The great question of over population

I almost forgot the regenesis experiment conducted in a human rights vacuum in Chile, 1973-1985, RIP. And then in the 1990's, western leaders cheered on Boris Yeltsin to "have the courage to be a dictator", like their rightwing Chilean protege and los Chicago boys before. They want to dice this one up and bury it in the four corners for all time.

[ 25 October 2008: Message edited by: Fidel ]

Did you ever get around to reading Deer HUnting With Jesus,  D? You were interested in "class war" in the Appalachians, I recall, and asked me to post something more on it.

Or did you find the language of the rednecks a bit much for your refined sensibilities?

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p.s. If you've come across a method for sustaining life "indefinitely", please share .

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Humanity produces its own life, through labour as a conscious social activity. This basic characteristic of our species has [b]two important consequences[/b] for a discussion of ecology.

[b]The first[/b] is that humanity doesn’t just evolve biologically, as other species do, but also develops itself through history. As it develops, passing through different modes of production, it changes its relationship with the environment and changes the environment itself. That is why our species has such an impact on the environment. The nature of our impact is not fated in advance: more development does not automatically imply more environmental destruction. For example, in some regions agricultural communities probably put less pressure on the environment than hunting communities that used fire as a means of production. The relationship between human development and the environment is dialectical. We have choices. [b]Development does not necessary imply material, quantitative growth. Within certain limits, we can develop while protecting the environment.[/b]

[b]The second[/b] consequence is that knowledge of homo sapiens’s biological characteristics doesn’t help us to understand any particular problem in the relationship between humanity and nature. On the contrary, the decisive role is played by socially and historically conditioned forms of development. To seek an explanation or solutions for modern environmental crises by studying the history of Easter Island, or the Mayan collapse, as Jared Diamond does in his bestseller Collapse, is pure nonsense. The Neolithic civilisation on Easter Island had no nuclear power, didn’t use pesticides and didn’t burn fossil fuels.

[b]Ignoring history and the concrete mode of production in a discussion of humanity and nature can only lead to a seemingly trite but very dangerous conclusion: that, other things being equal, the more human beings there are on Earth, the more ecological problems we create. That in turn leads to just one question: How many people should there be? James Lovelock, author of the Gaпa hypothesis, says 500 million, others say 3 billion. Who will decide?[/b] Above all: with that diagnosis, how can we democratically address an urgent ecological problem like global warming? According to the IPCC, global GHG emissions should decrease by 50% to 85% by 2050. Faced with such a great challenge, [b]obsessive “Population Bomb” thinking can only pave the way for a new barbarism — which is why, while not in the least favoring pro-natalist policies, the left should consider the “overpopulation” debate as an important ideological battlefield....[/b]

[C]apitalist ecological crises mainly proceed from overproduction and the resulting overconsumption. Not only does capitalism use more resources, it does so by developing environmentally dangerous technologies. Each capitalist tries to get surplus profit, also called technological rent, by replacing human labour with machines, chemicals, etc., to improve productivity. Among other problems, this race for more productivity, this permanent revolution in production, leads to the development and use of new technologies like nuclear power, new molecules like DDT or PCB, and even new genetically modified organisms.

Climate change must be seen within that framework.

That might seem obvious, but it is not. The IPCC’s reports — which are excellent, especially those from Workgroups I and II — label global warming as “anthropic,” which is misleading. [b]Global warming is not a result of human activity in general but of capitalist human activity. Indeed global warming is the purest and more perfect example of a capitalist environmental crisis: it is a direct result of overproduction.[/b] Today’s atmosphere is saturated with CO2, due to the massive burning of fossil fuels — coal, oil, gas — in imperialist countries since the Industrial Revolution. Climate Change is the global inheritance of 250 years of capitalist accumulation.

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SOURCE: [url=http://climateandcapitalism.com/?p=567]ecosocialist Daniel Tanuro[/url]

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Originally posted by Merowe:
[b]Guess I'd quibble with a couple of points in M.Spector's opening quote....most of which I salute as sensible enough...the author's second point, that knowledge of homo sapiens biological circumstances is irrelevant is palpable nonsense. Our metabolisms require oxygen rather than for example, sulphur and the distinction IS important.[/b]

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The fact that we require oxygen rather than sulphur tells us what, exactly, about the cause of the current ecological crisis?

I suggest you read the whole article, and not just the portion I quoted. Tanuro explains very well why capitalism is responsible for the crisis.

