Environment » No One Special

What’s the point for the millions of afica kids to be starvinq and diyinq over there? – Yahoo! Answers

What’s the point for the millions of afica kids to be starvinq and diyinq over there? – Yahoo! Answers.

Horrible spelling aside, this poster from Yahoo! Answers wants to know the ‘point’ of all the people being born in Africa seemingly only to die.

“What’s the point?” What does that mean? Why does there have to be a point?

The situation in Africa is complex and understanding the labyrinthine connections of cause and effect would take years of study.

Humans are animals and as such we follow many of the same reproduction strategies.

Populations with a high infant mortality rate tend to have a greater number of children. The more children you have, the higher the chance of some surviving long enough to reproduce and take care of you when you’re unable to. While African countries have the among the highest infant mortality rates in the world, they also have the highest population growth rates. This fact is often overlooked by those who would play on your bleeding heart (and then ask you for money) about all the people dying in Africa.

All the kids in those commercials all have something in common with you. They are flesh and bone. People who are flesh and bone are made of food. This should be obvious but is something overlooked. If there really was no food for them to eat, they wouldn’t be there. Of course there are plenty of kids who do die for lack of food but the inescapable fact is that the population is growing. There is food.

Increased food production/supply will always result in an increased population. The human population on this planet continues to grow as we continue to produce more food. Affluent societies tend to have fewer children per family while poorer societies tend to have more children per family, so it should come as no surprise that the poor population is expanding. This is true in Africa and it is true in the inner city.

Agriculture allows for an area of land to produce food more efficiently. But this efficiency comes at great cost to the long-term health of the land. This efficiency leads to an increased population. Over time, the population growth will outpace the ability of the land to provide for the people. This requires food to be imported from other areas to the detriment of that land and its people. It is a vicious cycle that has been going on for 10,000 years since the Agricultural Revolution. More food results in more people who require more food so they produce more food which results in more people.

The land in Africa cannot support the population of Africa. Importing food to Africa (and the resultant population growth) only adds to the instability of the population. When (not if, but when) it becomes the case that Africa can no longer import food, the results will be disastrous. It will make the Irish potato famine look like a picnic. It is inevitable. The greater the population of Africa is when it happens, the worse it will be. Yet, the population of Africa is growing.

Agriculture is not sustainable because it damages the land and results in a self-perpetuating population growth that is inherently unsustainable. Continuous growth is one of the big myths our civilization is based on.

The problem is not just limited to Africa. The planet cannot sustain 7 billion people long term and yet our population is growing. We are in the middle of a period of mass extinction at a rate not seen since the fall of the dinosaurs. We are causing it. We are rapidly converting the world’s biomass into human biomass — us and what we like to eat — all at the expense of biodiversity and long-term stability and sustainability.

A global population crash is inevitable. The only question is how much damage we do to the landbase and the world’s ecosystem in the interim.

So what’s the point? The point is that our culture (not humanity, as the Yanomami, Piraha and bushmen aren’t doing this, our culture is doing it.. the so-called civilized) is setting itself up to crash and crash hard. Our culture has a number of myths that enable this behaviour and if we are to survive at all, we must work to dismantle these myths. Now.

One of those myths is that there is some sort of cosmic point to all of this. There isn’t. We are utterly insignificant in any grand scheme of things. We are responsible for our own actions and inactions. The Easter Bunny won’t save us.

Is religion good?

Prompted by the recent Munk debate in Toronto between Christopher Hitchens and Tony Blair, the blogosphere is buzzing with everyone offering their own take on the question, “is religion good?”

The audience of that debate voted a resounding ‘no’ and gave the victory to Hitchens. Leading up to the debate, there was an Ipsos-Reid poll asking, “is religion a force for good?” Mercifully, only 36% of Canadians surveyed said religion was good, compared to 65% of Americans and 92% of Saudis while only 19% of Swedes could say the same.

