“JERUSALEM: Israel, tiny and bereft of oil, has decided to embrace the electric car.”

- —

January 21, 2007: http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/01/21/europe/EU-GEN-Greece-Arson-Spree.php

ATHENS, Greece: Three car dealerships and five banks were damaged in arson attacks across Athens early Monday.

- —

January 1, 2006: http://www.janeholtzkay.com/Articles/all_paved.html

“As the nation’s population grows — or, rather, stalls — through a new century, engulfed by vehicles and stuck in traffic, the automotive life has become a misery for the adults of the future. And forget about buying a third car for 16-year-old Junior, whose only means of independent travel is on the Internet. Worse still, the emissions from Junior’s grandparents’ cars, which contributed 25 percent of America’s greenhouse gases to the atmosphere in the past century, have accelerated global warming, drowning the coastal and waterfront sites where half the nation’s population once lived. As the waves begin to ripple through the petunia patches and cornfields, Junior and his parents are contemplating putting their 2030 house on stilts.”

- Jane Holtz Key > the author of Asphalt Nation (1998) > http://asphaltnation.com/AsphaltNation/index.html

Old age is only one place extreme medical interventions occur which can be pointless or even create more suffering than they alleviate, the other (at least in the US) is with newborns.

Medical ethics is not something many people want to talk about. The solution that seems to appeal to most people (and most doctors) is the simple one: to offer every possible intervention in every case no matter what the cost or consequences to the medical care system as a whole (especially if the patient has good insurance).

Until we learn to talk about medical ethics rationality (which I think is a long way off) the situation won’t change. I think we all wish for the day when there is a reasonable and just allocation of medical resources so that more people live healthier lives.

Ceasing to prolong life for its own sake, subjectively, is a key part of ensuring a sustainable future for mankind.

Currently, the focus of education is “How my family & I can get ahead in life.”

We need to make a sustainable future the focal point of all our education… at all levels from Kindergarten to Doctorate.

And like everything else that we speak of, we need this to be done NOW.

Warmly,
Krish

Sometimes things could in actuality be simple, despite all the complexity in our world that can serve to obscure simplicity.

Simple idea: (in two parts)

Immediately feed and educate the children of the world.

1) Rather than react to crisis situations by INTERMITTENTLY dropping packaged foodstuff to people who find themselves in dire straits, fund and empower United Nations agencies to distribute nutritious food supplies systematically through time;

and SIMULTANEOUSLY

2) Provide education to these children in an ongoing manner, one that focuses on population mathematics (ie, exponentiality), health and family planning, limits to growth of human consumption/ production/ propagation activities in a finite world, and human creatureliness.

These provisions would be substantial sustenance in two forms: “food for the body and for the mind.”

Always,

Steve

The problems concerned with the population explosion can just as easily be solved at the bottom layer of the population pyramid. If we — adult humans — had the guts to really teach our children some population maths and indicate what the natural or environmental problems concerned with the population explosion are really all about, chances are the children will listen to reason and decide for themselves — voluntarily — to “look to China”.

I’m entertaining this slightly far-fetched idea with some seriousness this morning.

At the risk of sounding like a cold-blooded Nazi, I’m thinking half-seriously we all — in developing countries and developed — could be legislatively put to death at age 60 or 70 at a festive occasion resembling a scenario from the movie ‘Logan’s Run’ . People (and their relatives) would celebrate and mourn death simultaneously at a grand occasion!

I think having a fixed date-with-death actually improve the quality of our lives. I feel anybody who knows that he/she has a finite number of years to live turns into a better human being, living life more meaningfully and with purpose.

On the other hand, the thought of being kept alive infinitely (with loads of medical intervention) deep into our feeble 90s makes us all fearful that our retirement funds may run out before we, or our spouses, reach the end. I think this deep-seated fear makes us neurotic and selfish.

Think about it.

Warmly,
Krish

I read a comment from you saying that while you support any efforts to get to the deeper roots of our ecological problems, you do not think that that will happen fast enough and, so, you are concentrating on economic and population growth as areas of concern and action. I have a strong feeling that even if these areas are acted upon mightily – which itself is going to be hard to agree upon – the hoped-for results will be far from forthcoming.