Tanuro is refuting the idea that biology is destiny – that there is something in “human nature” that makes us destroy our environment. He is saying that humans have evolved not just biologically but socially, and that trying to draw conclusions about our relationship with nature today, based on our relationship with nature in earlier, less evolved societies (as Diamond and others seek to do), is fallacious, since that relationship has changed so radically.

If you read the whole article, you will see how Tanuro explains the qualitative difference between the ecological crisis of capitalism and the crises of primitive societies. He says:

quote:

Pre-capitalist modes of production produced use-values, quantitatively limited by human needs. Labour productivity was low, and growth occurred very slowly. Social crises involved shortages of use-values.

Capitalism produces exchange-values, not use-values as such. Its only limit, as Marx said, is capital itself. Over-production and over-consumption [b](the first conditioning the second)[/b] are inherent in this highly productive system, which is based on ever more profit and ever more growth to produce profit. Social crises involve overproduction of commodities — that is, of exchange-values.

These basic differences shape very important distinctions between present and past ecological crises.

Previous ecological crises, in so-called primitive societies for instance, mainly involved low production communities looting natural resources as a response to food shortages caused by droughts, flooding, or wars.

Capitalism also loots nature, but in a very different way: capitalist looting aims to obtain and sell exchange values, not to satisfy needs, so it causes more environmental degradation than previous societies.

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Originally posted by Merowe:
[b]Likewise, in his eagerness to condemn capitalism he misses completely the fact that it is industrialism that lies at the heart of our current material consumption patterns and the dangers our societies confront. Obviously the two are linked...but are most emphatically NOT the same thing.[/b]

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“Consumption patterns” are not the primary cause of the ecological crisis, because overconsumption is itself a consequence of overproduction. And overproduction is an inseparable part of capitalism.

“Industrialism” is not something counterposed to capitalism. Industrialism is the most advanced form of productivity, and is used by capitalism to maximize productive capacity in order to maximize profits. It is made possible only by the discovery and use of concentrated energy sources such as fossil fuels.

Industrialism does not necessarily, of itself, imply overproduction. It is only when industrialism is overlaid on a capitalist economic system that it becomes a tool for the overproduction that is inherent in capitalist political economy. The solution to the ecological crisis is not to smash the machines but to smash the capitalist system that uses them to impoverish the earth.

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Originally posted by Frustrated Mess:
[b]What if by bringing about another great extinction through over consumption of the planet's resources and the incumbent waste, we are merely fulfilling our species' biological destiny? What if we are genetically programmed to do exactly what we are doing?[/b] [END QUOTE]

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As I noted above, Tanuro refutes the idea that biology is destiny – that there is something in “human nature” that makes us destroy our environment. He does so by reminding us that we are the product of social, as well as biological evolution.

The argument from biology is really a non-starter. There is nothing in our genome that says we must destroy rainforests to make giant [url=http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/11/borneo/white-text/3]oil-palm plantations[/url], or clear-cut forests in Alberta in order to strip-mine bitumen. These and thousands of other insults to the environment are caused by the way we organize our society - or more accurately, the way our society has evolved as a class society dominated by the capitalist mode of production. As Tanuro puts it, "Global warming is not a result of human activity in general but of capitalist human activity."

Consider our closest biological relatives - chimpanzees, with whom we share 96% of our DNA. There is no sign that they have any biological imperative to destroy their environment.

Moreover, we have the intellect and the power to overcome any negative biological imperatives we may have. The very fact that we are revolted by what is being done to the environment demonstrates that ecological devastation is profoundly [b]contrary[/b] to our human nature. We have conscious will, we have societies, we have state apparatus that can be used to curb antisocial behaviour if necessary. All we need is the will to use our human abilities to restore our equilibrium with nature. To do this we must get rid of capitalism.

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Originally posted by Frustrated Mess:
[b]I don't pretend to know exactly what our genetic programming is.[/b][END QUOTE] 

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Why don't you get back to us when you have some actual scientific fact to back up your speculation? Like maybe a greed gene, or an exploitation gene...

[b]Will limiting population growth solve the climate crisis?[/b]

by Simon Butler

Many environmentalists believe that environmental destruction is a product of "overpopulation", and that the world is already "full up". So are population reduction strategies essential to solving the climate crisis?

At best, population control schemes focus on treating a symptom of an irrational, polluting social and economic system rather than the causes. In China, for instance, such measures haven't solved that country's environmental problems.

