John Feeney , Trinifar, Magne Karlsen and Lo Fleming are due thanks for preparing the way for this opportunity to openly consider apparently unforeseen scientific evidence of human population dynamics and the human overpopulation of Earth. Who knows, this discussion could be a useful process by which the most formidable of humanity’s looming global challenges is carefully and skillfully examined.

Sincerely,

Steve

Excellent effort on your part. I will follow your example going forward.

Always,

Steve

I went ahead and truncated the articles and provided links to read the rest. I think it’s probably the best way to go because even with permission from the author, pasting a whole article in a comment makes for a very long scroll. Thoughts?

Another commonly used option, and perfectly acceptable under “fair use” guidelines, is just to paste the first several sentences (or perhaps the first paragraph) of the article, followed by a link to where people can read the rest. That might be the easiest approach on an ongoing basis. You don’t need to be running around trying to get permission from the author every time you want to call attention to an article. It’s no big deal; let me know which option you want to take, and I can fix each comment from my end in a matter of seconds.

It appears that I have made a mistake here. Dave Foreman and Curtis White look to me like two of our most wondrous “voices in the wilderness”…..voices that need to be heard. I do not know either of these outstanding thinker-scientists personally. Consequently, this week I will find them and ask each for this permission. If I do not obtain the permission, then I will advise you of same, at which time I suppose the articles of both men will be exchanged for the link or, perhaps, it would be satisfactory simply to add the link on each post.

Thanks for bringing this situation to my attention.

Sincerely,

Steve

If you’re going to paste more than a brief snip from an article in a comment here, please make sure you have permission from the author. Normally, I wouldn’t so much mind as I’d just take it down if I got a complaint from the author. But the WordPress staff have been very firm in some messages on their support forums to the effect that if they receive a complaint about copyrighted material on someone’s blog they will close down the blog, no questions asked, and only might put it back up if the material in question is removed.** So I don’t want to take chances with that.

Steve, if you know Curtis White could you check to see if reprinting those here is okay with him? Otherwise, you or I could just provide a link to them in Orion. (Same thing with the Dave Foreman essay. And if you know him, man you know everyone! :^)

Thanks,

The management

**That’s also why I only use photos here which are licensed in ways that don’t raise any copyright issues. Based on what I read on the forums, I think bloggers on wordpress.com blogs need to be a little extra careful about that.

Environmentalism can’t succeed until it confronts the destructive nature of modern work—and supplants it

by Curtis White
Published in the May/June 2007 issue of Orion magazine

I

ENVIRONMENTALISTS SEE THE ASPHALTING of the country as a sin against the world of nature, but we should also see in it a kind of damage that has been done to humans, for what precedes environmental degradation is the debasement of the human world. I would go so far as to say that there is no solution for environmental destruction that isn’t first a healing of the damage that has been done to the human community. As I argued in the first part of this essay, the damage to the human world has been done through work, through our jobs, and through the world of money.”

Read the rest here: http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/267

As background for Russell Hopfenberg’s comments later this week, please consider the following essay. Thanks.

“The Idols of Environmentalism

Do environmentalists conspire against their own interests?

First in a two-part series by Curtis White.
Published in the March/April 2007 issue of Orion magazine

For part two of this two-part series, see The Ecology of Work.

ENVIRONMENTAL DESTRUCTION proceeds apace in spite of all the warnings, the good science, the 501(c)3 organizations with their memberships in the millions, the poll results, and the martyrs perched high in the branches of sequoias or shot dead in the Amazon. This is so not because of a power, a strength out there that we must resist. It is because we are weak and fearful. Only a weak and fearful society could invest so much desperate energy in protecting activities that are the equivalent of suicide.”

Read the rest here: http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/233

I’m always a trend setter.

You are ahead of the times. Your May 3rd discussion is coming along just at the right time. Many of the sites are talking about food and population.

Lo

According to Hopfenberg, the dynamics of human population numbers is no longer a preternatural phenomenon but a knowable one and human population dynamics is not essentially different from the population dynamics of other species in both the complexity and the simplicity of the governing elements.

A point in human history may have been reached when the current scale and anticipated growth rate of economic expansion worldwide, increasing per human consumption of limited natural resources, and skyrocketing absolute global human population numbers can be seen as soon to become patently unsustainable.

Regardless of how long a predominant culture of the human species prizes certain of its unbridled growth activities and CHOOSES TO LEAVE THEM UNCHECKED, surely it is not too late to accept limits to growth of the human economy, human consumption, and human numbers
worldwide by altering human behavior accordingly.

Thanks,

Steve