Trying to save the planet 'is a lot of nonsense'

[82_28]

Thanks, Iam, that was very interesting.

[wintler2]

We must get out of this space and understand that the ecological crisis and the social crisis are two faces of the same disaster.

Rhetorically true but physically false - the social problem is at much smaller scale than the ecological one/s. Sounds like yet another marxist trying to pin his tattered flag to the ecological mast.

I don't understand why you'd ever make such a statement, unless it's because of an ideological aversion.

Broadly speaking the ecological problem (the rapid destruction of the biospheric capacity to sustain life for our species and many others) is a function of the social problem (the relations among humans that determine what our civilization as a whole does). To say the social problem is at "a much smaller scale" seems meaningless, like dismissing the importance of the bullets because cumulatively they weigh only a few ounces, while the dead body full of bullet holes weighs 200 pounds.

I don't dismiss our social problem, its just not equivalent to or simply linked to the ecological one, as i read into your 'two sides of a coin' analogy. It can be argued that human social relations have played a big role in creating our ecological problem, over the passage of time, but it cannot be shown that better social relations would definitely have avoided our ecological problem and better social relations won't automatically solve it. We need to optimise our adaptations to both problems and avoid the seductive assumption that fixing one will fix the other, not that you JR said that.

[wintler2]

..
There has been, and there will not be, any reduction, or even a leveling off, of wasteful consumption in this place, unless, like I said, the plug is pulled. It's nice to think otherwise, but it ain't gonna happen. We are burning more oil than ever before. ..

Is that your gut feeling, or what you know and can show to be happening?



You have my sympathy Nordic, believe me i do know what it means to pinned both by ties of love and poverty, and LA sounds like a hard place to nurture the dream. Just cos they own your ass tho doesn't mean they have to have your mind too.

[Nordic]

Yeah, thanks, it's a weird situation to be in and I sure didn't plan it this way!

[23]

The ecological is linked to the social. The former mirrors the latter.

As long as we possess the mind of ownership, we'll fear losing that which we think we can own.

When there is no ownership, however, there is no fear of losing what you don't own.

The alternative to the mind of ownership is the mind of stewardship.

Or taking competent care of something that is temporarily entrusted to you.

Before we can become stewards of our earth, we'll have to become stewards in our personal lives.

And give up the notion that we can own anything.

To do with as we wish.

Unless, of course, our preference is to resonate with his man's view re. ownership:

[LilyPatToo]

Food for thought--

"To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places (and there are so many) where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory."

-Howard Zinn, activist, historian and author

Just sayin'...,

LilyPat

[Simulist]

Trying to save the planet 'is a lot of nonsense'

That's like saying that, since we're all inevitably going to die anyway, maintaining or trying to save our lives today is nonsense.

At the age of 90, Prof Lovelock is resigned to his own fate and the fate of the planet. Whether the planet saves itself or not, he argues, all we can do is to "enjoy life while you can".

So Lovelock is "resigned to his own fate." How quaint. Did he have breakfast this morning? Or dinner tonight? If so, for heaven's sake why?!? I mean if he's really "resigned to his own fate and the fate of the planet," then why not just save himself all the trouble — and go peacefully into that dark night?

The fact is, he's probably not really all that "resigned," after all — and neither should we be.

[No_Baseline]

Quote:
At the age of 90, Prof Lovelock is resigned to his own fate and the fate of the planet. Whether the planet saves itself or not, he argues, all we can do is to "enjoy life while you can".

Actually, no, 'Lovelock is resigned to his own fate and the fate of the planet' is not what he has ever said. Watch the BBC interview, to which this quote is attributed.

I don't want to speak for Lovelock, or further add to the misinformation surrounding what he is saying...so I all can further contribute to this thread is to ask that users please read his articles and books, and watch the video snippets of his interviews, and form their own opinion after doing so...because, even the 'old fart' as someone on this forum called him, he has something important to say.

Do I believe he is a guru, or all-knowledgable? NO, and I do not believe he does either...even in his latest book, published in 2009, he says that he does not want to be regarded as a 'Cassandra', and he outlines what data is known/what he knows ONLY...he distinguishes very clearly what he believes and what he knows, and no where is the message to 'resign yourself to fate'.