At worst, populationist theories shift the blame for climate change onto the poorest and most vulnerable people in the Third World.

They do not address the reasons why environmental damage, or even instances of overpopulation, happen in the first place and they divert attention away from the main challenge facing the climate movement - the urgent need to construct a new economy based on environmentally sustainable technologies and the rising of living standards globally.

For at least 200 years, "overpopulation" has been used to explain a host of social problems such as poverty, famine, unemployment and - more recently - environmental destruction.

Between 1798-1826, the conservative English economist and clergyman Thomas Malthus published six editions of his influential Essay on the Principle of Population, which argued that population growth inevitably outstrips food production.

Malthus' argument was that the English working class was poor because they were too numerous, not because they were exploited. He opposed welfare or higher wages because, he said, that would allow the poor to survive, and breed, compounding "overpopulation" and leading to more poverty.

Malthus was wrong about food production. In the last two centuries, food production has grown faster than population - his theories nevertheless gained wide acceptance among the English elite of the day because they provided a convenient excuse to blame the poor for their own predicament.

In the 1960s, Malthus' anti-human ideas were resuscitated by a new generation of conservative theorists who argued that the people of the global South remained hungry because there were too many to feed. US environmentalist Paul Erlich, in his 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb, argued for population control measures in the Third World to, he said, avert an ecological crisis.

Populationists like Erlich usually don't question the unequal allocation of resources on a global scale. Nor do they admit that high birth rates in the Third World are largely a response to dire poverty.

Instead, they look at the world's resources as though they were dividing up a pie: reduce the world's population and those remaining will each get a bigger slice. They fail to address the question of power and, therefore, unequal access to global resources.

Most environmentalists who believe that population control is necessary would still reject the most extreme forms of the populationist argument.

But the fact remains that the real driver of climate change is not population growth but a market economy locked into burning fossil fuels for energy. The corporations that profit most from taking the lion's share of global resources are the same polluting industries that, today, are resisting the necessary shift away from carbon-based economies.

Populationists tend to downplay the question of power. As renowned US ecologist Barry Commoner commented, populationist solutions to environmental destruction are "equivalent to attempting to save a leaking ship by lightening the load by forcing passengers overboard".

He went on to ask the question that populationists tend to ignore: "One is constrained to ask if there is not something wrong with the ship".

The world is not experiencing runaway population growth. Global population is growing, but the rate of growth is slowing. It peaked in the 1960s and has been in decline ever since. Global population grew by 140% between 1950 and 2000. Experts predict a further rise of 50% between 2000 and 2050, and just 11% in the 50 years after that.

The simplistic view that population control is the main way to reverse runaway climate change can obscure debate over other measures. These include: the rapid replacement of fossil fuel-generated energy with renewables; improvements in energy efficiency; and the introduction of sustainable agricultural methods.

In rich countries such as Australia, we need to campaign for environmental outcomes that sharply reduce Third World poverty, including cancelling debt owed to First World nations.

It is well documented - including in the wealthy countries - that birth rates fall as living standards rise. Furthermore, the greater economic independence women have, and the more control women have over their own bodies, the fewer children they have. Development, along with women's emancipation, is the best contraception.

It is undeniable that parts of the world are overcrowded, and that land degradation through over-logging, erosion, over-hunting, over-fishing and poor waste disposal are massive problems in the countries of the global South.

These social, economic and environment problems are interlinked, and point to the real causes of overpopulation and environmental destruction of the Third World - extreme poverty. Liberty and justice and rights for the poor, especially women, have to be our concern.

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From: Comment & Analysis, Green Left Weekly issue #774 12 November 2008.

http://www.greenleft.org.au/2008/774/39925

And then there's the benevolent effect of modernization on nearby China, another nation of 1.3 billion people ( although, unlike India, it did not more than double its population from 1973 to the present).

By Michael Bristow
BBC News, Beijing

A UN report on China says the lives of its people have been vastly improved over the last three decades.

Poverty has fallen, adult literacy has climbed and Chinese people are now living longer than ever, it says.

But despite rapid economic progress, new problems have emerged, such as the gap between rich and poor.

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), which published the report, says these problems need urgent attention.

The report, entitled Basic Public Services for 1.3 Billion People, comes just weeks before China celebrates 30 years of economic reforms.

During this period, the Chinese government has largely ditched central planning in favour of the free market.