It’s funny. I’m assuming if you’re reading this that you already know what I think. Maybe you don’t. A couple months ago a friend of mine told me that people who go to church have better morals than people who don’t. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing and as this person and I have had many conversations about religion, I couldn’t believe he would actually say something like this to me. So maybe I’m not always explicit. Maybe my criticisms are seen as being in jest or as purposeful exaggerations. Let me be clear, religion is terrible. If there was such a thing as “evil,” religion would be that.

I’ve left a few comments on various sites and blogs but this one in particular might deserve mentioning.

My first comment was this:

“Our cultural ancestors invented the idea of gods to justify attempting to live outside the “laws” of nature. The story of the fall of Adam and Eve, for example, is clearly describing the Agricultural Revolution. Pretty much all of Genesis reinforces this view. Who could possibly give us the authority to take over the world: to go forth and multiply, to have knowledge of who should live and who should die (is that not the knowledge of the gods? of good and evil?) Who could possibly have given us that kind of authority but the gods themselves. And so we invented religion to justify our behaviour. As a result, civilization was born and expanded and fuelled a population explosion. We’re now living in a time of mass extinctions at a rate not seen since the fall of the dinosaurs only this time we know we’re the ones causing it. We can no more live outside the laws of nature than spiders, salmon or sequoias can. In order to work, airplanes do not ignore the laws of gravity. Jump off a cliff and you better expect to hit the ground eventually no matter how hard you flap your arms. Eventually the law of gravity will catch up with you. In the same way, the laws of nature will eventually catch up with civilization and it will crash and crash hard. The only question is how bad is it going to be? Considering the damage we’re doing to biodiversity, there is a real danger of total collapse of the ecosystem. Why else do you think the Abrahamic religions are so eschatological? Neighbouring indigenous tribes have always known how dangerous it is to live as though you were above nature.

Let me be very clear: All the horrors of civilization — famine, drought, overpopulation, genocide, disease, etc — are enabled by religion. “Go forth and multiply” is nothing less than a declaration of war on the environment.

Of course there are other myths and false premises that civilization is based on but the god-concept is one of the big ones.

Nothing religious people do could ever make up for the kind of destruction that religion has enabled. Of course, your help in taking down civilization would certainly go a long way.”

Someone replied to me saying that Indians (sic) were religious and there was no correlation between the destruction I was talking about and religion. Of course, this is nonsense…

“Actually the gods of the indigenous peoples of the world (past and present) are very different from the gods of civilization. By and large their deities (where they have them, some tribes don’t/didn’t have any at all) are personifications of natural processes as they knew them, not some omnipotent and omniscient father figure. Consider Atira of the Pawnee who was represented earth and was considered the “Sacred Mother” of all things:

“The Pawnee were hunters. When told to abandon hunting and settle down to farming, their priest replied: “You ask me to plow the ground! Shall I take a knife and tear my mother’s bosom? Then when I die she will not take me to her bosom to rest. You ask me to dig for stone! Shall I dig under her skin for her bones? Then when I die I cannot enter her body to be born again. You ask me to cut grass and make hay and sell it, and be rich like white men! But how dare I cut off my mother’s hair? It is a bad law and my people cannot obey it.””

Even more anthropomorphic figures like Nanabozho have nothing in common with an Abrahamic god, for example. Nanabozho’s story is a living story which has been adapted to include him killing Paul Bunyan to protect the forests. That’s a far cry from some invisible, omnipotent law giver.

No, their gods are definitely not the same as our gods.

If you have any understanding of the origins of the various religions of civilization, compare that to the model for the expansion of agriculture/civilization found in Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs and Steel.” There is clearly a parallel. And you’d expect the Bible, for example, to have some sort of reference to the Agricultural Revolution since it happened at around the same time in about the same area as some of the other stories. Not surprisingly, it does… the story of the Fall of Adam and Eve. The story obviously doesn’t refer to the actual first humans and it would be absurd to believe so. But the development of agriculture would have been a momentous event for these people, definitely important enough to them to call it “creation.”