[23]

[Maddy]

Considering the possibility that human beings have been around for 200,000 years or more, I'm not overly concerned that the earth is going to just die off. Civilizations have come and gone - perhaps this is simply the end of another era. Perhaps its simply the end of an era that should have ended before it became so toxic. I am relatively certain the earth is going to heal herself when we're gone. And its not going to take the earth to "shake us off", we're doing a grand job of destroying this civilization without her help.

[JackRiddler]

Considering the possibility that human beings have been around for 200,000 years or more, I'm not overly concerned that the earth is going to just die off. Civilizations have come and gone - perhaps this is simply the end of another era. Perhaps its simply the end of an era that should have ended before it became so toxic. I am relatively certain the earth is going to heal herself when we're gone. And its not going to take the earth to "shake us off", we're doing a grand job of destroying this civilization without her help.

Let’s define it, though. Barring a very large collision, Earth the planet is almost certainly not going to cease to exist for billions of years. Earth even has a chance to survive the expansion of Sol prior to its depletion in four or five billion years. In that case it will remain in orbit around the brown dwarf for many more billions of years, again barring any other significant astronomical events in the vicinity.

The biosphere - let’s call it Gaia - has seen at least six major species die-offs since the Cambrian explosion (arrival of first multicellular organisms) 600 million years ago, and after each it has returned again to a higher level of biodiversity. Humans are very unlikely to kill it, even if (to take a purely theoretical extreme) we pledge ourselves to Sauron and consciously deploy all our weapons and resources for the express purpose of wiping everything out. All kinds of stuff will live, including bacteria, fungi, protista and very likely many kinds of plants, insects and possibly even vertebrates. They will adapt to new circumstances and within a mere 100 million years evolution is likely to be producing big dumb lumbering animals again, like ourselves.

Obviously we won’t all agree to act as one in actively trying to exterminate ourselves down to the very last person killed. So humans as a species are pretty much a lock to survive the worst ecological disasters for many thousands of years yet. That would probably include even a nuclear war, hydrocarbon depletion, mega-plagues, a new ice age or a rise in average temperatures by 20 degrees, black clouds blocking out the sun, the collapse of the present civilization and a substantial rollback of technology. Even then, millions of people very likely will still find ways to survive in select habitats. Shakespeare, Homer, and Mickey Mouse will also survive. People will weather a series of catastrophic centuries, adapt, set themselves up under domes, engineer themselves to eat and breathe crap, and hate all of their ancestors with an abiding passion.

That’s not altogether guaranteed. During the 200,000 years you speak of, according to present knowledge of population history, the total population of humans in the first 100,000 years grew to higher than 10,000 people, but then declined to just about that around 100,000 years ago. At that time, the right plague or a minor astronomical event could have put an end to us. It took another 90,000 years to get to six million people, 10,000 years ago.

Going by rule of thumb measures, that’s 95 percent or more of all human history to get to one one-thousandth of the present human population, and at that point gathering and hunting was already getting difficult by the means and in the habitatsavailable at the time. Over the next few millennia, independently of each other, people on several continents started figuring out agriculture. That was the first big explosion, and it took almost all of the remaining 10,000 years to reach a population of about half a billion, 500 years ago.

After more growth, interrupted briefly by the black plague, we reached a billion people 200 years ago, at the dawn of the industrial and hydrocarbon age. In 1950, we were still at just over two billion people! (Imagine it: We're talking already after World War II!)

Population has tripled in sixty years, whereas 800 years ago the growth rate was such that it would still take 300 years to double. (10,000 years ago the implied doubling time was about 5,500 years. I’m getting these figures from David Christian, Maps of Time, Table 6.2, p. 143.)

We constantly and collectively mislead ourselves and deny reality by calling the present dilemma of the human species an environmental or ecological crisis. It’s not. The environment is indifferent to us. An environment will continue to exist no matter what happens.