'Stunning achievements'

These reforms, started by the late, former leader Deng Xiaoping, have brought spectacular results, as the report makes clear.

"The speed, scope and magnitude of the improvements… rank among the most stunning achievements in the history of human development," says the UN's chief representative in China, Khalid Malik, in the report.

Between 1978 and 2007, rural poverty fell from 30.7% to just 1.6%, according to the UN.

But new problems have emerged, with not everyone benefiting equally from rapid economic expansion.

Rural areas lag behind urban areas, the east coast is richer that the western hinterland and there is a large wealth gap between different social groups.

Schoolchildren in the wealthy coastal city of Shanghai receive 10 times more funding than some rural pupils, the report says.

[url=http://www.greenleft.org.au/2008/775/39955][u]Climate change: Too many people?[/u][/url]

Simon Butler replies to critics of his article [url=http://rabble.ca/comment/960047/Will-limiting-population][u](above)[/u][/url]

14 November 2008

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Last week, Green Left Weekly published an article arguing that population reduction schemes provide no answers to the threat of climate change.

Population-based arguments wrongly treat population levels as the cause, rather than an effect, of an unsustainable economic system. This means they tend to divert attention away from pushing for the real changes urgently needed, the article insisted.

Campaigning for such measures as the rapid introduction of renewable energy and the phasing-out of fossil fuels, along with a shift to sustainable agricultural methods, should instead be the highest priority of the environmental movement.

Strategies to reduce human population also end up blaming some of the world's poorest people for the looming climate crisis, when they are the people least responsible. Instead, it is the powerful, vested interests that profit most from the fossil-fuel economy who pose the real threat to the planet. They must be confronted.

A section of those who accept the idea of population reduction on environmental grounds would protest that their own ideas aren't designed to substitute for the introduction of renewable energy, but to complement it.

Others would be indignant at the suggestion that their views have anything in common with the overt racism expressed by the likes of prominent US population theorist Garrett Hardin.

Hardin (himself a father of four) argued against providing food and medical aid to countries in the Third World facing famine. Such humanitarian aid only encourages more babies to survive, driving up "overpopulation" and resulting, he said, in further environmental destruction.

Population theories still retain their appeal to people who are genuinely worried about the threat of global warming, are concerned with enduring poverty in the global South and would reject Hardin's callous conclusions.

The rapid world population increase over the past two centuries appears to offer a plausible explanation of how the world got itself into ecological distress - reducing world population seems like a plausible solution….

Butler then goes on to demolish the populationist position of a group called Sustainable Population Australia. This is the meat of his argument, and you should go to the source and read it.

Butler's article concludes:

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The populations of the global South are not responsible for climate change. Rather, they are an essential component of a safe climate solution. Our strategy should be to join up with them in this fight for the future - not draw up plans to reduce their numbers.

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Population-based arguments wrongly treat population levels as the
cause, rather than an effect, of an unsustainable economic system.

Actually population can be both the casuse and effect.  Too treat it as simply either one or the other is a mistake.

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Campaigning for such measures as the rapid introduction of renewable
energy and the phasing-out of fossil fuels, along with a shift to
sustainable agricultural methods, should instead be the highest
priority of the environmental movement. 

True, but we should keep in mind that the more of us there are, the less there is for everybody, and any sustainable rate of consumption greater than about 20% of the current Canadian rate will require a decrease in population.

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Strategies to reduce human population also end up blaming some of the world's poorest people for the looming climate crisis,....

It is a mistake on the part of those that do, just as it is disingenuous to use the above arguement to discredit the argument that population is part of the problem.

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Instead, it is the powerful, vested interests that profit most from the
fossil-fuel economy who pose the real threat to the planet. They must
be confronted. 

True, but does  not take away from the fact the over all population numbers are a problem.

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The rapid world population increase over the past two centuries appears
to offer a plausible explanation of how the world got itself into
ecological distress....

The real reason is over consumption.  Population, among other things, has a role in that.  Ending over consumption is the first priority.  Achieving a population level that can be supported by whatever is decided as the acceptable level of consumption is the second.  Until the second is reached, consumption levels should not rise above what can be sustainably taken by the current population.  Canadians will have to reduce consumption by about 80% to do this. 

By placing Belize "north of Mexico",  one wonders if staff writer Mike Morreale was himself sober when writing this one, amigo.