Even consider the symbolism of Jesus’ death and resurrection. The birth-death-rebirth cycle is a very common theme and, again, is symbolic of natural processes. The story of the Green Man has a lot of parallels with the story of Jesus. The biggest difference is that the Green Man dies and is reborn every single year. When coopting this meme, Jesus only did it once symbolizing a permanent fracture with natural processes. Of course, the story is that Jesus did it for our sins so that we could have eternal life in heaven. Who wants to die — even if your death means life for other creatures — when you can live forever with the most powerful entity imaginable when he happens to love you? Well, me, and virtually all indigenous peoples.

I’ve noticed through my activism that people tend to get just as mad when you say that we are animals as they do when you say there are no gods. Religion has everything to do with our perceived break and separation from nature.

So don’t tell me there’s no connection. It wasn’t the Pawnee or Ojibwe (or the Yanomami, Piraha, or Bushmen, etc, etc, etc) who brought us to this point. It was the sons of Adam. Agriculturalists. Civilized. Us.”

Explicit enough?

War, violence and resistance

I’ve been thinking a lot about this war we’re in. No, I’m not talking about Afghanistan or Iraq. I’m not talking about North Korea or Iran. I’m not talking about the war on drugs or the war or poverty. I’m not even talking about the war against Christmas. I’m talking about the war that’s been going on for 8-10,000 years or so.

I’m talking about the war of civilization against the natural world. I’m talking about the war of belongings against belonging… the war of hierarchy against community… the war of industry against the land base. I’m talking about the war of linear logic (and spirituality) against the fundamental interconnectedness of all things. This is the war of power and control against life.

If you’re still not sure what war I’m talking about, you really need to get yourself up to speed. The belligerent aggressor is civilization itself. We, the “civilized,” have been waging a war as we’ve done our darnedest to live outside the laws of nature. We’ve invented gods and religions to enable us to think we’re somehow special. Not only are we supposedly distinct and superior to non-human animals, we’ve been commanded by the gods themselves to take over the natural world. And you thought “go forth and multiply” was just a cute little phrase in the Bible while it is clearly a declaration of war. The land is ours, screw the spiders, salmon and sequoias. As the human population has grown exponentially, we’re in the midst of a period of mass extinction not seen since the fall of the dinosaurs and we’re (we the civilized, not we humans. The Yanomami, Bushmen and Ayoreo are not only innocent in this, but also victims of this) the ones who have been causing it. We’ve been undermining the ecosystem to the point where a few species failures could very well cause the whole ecosystem to collapse. (Seriously, if diversity is good for your stock portfolio, wouldn’t biodiversity be that much more important for the ecosystem? It is infinitely more important.)

The object of this post isn’t to explain why civilization is bad. If it isn’t already evident to you, there are a number of books and authors I can direct you to. There are plenty of people who not only realize we’re at war, but have engaged on the side of the land and of nature. I’m one of those people.

I have almost finished reading Derrick Jensen’s Endgame, Vol. 2. One of the central topics of the book is to what extent are we justified in our actions to do what is necessary to take down civilization. In particular, Jensen exposes the pacifism preached by many environmentalists and activists as foolishness and folly. I didn’t need convincing.

The purpose of this post is mostly for me to record my reaction to Jensen’s argument. I feel he missed a few important points that only help his argument. I haven’t quite finished reading the book so maybe I’m the one who has missed something.

The first thing is that not only is self-defense justified, I don’t even see it as being violence. If a man tries to rape a woman and she kills him defending herself, that isn’t violence as far as I’m concerned. If you could go back in time to 1938 and kill Hitler, would you do it? Would that be violence? If you would go back and kill Hitler, why haven’t you already killed Tom Albanese, Gary Jackson, or Hugh Grant? (I’m not suggesting anyone should go kill these people.)

Actually, now that I’m writing this down, I’m wondering if Jensen doesn’t want us all to accept it would be violence to kill in self-defense so that these corporations don’t get to use the same self-defense argument to explain away their violence. I could justify using violence to kill Hitler. Maybe those CEOs could not justify the violence they use against indigenous people (or non-humans) if they were forced to considering what they do violence. (And it is violence.)

