Posted on 10/25/2003 11:42:31 AM PDT by PushForBush2004
With the turning of every year, we expect our lives to improve. As long as the economy continues to grow, we imagine, the world will become a more congenial place in which to live. There is no basis for this belief. If we take into account such factors as pollution and the depletion of natural capital, we see that the quality of life peaked in the United Kingdom in 1974 and in the United States in 1968, and has been falling ever since. We are going backwards.
The reason should not be hard to grasp. Our economic system depends upon never-ending growth, yet we live in a world with finite resources. Our expectation of progress is, as a result, a delusion.
This is the great heresy of our times, the fundamental truth which cannot be spoken. It is dismissed as furiously by those who possess power today -- governments, business, the media - as the discovery that the earth orbits the sun was denounced by the late mediaevel Church. Speak this truth in public and you are dismissed as a crank, a prig, a lunatic.
Capitalism is a millenarian cult, raised to the status of a world religion. Like communism, it is built upon the myth of endless exploitation. Just as Christians imagine that their God will deliver them from death, capitalists believe that theirs will deliver them from finity. The world's resources, they assert, have been granted eternal life.
The briefest reflection will show that this cannot be true. The laws of thermodynamics impose inherent limits upon biological production. Even the repayment of debt, the pre-requisite of capitalism, is mathematically possible only in the short-term. As Heinrich Haussmann has shown, a single pfennig invested at 5% compounded interest in the year 0 AD would, by 1990, have reaped a volume of gold 134 billion times the weight of the planet. Capitalism seeks a value of production commensurate with the repayment of debt.
Now, despite the endless denials, it is clear that the wall towards which we are accelarating is not very far away. Within five or ten years, the global consumption of oil is likely to outstrip supply. Every year, up to 75 billion tonnes of topsoil are washed into the sea as a result of unsustainable farming, which equates to the loss of around nine million hectares of productive land. As a result, we can maintain current levels of food production only with the application of phosphate, but phosphate reserves are likely to be exhausted within 80 years. Forty per cent of the world's food is produced with the help of irrigation; some of the key aquifers are already running dry as a result of overuse.
One reason why we fail to understand a concept as simple as finity is that our religion was founded upon the use of other people's resources: the gold, rubber and timber of Latin America, the spices, cotton and dyes of the East Indies, the labour and land of Africa. The frontier of exploitation seemed, to the early colonists, infinitely expandable. Now that geographical expansion has reached its limits, capitalism has moved its frontier from space to time: seizing resources from an infinite future.
An entire industry has been built upon the denial of ecological constraints. Every national newspaper in Britain lamented the "disappointing" volume of sales before Christmas. Sky News devoted much of its Christmas Eve coverage to live reports from Brent Cross, relaying the terrifying intelligence that we were facing "the worst Christmas for shopping since 2000". The survival of humanity has been displaced in the newspapers by the quarterly results of companies selling tableware and knickers.
Partly because they have been brainwashed by the corporate media, partly because of the scale of the moral challenge with which finity confronts them, many people respond to the heresy with unmediated savagery. Last week this column discussed the competition for global grain supplies between humans and livestock. One correspondent, a man named David Roucek, wrote to inform me that the problem is the result of people "breeding indiscriminately. ... When a woman has displayed evidence that she totally disregards the welfare of her offspring by continuing to breed children she cannot support, she has committed a crime and must be punished. The punishment? She must be sterilized to prevent her from perpetrating her crimes upon more innocent children."
There is no doubt that a rising population is one of the factors which threatens the world's capacity to support its people, but human population growth is being massively outstripped by the growth in the number of farm animals. While the rich world's consumption is supposed to be boundless, the human population is likely to peak within the next few decades. But population growth is the one factor for which the poor can be blamed and from which the rich can be excused, so it is the one factor which is repeatedly emphasised.
It is possible to change the way we live. The economist Bernard Lietaer has shown how a system based upon negative rates of interest would ensure that we accord greater economic value to future resources than to present ones. By shifting taxation from employment to environmental destruction, governments could tax over-consumption out of existence. But everyone who holds power today knows that her political survival depends upon stealing from the future to give to the present.
Overturning this calculation is the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced. We need to reverse not only the fundamental presumptions of political and economic life, but also the polarity of our moral compass. Everything we thought was good -- giving more exciting presents to our children, flying to a friend's wedding, even buying newspapers -- turns out also to be bad. It is, perhaps, hardly surprising that so many deny the problem with such religious zeal. But to live in these times without striving to change them is like watching, with serenity, the oncoming truck in your path.
Yes, maybe so however he has something going for his self promotion that Hillary doesn't.
Without knowing the guy, or ever seeing him, he has appealing looks going for him when referenced to Hillary!
You can drive a 60,s car, go to a 60's doctor at a 60's hospital, punch a clock at a 60's office job, watch your 60's TV, dial your 60's phone and be tied to the 60's news sources. I'll stay here.
Which means, at the end, they lost. LOOSERS!
supercalifragalisticexpialidoshous
I'll let the author go first. I stand ready to borrow money from him and have him pay me for the privilege.
All those words to just say increase taxes on the wealthy, Proof that socialism is inefficient as well as exploitive.
Nonsense. They said in the 1960's that by 1980 we would be living in each other's vest pockets, and all the oil would be gone. Whups! Wrong again!
They have none, so how can it catch up with them?
All of todays idealogical liberalism (as opposed to the classical liberalism of the past) is composed of emotionally immature mentalities.
One won't find the emotionally immature among those who engage in critical thinking. They don't dare to even try to engage in it, because they are afraid to face the reality to which it leads (it may not fit with what they prefer to believe).
Such mentalities aren't even intellectually honest with themselves.
Right. The year a swarm of dirty, drug-addled, obscenity-screeching, foul-smelling hippies burned-down our ROTC building on campus.
LoL's...(gasp)No thanks, I'll tie myself to current events!...however I just listened to a great tune from the '60's..."Where Were You When I Needed You" by the "Grass Roots". I guess as little as it may be, some good came out of the '60's! : )
It seems pretty obvious this person is a troll. He or she is just using the "See, I agree" argument of disarming - which is the hallmark of liberal dialectics.
In it's classic form it appears as a 'but' statement: "I agree we have the right to bear arms [lie] but since tens of thousands of children are murdered by guns every year [argument to emotion], firearms should be banned [true opinion]."
Furthermore, I'm sure the IP addresses of all posters are logged and if a repeat troll has a static address, you just ban it right off the bat.
That's the primary way the phrase "Returning Troll" makes sense.
Similar nonsense from the first Earth Day:
"We have about five more years at the outside to do something," ecologist Kenneth Watt declared to a Swarthmore College audience on April 19, 1970.
Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that "civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind."
"We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation," wrote Washington University biologist Barry Commoner in the Earth Day issue of the scholarly journal Environment.
Peter Gunter, a professor at North Texas State University, wrote, "Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions....By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine"
(SV:Sounds a lot like climatologists agree almost unanimously blah blah blah doesn't it?)
More nonsense:
Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich confidently declared in an interview with then-radical journalist Peter Collier in the April 1970 Mademoiselle, "Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make, The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years."
The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years."
Those interested in info along these line should read the article posted here.
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