And, of course, if medical facilities in Belize came anywhere near approximating those of Cuba (not far northeast of Belize across the Yucatan Channel), the two-year-old would be very unlikely to have been born with HIV, and would certainly be treated if it had been.

As Bageant says, Canadian and other vacation interests are rapidly taking up the living spaces of the native people, ensuring that even more will be living in the conditions described by the hockey player.

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Found it. The population growth curve is definitely flattening, and Cuba's growth is not going to be "a threat to neighbouring countries", as suggested by the CIA's world book of facts.

From safe old wikipedia comes:

According to the govt. sources, Cuba's population by December 31, 2006 was 11,239,536 compared to 11,243,000 in 2005. Total number of births was 111,084 in 2006 (BR of 9.88) compared to 120,716 (10.74) in 2005.

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Belize, however, looks more like Topsy:

The population of Belize in 2003 was estimated by the United Nations at 256,000, which placed it as number 171 in population among the 193 nations of the world. In that year approximately 5% of the population was over 65 years of age, with another 41% of the population under 15 years of age. There were 103 males for every 100 females in the country in 2003. According to the UN, the annual population growth rate for 2000–2005 is2.06%, with the projected population for the year 2015 at 315,000... the population density is as high as 360 per sq km (932 per sq mi) on agricultural land.

It was estimated by the Population Reference Bureau that 54% of the population lived in urban areas in 2001. The capital city, Belmopan, had a population of 6,000 in that year. The largest city is Belize City, with an estimated population of 46,342. According to the United Nations, the urban population growth rate for 2000–2005 was 3.4%.

The largest ethnic group in Belize is the Mestizo, which comprises 44% of the population. Other ethnic groups include Creole (30%), Mayan (10%), and Garifuna (6%).

Advance women's rights and health systems everywhere, and everyone equitably lighten their ecological footprint, ASAP. Human population will peak, then subside.

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Right on.

Now tell us, in the case of Belize, how? Through the tourist agencies that now take you on ecological tours?

How, please, starting with Belize.

Maybe bring a few hundered doctors over from Cuba? Do a trade, like the Venequela/Cuba deal - but with coconuts for doctors instead of oil?  Include a few armed guards against chance meetings with Belize's male population and randy tourists?

George Victor wrote:

 

By placing Belize "north of Mexico",  one wonders if staff writer Mike Morreale was himself sober when writing this one, amigo.

I see Morreale's error is corrected. Belize is not due north of Mexico, although there are southern extremes of Mexico situated  south-west of Belize. And the grinding poverty Patrik Elias describes is just a few day's drive from Texas. Honduras and Guatemala are lacking as well.

Sorry to be pissing you off, MS. Didn't think the question was stupid, and it was straighforward enough.

You don't see Belize's population growing at a faster rate than Cuba's? Perhaps it's my math. Will check again.

256,000 people in 2003 and pro0jected 315,000 in 2015 - and 41 per cent now under the age of 15.

I did not include the growth graph for Cuba but take a boo...it is flattening as the figure above indicates.

And I do hope it's all right with you if I challenge statements about what should be that are not supported by any ideas of how to achieve them.  I would hate to be found too materialistic for your taste in my assessment of what might realistically work for  social change in the "third" world.

It just seems to me that Cuba might be able to achieve a sustainable population, just as it has achieved a sustainable agriculture (again, see Suzuki , two-part program).

I can't see Belize pulling it off.

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Anyway, here it is ....

Demographics of Cuba, Data of FAO, year 2005 ; Number of inhabitants in thousands.

El malecón de La Habana

With their winters?

The mind boggles.

Jerry West wrote:

Some  may find this of interest:

Living Planet Report 2008

[IMG]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v697/rabblerabble/EcoPrint.jpg[/IMG] 

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The struggle between people and corporations will be the defining battle of the 21st century. If the corporations win, liberal democracy will come to an end. The great social democratic institutions which have defended the weak against the strong - equality before the law, representative government, democratic accountability and the sovereignty of parliament - will be toppled. If the corporate attempt on public life is beaten back, then democracy may re-emerge the stronger for its conquest. But this victory cannot be brokered by our representatives. Democracy will survive only if the people in whose name they govern rescue the state from captivity. -- George Monbiot

Interesting Article FM; although I share most of Price's thinking I'm more optimistic about the consequences of collapse. From the Article:

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Operative mechanisms in the collapse of the human population will be starvation, social strife, and disease.

