of climate change. Barack Obama cannot know whatsoever could somehow be true, in large part, because so many scientists have failed to reasonably assume their responsibilities to science as well as to sensibly fulfill their duties as scientists.

Rather than do what I have been doing over the past 7 years by extolling the virtues of good science, today I am going to try something different.

What follows is a brief artistic expression that is intended to convey a symbolic meaning parallel to but distinct from, and more significant than, the literal meaning.

Please consider an allegory: that a titanic struggle between human beings and the natural world is in the offing. It seems this struggle is fulminating now precisely because too many leaders of the 6.7 billion {soon to be 9+ billion} members of the human family generally do not share the distinctly scientific, evidence-based perspective of many within the Orion community. Many too many of our brothers and sisters, especially those with great wealth and power, pompously and erroneously believe that human organisms are separate from, and somehow superior to, life as we know it on Earth.

At least to me, it appears that an epochal contest is taking shape on the far horizon between the ‘team’ of “mother culture and father profit” on one side and ‘Team’ Mother Nature on the other.

This could be the greatest show on Earth in 10,000 years.

The team of “mother culture and father profit” appears adamant in its willful intentionality to stay the same old business-as-usual course of recklessly overconsuming limited natural resources; relentlessly expanding large-scale production and distribution capabilities without regard to physical limitations of the natural world; and overpopulating our planetary home, come what may for children and coming generations, biodiversity, the environment and the Earth’s body.

Team Mother Nature simply is.

Which team will likely be seen by reasonable and sensible observers as winning the contest for success in 2012, 2020 and 2050, if the human community continues its idolatry of distinctly human overconsumption, overproduction and overpopulation activities by choosing forevermore unbridled overgrowth activities just as we are doing now?

If the leaders of the family of humanity do not choose change, do you have any ideas about which team will prevail and when will the outcome of the colossal contest no longer be in doubt?

Sincerely,

Steve

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1176

http://literature.lalisio.com/oai.html?o.0.au=Salmony,+Steven+Earl

Steven Earl Salmony states that “Science is indisputably the finest source for gaining an adequate understanding of the way the world we inhabit actually works and for accurately enough grasping the “placement” of the human species within the order of living things on Earth.”

Apparently, this “truth” is so self-evident that it allows no dispute. I dispute it in its entirety, and the fallacy lies in the very language with which it is stated.

The scientific method, though it might be useful for the accumulation and application of knowledge and the taxonomic placement of humanity within the biotic community, is perhaps the most narrow method of discerning truth employed in the broad scope of human experience.

Science acknowledges only observable, physical and quantifiable data and denies any form of intelligence beyond logical reasoning. Ironically, it denies the intuitive faculty which is the font of all hypotheses, and denigrates emotional intelligence or “extra”-sensory experience.

For instance, nearly every time an anthropologist has asked an indigenous healer how s/he came to know the healing and poisonous parts of the plant world, and the answer is “I listened to the plants”, this is (mis)interpreted as metaphor for trial and error (the only method the scientist knows). In fact, all indigenous healers can communicate with the natural world, and hunter-gatherers are highly telepathic.

The scientific paradigm has brought us to the multiple global crises we now face, and proposes to lead us out by the same methods which created them.

That is a form of insanity to which many moderns fall prey. No “leaders” will initiate the paradigm shift that is necessary for our survival. The change will come, if at all, within the hearts of each one of us. But not to those who cannot think, or even imagine, outside-the-box.

I would be fine with Steven’s assertion regarding science if scientific research were done in a vacuum by honest, principled and ethical scientists - all of them all the time. That’s theory though, not reality.

There are too many evidences of scientists arriving at their results by mixing in ideology (the DDT-malaria debate is one example), or because they don’t want to bite the hand that gives them their paycheck. Whatever Monsanto has done in the name of science would not have been possible without some scientists being complicit. There’s proof of oil industries muddying the scientific debate in the US regarding AGW, again done by scientists on the payroll.

Science-as-practiced is over-rated and needs to be questioned more often, instead of becoming another religion or a blind faith. Just because something is published in a peer-reviewed journal does not make it the ultimate, indisputable and infallible truth, though that is how most peer-reviewed papers are treated. Just my opinion.

Bill - thanks for this article whose content is I think long overdue for activists’ consideration.

Personally I’d go a little further, and point out that, until we have negotiated the Treaty of the Atmospheric Commons,
with its annual contraction of the global GHG budget,
and with its annual convergence toward per capita parity of (tradeable) national emissions rights under the budget,
all our personal & national efforts at cutting our fossil fuel usage
just marginally lower fuel prices allowing other people to buy more of them to burn.

Until we have a treaty,
(that is necessarily simple in its structure and is sufficiently equitable in its operation to endure the stresses it will face)
I wonder if you may agree that all the voluntary personal & national actions are really just dress rehearsals, R&D;, & confidence building ?

As you say, “Screw in a global treaty. Now you’re talking. ”

I disagree that all the voluntary personal & national actions are really just dress rehearsals, R&D;, & confidence building. In fact, it is only the personal that makes a difference and as Margaret Meade, Gandhi, and Jesus preached, it is the only thing that ever has.

Nobody here disputes that we need a new, green economy and that we ought to push our elected officials and business leaders to make that happen quickly. Few dispute that it will take two to ten years to implement any of these grand plans. In the short-term we cannot continue to spew GHGs at the same rate so taking personal responsibility (aka sacrifice or taking matters into our own hands) is essential for our survival.

If environmentalists want to be labeled soft liberals, then waiting for government or pater to save us from ourselves is, indeed, the only thing in which we ought to place our hopes. For my part, I am not waiting for Uncle Sam, King Coal, and our brothers and sisters in Detroit to make everything better.