Good news and bad reaches me, by occult means, from Beyond the Veil.
The good news is that the great Jim Lovelock, whom God preserve, has worked out how to save the planet. The bad news is that humanity's not included. O well, easy come easy go, it was fun while it lasted.
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
I read a piece a few days ago from someone high in the green movement, specifically anti-whaling, and his masterplan for the near future was, with no hint of remorse, a culling of 80% of the human population.
ReplyDeletePaul Watson, founder and president of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society' May 4 editorial said:
“We need to radically and intelligently reduce human populations to fewer than one billion.
“No human community should be larger than 20,000 people and separated from other communities by wilderness areas.”
Plenty of us probably think we could certainly do with a big slowing-down in our numbers but how, I wonder, does Watson envisage the drastic reduction he seeks. From what I read he wasn't content to be talking about long-term plans.One would presume something along the lines of extermination camps. as I can't imagine most of our species thoughtfully commiting mass suicide. I genuinely have no idea but how widespread is this kind of thinking, I ask myself.
Divorce is a bit final. After so many years together, it would be a shame not to give it another go. Maybe a few years down the road, if mediation and counselling don't work, a trial separation might be an option. You know, see how we get on without each other for a while. We could see other planets and the earth could see how it gets on with the other species left. Come on, think of the children, for Chrissakes!
ReplyDeleteAndrew, you might like to take a look at this post. My view agrees with some of the more critical comments made against the thesis, but the thesis is not a foolish or trivial one. The author could be wrong by an order of magnitude, and still we are looking at a very dark century before us.
ReplyDeleteAndrew, these people are truly scary - and what's with the 'we need to' and the 'no human community should'? Says who?
ReplyDeleteAnd Neil, brilliant, you are so right - we must put the kids first. Gaia and us, we've still got a lot going - let's not throw it all away...
Malthus, anyone? Or for that matter, Jonathan Swift?
ReplyDeleteScary indeed, Nige. It is of course a very serious issue, rev sam, but the kind of position expounded by Watson strikes me as diablosim masquerading as concern. There's that New Testament line about false prophets: "They will come in sheep's clothing, but underneath they are ravenous wolves."
ReplyDeleteEmm...diabolism
ReplyDeleteJust to quickly add an apposite line from me main man, Aldous Huxley:
ReplyDelete"Intelligence and knowlege without goodwill and charity are apt to be inhuman".
Oh, great. Now environmentalism is not only a religion, but it's an apocalyptic religion. What complete idiots. Here are some obvious truths that they will simply deny:
ReplyDeleteWe are not anywhere close to the carrying capacity of the planet. The planet is severely underpopulated. Our greatest long-term problem is declining fertility rates.
A fact that is rarely publicized: if everyone on the planet moved to Texas, we would have a population density equal to that of central London -- and the rest of the planet would unpopulated.
Another one, in the form of a question: how many finite non-renewable resources have we used up in the course of human history? Just in, heh, round numbers.
You would think that 209 years of being laughably wrong would be enough for anyone.
Perhaps this is a good time to share a line from the great Julian Simon, who stuck a fork in this line of thinking 20 year ago:
ReplyDelete"Let a chicken or pig be born in Delhi or Shanghai and the bean counters at the U.N. and World Bank will tell you that the nation is wealthier. But let an Indian or Chinese mother give birth to a son or daughter, and it goes down in their crabbed little ledgers as a liability."
Or his standard prediction for the future: things will get better and better in every measurable way while we're being told that things are getting worse and worse.
Here's another bit, Dave, that's mixes the deadpan and the nuts very elegantly:
ReplyDeleteJohn Guillebaud, co-chairman of the Optimum Population Trust and emeritus professor of family planning at University College London, said: "The effect on the planet of having one child less is an order of magnitude greater than all these other things we might do, such as switching off lights.
"The greatest thing anyone in Britain could do to help the future of the planet would be to have one less child."
"The decision to have children should be seen as a very big one and one that should take the environment into account," he added.
The British fertility rate is 1.7. The EU average is 1.5.
The ideal British family should therefore be reduced to seven tenths of a child.
This is the black heart of the green movement.
ReplyDeleteA:"Of course, I am sorry for mankind! But I was most sorry for it when I watched it rushing headlong to its own ruin. It's enough to make you scream looking back at it now...Don't you remember how Wolf Meynert proved that man must make room for the Newts, and only the salamanders will establish a happy, uniform and homogenous world..."
ReplyDeleteB:"For Christ's sake, Wolf Meynert! Wolf Meynert's an intellectual. Have you ever known anything too horrible, too murderous or too nonsensical for an intellectual not to want to seize on it for the purpose of regenerating the world? Leave it at that."
Karel Capek, "The War with the Newts" (1936). An amazing book, prophetic in so many ways.
And another quote, this from the great Marilynne Robinson (in The Death Of Adam):
ReplyDelete'that famous western rationalism, old enemy of reasonableness, always so right at the time, always so shocking in retrospect'...
Andrew. I have no child. Advise please. Stop.
ReplyDeleteI'm afraid not having a child you could have one less of, Dave, you're simply faced with the option of suicude so as to help the population crisis, and ensure someone else's seven tenths of a child will have a better future.
ReplyDeleteRev Sam links to the Canadian chapter of The Oil Drum blog. Now, I'm a big fan of The Oil Drum, but the apocalyptic posters suffer from short-sighted, linear thinking, and the author of the linked post, GliderGuider, is no different.
ReplyDeleteSays she: "At the root of all the converging crises of the World Problematique is the issue of human overpopulation. Each of the global problems we face today is the result of too many people using too much of our planet's finite, non-renewable resources and filling its waste repositories of land, water and air to overflowing."
Well, that's just rubbish. In the first place, at the root of all of the converging crises of the World Problematique is the issue of bad governance. If all nations were as well and efficiently run as are the U.S., Canada, the UK, Japan, Germany, the Nordic nations, and even France, then THERE WOULD BE NO CRISES.
Take, for instance, the world's "overflowing waste repositories." Are these problems in the developed world, or the undeveloped world ?
It's famously a problem of poor or Communist nations, that they don't have the money or willingness to clean up after themselves, instead just dumping their waste into piles, or nearby waters.
As for the idiocy of the planet's resources being "finite and non-renewable", David is absolutely correct. Any given resource may be finite and non-renewable, but humans adjust to scarcity. (Which is why many of the Oil Drum posters go so wrong: They cannot conceive that humanity will simply adapt, adjust, and overcome, as we always have. They seem to think that the only way to live is exactly as we currently are living, not realizing that our current way of life is the response to earlier crises).
Before "peak oil", humanity had to face "peak firewood" and "peak whale oil". We overcame those crises, and now live better than ever. Moving away from petroleum will be no different, which is why Rev Sam is mistaken in thinking that "we are looking at a very dark century before us".
Indeed, given our rapid progress in the areas of materials science and nanotechnology, our use of energy will become vastly more efficient, so that humanity will be using half as much energy by the end of this century, while producing ten times as much output.
Even now, the U.S. uses 1/3 the energy that China uses, to produce a dollar of economic output. In other words, if the Chinese economy were the size of America's, they'd be using three times as much energy as does America.
That's the difference between an advanced and a developing economy.
imaginary ideas? what about this one then? "polar cities" for future survivors of glo war? google the term
ReplyDelete