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But even if a few people manage to survive worldwide population collapse, civilization will not.

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Civilization refers, in its derivation, to the habit of living in dense nucleated settlements, which appeared as population grew in response to plentiful resources.

To me this sounds like a gradual population decline (his examples span several centuries at a minimum), abandonment of our consumption culture, and a return to nomadism. All that's very positive stuff IMO.

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And the spiraling collapse that is far more likely will leave, at best, a handfull of survivors. These people might get by, for a while, by picking through the wreckage of civilization, but soon they would have to lead simpler lives, like the hunters and subsistence farmers of the past.

A "handful" is a rather odd measure of population but over the several centuries of "collapse" a number such as the 1 billion people that George suggested could be possible. I'm not sure why leading "simpler lives" like subsistance farmers and hunter-gatherers would be a bad thing... its long overdue IMO.

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They would not have the resources to build great public works or carry forward scientific inquiry. They could not let individuals remain unproductive as they wrote novels or composed symphonies.

I highly disagree with this statement, that learning and creativity are both a) unproductive and b) the products of our modern capitalist society. Its not born out by history or comtemporary examples of subsistance societies. I suppose this rests with one's conception of learning and creativity. He's right about building "great public works" but in the future he's described they would also be (thankfully) unnecessary.

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Or it may prove impossible for even a few survivors to subsist on the meager resources left in civilization's wake. The children of the highly technological society into which more and more of the world's peoples are being drawn will not know how to support themselves by hunting and gathering or by simple agriculture. In addition, the wealth of wild animals that once sustained hunting societies will be gone, and topsoil that has been spoiled by tractors will yield poorly to the hoe. A species that has come to depend on complex technologies to mediate its relationship with the environment may not long survive their loss.

Again I don't agree with this statement at all. For one it discounts the many societies which have retained traditional knowledge (such as many indigenous societies the world over) as well as the movements of people in developed societies towards a new relationship with our environment and the re-learning of the skills we need for such a relationship. The idea that without our technology we aren't human is simplistic and misguided; this loss would be a long-term gain for our species. As to animal populations, in a world of dwindling human populations and abandoned cities animal populations would have a significant boon; barring complete environmental collapse (which the "collapse" of "civilization" should help prevent) the capacity of animal populations to rebound is much greater than this statement gives them credit for IMO.

Anyway thanks for posting that article FM. 

Quote:

The children of the highly technological society into which more and more of the world's peoples are being drawn will not know how to support themselves by hunting and gathering or by simple agriculture. In addition, the wealth of wild animals that once sustained hunting societies will be gone, and topsoil that has been spoiled by tractors will yield poorly to the hoe. A species that has come to depend on complex technologies to mediate its relationship with the environment may not long survive their loss.

This reminds me of reality shows from a couple of years back, like "Pioneer Quest" that took regular city people back to pre-20th century technology. Aside from the quick adaptation (most of) the people made to subsistence farming, what was ignored in the premise was the fact that most of the world's population [i]still lives[/i] at pre-industrial capitalist technological levels. If you took regular Canadian city dwellers, and a family from say, Congo, and put them in the same 1880's settler farm, the family from  would think they'd won the lottery, and the Canadians would starve to death trying to order pizza by pony express.

Like those shows, the article has the myopic view that western technological dependency is a necessary condition for the entirety of humanity. Never mind that much of the world does not share our over dependency on technology, the assumption is if [i]we[/i] (wealthy westerners) can't shop at Safeway, then [i]all[/i] humanity will collapse. A very imperial mindset.

Frustrated Mess] <p>I don't think you understood it.</p> <p>Anyway, here is an example of our big, human brains in action:</p> <p>[quote wrote:

The Arctic has long been seen as a rich but inaccessible resource base. Energy experts estimate there may be as much as 25 percent of the world's oil and gas reserves lying beneath the Arctic seabed.

    "The Arctic presents Russia with a range of interests, especially as an energy supplier. Even by preliminary estimates, the Arctic shelf is one of the biggest supplies [of energy resources] of oil and gas," says Dmitry Abzalov, an expert at the Center for Current Politics, a Moscow-based think tank

My god we are doomed. Notice there is no mention of US missile "defense" for Ukraine and Poland, suppodly to protect them from weapons which Iran doesnt have and precariously situated within minutes of striking distance from Moscow and Beijing. The prospect for world peace represents a personal terror for these idiots. They could actually trade freely for Russia's resources instead of resorting to ongoing Islamic gladio terror in Asia since the 90's. As Chalmers Johnson said, it was a complete failure of imagination among US hawks to realize the significance of the end of the Berlin Wall and lowering of the iron curtain.