I feel that this crisis shall force us, with its breadth, depth and enormity, to necessarily look at those very roots…

Let me clarify. To use an analogy, let’s say the earth is like a medical patient with cancer caused by exposure to some environmental toxin. This patient now has a brain tumor which will kill him within a month if it’s not removed. Yet, slightly longer term, he will die, as well, from continued exposure to the toxin, the root cause of his cancer, unless all traces of it are removed from his body and his environment.

How do we treat him? We address both the root cause and the immediate symptom (tumor). Ideally, we should address both facets immediately and as effectively as possible. But if forced to focus on one or the other in the next “week,” we would have to choose the tumor.

With regard to the human ecological plight, I currently focus on population and economic growth because, like the tumor, they are a very serious, relatively short term threat which, on a very physical level, and converging with climate change, groundwater depletion, and other problems, threaten countless lives in the coming decades. But I do so also because other environmental writers and political commentators avoid or ignore them more than any other serious environmental issues.

But I completely support and encourage simultaneous attention to the root, societal causes of this mess. Certainly, civilization will face cataclysm if we don’t do that as well. We must do both. And you make a very insightful argument about “artifice” versus “nature.”

Of course the search for “root” causes is tricky. One can legitimately say that economic and population growth are “causes” of our environmental problems (just as the tumor will be the immediate cause of the patient’s death), but you’re quite right that fundamental societal structures, values, etc. underly those. (It depends on what level you’re looking for roots. ) We might even be able to go further in identifying underlying causes of those structures and values! But, particulars aside, yes, we must address those deepest underlying factors.

Currently I happen to focus most on the population issue, then the economic. But I’ve touched on issues like capitalism and globalization in the past (perhaps moving a little closer to the “artifice” of which you speak… see past posts). I do welcome guest articles on topics such as that which you’ve been developing in some of the comments here. I’m definitely interested in the historical roots of how we got into this mess, going back to agriculture and on into the industrial age as you and Magne have been discussing.

Immediate threat and underlying causes — we must attend to both!

ps – Have you seen this:

http://www.mnforsustain.org/food_ag_worst_mistake_diamond_j.htm

pps – One root cause which I think can explain a great deal very simply is our view of ourselves as separate from and more important than other species.

Not at all. Not at all! You’re misinterpreting me entirely. But okay, this is what happens when the manner of communication is purely written and read. The irony is not always all that easy to get across.

What I am saying is that I have definitely — and gladly so — been interpreted as a grandma-killer myself. Now, that’s a different story. I’ve never been in favour of any forms of killing or murder of any kind, ever. And I did not — I repeat: did not! — accuse you of any such thing.

What I am saying, really, is that it is difficult to find a solution to a problem so long as the width and depth of it is impossible for people to even consider relevant or at all possible to discuss. I agree with you, that overpopulation is to a very large extent, a product of the industrial societies, in terms of medical advances and advances in the form of industrial agriculture, all based on the oil age, with all of its opportunities fully intact. And factr is fact: we’re expecting a cure for cancer any day now, and they do actually expect us to become more 100 years old, on average, all of us, before we wither away and die. If this is not an essential piece of knowledge, as concerns the population dilemma as such, well, I’ll be damned.

I am in complete agreement with you that it is a problem of food distribution and not of production. What I am also saying is that the current system in place, which you acknowledge as being based on ‘abject greed’, will not allow that distribution to take place nor the expansion of production to slow down or plateau out.

So, it is likely to continue to be business as usual – the production of food is likely to continue to be subsidised even as it does not reach those who need it.

Ashit

I think that you are interpreting my words as being in favour of euthanasia, killing, etc. now that the numbers have grown to as much as they have. Not at all !!

What I am saying, in a nutshell, is that if humankind had homed onto a closer-to-nature living such large numbers, most probably, would not have come to be.

Now that the numbers have grown so large, no artificial quick-fix is likely to be agreed-upon, nor likely to work if sought to be implemented.

We are most likely set on pushing the limits till Nature itself shall bring the curtain down on our numbers.

Ashit

“The overpopulation is manifestly evident but … it is not the CULPRIT, just the MOST OBVIOUS SYMPTOM of our malaise/predicament. Also, the overpopulation is not linked symbiotically to food ALONE but to each and every artifice that humankind has employed … including medical intervention to artificially defer dying and to extend life, no matter if even in vegetable state, in state of decrepitude, etc., etc.”

- —

Wow. — You’re right. Of course you are. It’s not that I haven’t been thinking about the issue in exactly the same way as you do — believe me, I have — it’s just that I’ve discovered, ever so often, that this way of being absolutely truthful about the overpopulation issue comes with the usual side-effect of utter and total muteness. It’s as if people think you must be in favour, not only of euthanasia, but of the abject killing of all those who have reached the age of eighty-three, scary monsters, super creeps style.