The crisis is only that of our collective (by the decisions and actions of some more than others) destruction of the biospheric basis for sustaining our civilization in its present form and our species at the present numbers - and also of Gaia’s ability to support most other higher life forms (the latter probably only for the short term of mere millions of years). Nevertheless Earth and Gaia will survive, and you may think that (as I also do in some of my more philosophical moods) it’s no big deal, in the big picture, that billions of us will prematurely die as our population crashes, and also no big deal that most species in the vertebrate and arboreal classes will be wiped out, if our civilization continues consuming everything in the way we do, until it collapses. This still won’t mean our extinction… so okayfine?

[Maddy]

… so okayfine?

Okayfine!

[Allegro]

The point is that ecological consciousness is emergent globally and big resources, so far woefully inadequate, are being mobilized by it - now it must become exponential and complete, without compromises: … [followed with a quote by Yann Arthur-Bertrand] [Refer.]

Hopefully staying with the context written in the original comment from which an excerpt referenced above prompts the mention: if I’m unable to do any more that I’ve been doing excessively for not less than a couple of decades to help what I had supposed the ecology of Earth, I can additionally keep insuppressible my conscience for global ecology by reading proficient research with regard to the deep political and financial cogs the Mighty Oily Forces have greased into a systemic protecting immensely profitable rackets.

Once I see a new article by Michael Barker, I waste little time prepping the two-cups’o-coffee maker for a settling in for another historical read in which he will predictably abide, as in his many pieces, the practice of naming names, their associations and companies, the foundations involved; put together, many of the aforesaid will have been unfamiliar to me.

Greasing The Cogs Of Corporate Environmentalism

From Exxon to BP and Beyond

by Michael Barker | Swans dot com | September 6, 2010

“The history of oil in the 1970s is, in a way, simply another chapter in the posthumous life of John D. Rockefeller. The world of oil is much more densely populated than when he launched his Standard [Oil] empire, but still the axis on which that world spins depends heavily on Rockefeller companies. At home and abroad. At home, four of the companies that were spun off by the alleged ‘breakup’ of the Standard Oil Trust in 1911 still dominate the market in a total of forty-three states. Abroad, Rockefeller’s dead hand has an equally impressive grasp of energy matters.”
— Robert Sherrill, 1983.

(Swans - September 6, 2010) For many decades oil monies have been intimately connected to all things environmental, and black gold has been used to both destroy the environment and to sustain the movement to protect it. Heir to the massive financial and political power of the Standard Oil empire, the Rockefeller dynasty has presided over such polluting affairs to the current day, and any bid to undo their noxious involvement with the environmental movement necessarily means that we must first familiarize ourselves with their environmental precedents. Of course, former vice president of the United States Nelson Rockefeller (1974-7) was not the only Rockefeller to make his political presence felt when the environmental movement was born again in the late 1960s and 1970s. This is because three of Nelson’s brothers -- John D. Rockefeller III, Laurence, and David -- all played key though oft-understated roles in defining the strategic evolution of the mainstream environmental movement (see “The Philanthropic Roots of Corporate Environmentalism,” and “Laurance Rockefeller and Capitalist Conservation”). This article, however, unlike my previous work on these matters, is not directly concerned with the philanthropic activities of the Rockefeller family, but instead aims to show the direct connections between oil power brokers and environmental advocates. To tell this story I draw heavily upon Robert Sherrill’s book, The Oil Follies of 1970-1980: How the Petroleum Industry Stole the Show (and Much More Besides) (Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983).

To set the scene for this article Robert Sherrill reminds us how:


The 1970s were obviously destined to be a bloody battleground. As things turned out, most of the blood would be that of consumers. Still, the oil companies would bleed some too, for they would from time to time shoot themselves in the foot, or feet. If victory in the commercial world must include winning public approbation, then the oil companies lost the war of the 1970s disastrously; they emerged from that decade with hardly a shred of credibility still covering their affluence. Previously they had sometimes been able to claim at least some grudging respect; after the 1970s they were, it is fair to say, universally feared and despised. On the other hand, if victory can be measured only in new wealth, then it must be said that the oil companies were victorious indeed, for never in modern history has so much wealth been transferred from consumers to producers-with, let us add, so little justification. (pp.4-5)

Resume.