If we fail to achieve Kardashev's type one civilization status, then it wont be due to people in power using their heads. Socialism or barbarism. Or, noosphere or barbarism. And green capitalism is an oxymoron

Frustrated Mess wrote:

That's not my point, Fidel. Forget the bare militarism and global posturing for a moment. Forget the USA and capitalism, just for a minute.

Think of this: Our planet - our life support system - is in dire peril. The melting polar caps represent an open sore to which we - as a species entirley dependent on this biosphere - ought to be responding with alarm and with an immediate and unrelenting demand for both mitigation and the healing of this system.

Okay, but let me point out, FM, that in your first sentence above you appeal to us to forget about capitalism and imperialist maneuvering, and concentrate on the possible end result, which is dangerous climate change and environmental disasters affecting everything else.

But then the article points to the usual suspects, and this time it's Russian aggression in the arctic. Well, the Soviets were forced into a corner in the mid-late 1980's and told they needed to integrate their economies with the western world if they wanted to avoid vicious trade sanctions and relentless cold war. And so since the end of cold war, US  hawks have been busy bombing and invading Middle Eastern and Central Asia countries and "North Atlantic" Terrorist Organizaton encircling Russia and China militarily. Expansionist policies are engrained in the very philospophy of predatory capitalism, and written in stone by a debt-driven monetary system. Smaller bio footprints are not possible under this system, unless governments and big business plan to remain indebted to bond markets and an international banking system forever. Is that the deal, that whole nations shall be enslaved by a handful few bankers and money speculators living off the avails of and using compound interest as a weapon of mass destruction? None of us voted for bond salesmen or the Basel club of central bankers, IMF heads or WTO gangsters. I didnt vote for them. And if none of us voted for them, then who are they accountable to, mother nature? Lady of the lake? Excalibur? Ha! It's no laughing matter as I know you've replied to me in all seriousness.

Well, FM, I dont know the answer and way out of this dilemma other than socialism. We need to take the profit out of world economies and have democratic control of money creation and credit.  Profit motive was fine when scientists knew little about global warming, sometime before 1960 or so. Winston Churchill once said that governments eventually do the right thing after doing it wrong in every way possible. I think that time has come. Cheer up, as my grandmother used to say,  it might never happen.

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Frustrated Mess wrote:

Sorry Fidel, you don't seem to grasp the simple equation.  The point of the article is that human civlilzations have never lived in balance with nature and, regardless of the economic model, never will.

I think Canadian Ronald Wright said that every civilization that existed to concentrate wealth in the hands of a few, ie. consumption based economies, ended in resource depletion and collapse. There are more successful examples to follow than Easter Islanders, Aztecs, and Romans. Indigenous people around the world have lived simpler existences for thousands of years without making the economy a central focus of everyday living. Socialist Cuba is a good example for sustainable economy and acheiving much with very little. North Korea, although not an exemplar democracy and most citizens living spartan lives, has achieved certain things with very few natural resources. In fact, there are several billion people living in thirdworld capitalist countries whose standards of living are so poor and quality of life so low that it wouldnt take a lot to raise them, even by socialism. 

I'm not sure you're telling me anything that I dont already know. First you suggest that I should forget about predatory capitalism, because that's not the point. Then you suggest that democratic socialism isnt the answer, because we're doomed anyway.

I think Prince Phil, Al Gore of "Blood&Gore", and those nature nazis who refer to billions of people as animals and part of the nuisance herd, or "socialist horde"  that requires culling from time to time, are defeatists. And it's not hard to have a defeatist attitude when lookking at the world through the lens of capitalism. 

I think people are the answer though, and I think we are not all inherently greedy nor prone to individualism or even nihilism.  I think we are more than just one-dimensional prisoners of our own greed and waiting to break free from the chains of capitalism. People belong in the bigger picture. We're not animals. The animals are out thre profiting from war, state-sponsored terrorism, and taxpayer handouts. Capitalism is parasitic, and the planet is trying to tell us as much. People have the imaginative powers to create a better way. Earth, people, capitalism, and one of these three doesnt fit in the future scheme of things.  [img]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v697/rabblerabble/saucer-1.gif[/IMG]