I say: Wow. Not because you’re absolutely right in what you’re saying here, and I’m staggered or taken aback by what you’re saying here, but for the simple and straightforward fact that you dare even to hint at the rather easy-going possibility of some medical or medicinal connection to the overpopulation issue. Of course there is! — But here you are wading knee-deep inside a river of particularly troubled waters.

There can be no doubt, what-so-ever, of the fact that the beginning of the population explosion coincides in time with the take-off, second stage of the industrial revolution. I know some of the peak-oil people have explored this connection to full. If I’m not totally mistaken here, I think Paul Chefurka — a regular visitor to the GIM — wrote something to that effect here, somewhere on this blog.

The population / industrial connection is easily viewed, this way:

1900: 1.500.000.000
1930: 2.000.000.000
1960: 3.000.000.000
1975: 4.000.000.000
1986: 5.000.000.000
1997: 6.000.000.000
2007: 6.700.000.000

But that doesn’t matter much. Not from a strictly mechanistic moral-ethical point of view, which is the point that anyone who dares to even hint at a possible connection between overpopulation and medical/medicinal progress, is a little Hitler or a large Lucipher; either – or.

Thanks to both of you for the many insights into the human predicament that you are offering to this community.

Each of you has expressed a concern the scientific evidence from Hopfenberg and Pimentel appears to lead us automatically to make the choice of willfully denying food to our brothers and sisters in the human community. At least to me, this is example of a situation in which what is APPARENT is not REAL.

I cannot think of anything more pernicious than ideas, policies or programs that would willfully deny food to another human being who is in need of it.

That millions of people will die from lack of adequate sustenance in 2008 is anathema to me (and to Hopfenberg and Pimentel, I am sure), particularly because at least some of the hunger and starvation we see in our world today could be averted if we exercised the political will needed to begin redistributing our abundant global food harvests.

Mohandas Gandhi and Kofi Annan have recognized that there is enough food on Earth this very day to feed everyone now, IF world food harvests were reasonably and sensibly redistributed so that every human being was provided substantial sustenance. IF the leaders of the family of humanity chose to feed those people of the world who are hungry, I believe we have the food supplies and the distribution capabilities to accomplish this task to a much greater extent than we are doing presently.

What makes you believe that recognizing the relationship between food supply and human numbers will make the current situation, marked by hunger and starvation of so many people, worse? The hunger and starvation of billions of people in the world today is obscene, especially in light of the morbid obesity evidenced in hundreds of millions of our brothers and sisters. What is occuring on the surface of the Earth, that is leading to the hunger, starvation and extreme poverty in our time is a function not only of an unconscionable failure of political will and abject greed but also of a pervasive attitude among those in possession of most of the world’s resources and the political power to regard the least fortunate among us with what I would call ” not so benign neglect.” Of course, this neglect is not as perverse as the willful denial of food to those in need; but then, I honestly do not know of a single human being who would willfully deny food to others in need.

The acknowledgement that increasing the availability of more and more food drives population numbers of human species near-exponentially upward, just like food supply drives the population numbers of other organisms, appears to me not to be directly related to how food is distributed among the inhabitants of Earth. Decisions to redistribute food more fairly and equitably are separate from decisions to continuously increase the production of food, I suppose. Feeding those among us who are hungry is an actual food distribution problem, is it not, particularly if we acknowledge that enough food is available to feed the 6.64 billion people who exist with us in this marvelous world?

Sincerely,

Steve

I read a comment from you saying that while you support any efforts to get to the deeper roots of our ecological problems, you do not think that that will happen fast enough and, so, you are concentrating on economic and population growth as areas of concern and action. I have a strong feeling that even if these areas are acted upon mightily – which itself is going to be hard to agree upon – the hoped-for results will be far from forthcoming.

I feel that this crisis shall force us, with its breadth, depth and enormity, to necessarily look at those very roots no matter where we might have started from. We are going to be forced to ask ourselves what it really means to be human – merely stuck at the level of the stomach and the large intestine or capable of moving up to the level of a deeply aware mind and compassionate heart.

So, the title ‘humanity is the greatest challenge’ sounded very apt to me even though you might have used it with regard to population numbers.

regards,

Ashit