The second point I’d like to make is on the nature of war. Some form of militancy – of violence – is expected in warfare. Obviously the focus of grand strategy should be to win, but what does winning look like? B.H. Liddell Hart said that the object of war is to secure a better peace. I think this makes for an excellent watermark for us to determine our strategies and tactics. If the actions we perform help secure a better peace, then we are fighting the war strategically. If we are engaging our violent fantasies or our predilection for explosions, we are not fighting strategically. CEOs can be replaced easily enough. (See? I really wasn’t suggesting anyone kill those people.) “Critical” infrastructure on the other hand… Also, liberating rivers from dams would surely be a better peace.

The last point is also related to the object of war. Civilization doesn’t have a standing army whose defeat in the field would result in our victory. ( Not that that’s how most conventional wars are necessarily won either.) Storming Monsanto corporate headquarters won’t bring down civilization any more than the storming of the Bastille brought down hierarchy. That’s not to say these events were not (or wouldn’t be) considered victories but they were not (and will not be) the end.

As much as the physical acts of violence against the environment must stop, so too must the intellectual and emotional. There are some fundamental errors in the premises of civilization that have to be replaced. As much as rivers need to be liberated from dams, which will require explosives, we won’t see victory until those premises have been replaced. We are no more special than spiders, salmon or sequoias. The land does not belong to us, we belong to the land. This is where pies can be more effective than RPGs. It’s hard to take someone seriously when they are covered in whipped cream. It’s hard to fear someone you’re laughing at. These kinds of tactics can be useful expressions of resistance. “No, Mr Grant, I don’t even recognize your authority, let alone respect it.” Guns are probably always a challenge to authority. Sometimes that might be called for. Sometimes we probably want to project our rejection of authority.

If the object of war is to secure a better peace, we have to have some idea of what a better peace is to look like. Yes, there will be no dams so they will have to come down. But when it comes down to the epidemiology of abuse, we’ll have to treat the causes rather than the symptoms. This war will be fought with all the tools at our disposal from memes to mines.

Y!A: The problem with Christians’ metaphorical interpretations of the Bible.

From Yahoo! Answers:

The Bible exists. Lets take that for granted shall we?

Reading the Bible as entirely metaphorical or a simple morality play doesn’t do the Bible justice.

The Bible is a book of cultural history. A collection of stories passed on orally for generations (they were that important to those people) before finally being written down (again, they must have been considered very important.)

If you have to over-interpret the text of the Bible to make it make sense with modern theology (or scientific understanding) you are doing a great disservice to this book of cultural history.

If we are to interpret the Bible, one has to make some assumptions. The validity of our interpretations is directly related to the validity of our assumptions.

Christians tend to fall into two camps, either:

A) The Bible is the factual, literal and accurate word of God. Everything in it is exactly true. Of course, one of the assumptions is that the Christian god is real.
or
B) The Bible is a metaphorical expression of God’s will and love for his people. He spoke to them in a language they could understand that may not be directly translate for us now. It is full of parables and allegories giving us direction for how to live our lives. Of course, the assumption here is also that the Christian god is real but there’s also an assumption that the various interpretations are valid.

We atheists also tend to have our own assumptions. Most dismiss the Bible as fable or just quaint old stories that have no value for us today.

As an atheist, I obviously don’t believe in gods, so I don’t accept the assumption that the Bible is infallible or the word of God. However, unlike many atheists, I appreciate the cultural importance of the Bible. These were the stories that survived. They must have had importance for these people 6-8,000 years ago. The book of Genesis in particular had to be about something. It had to have importance for them. They obviously weren’t actually talking about *creation* during the story of Adam and Eve so we can dismiss the literal interpretation. Were they just talking about the dangers of sin, pride and disobeying god in a metaphorical sense?

Those who interpret the Bible literally tend to believe the earth is somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 years old because that’s the number “Bible math” gives them. This is obviously false but do these numbers mean anything? I’ve heard so many interpretations .. of days as ages or days being longer or any number of very strange over-interpretations to make the Bible fit with our own understanding of the history of the planet. Again, this interpretation downplays the importance of these stories to the writers of the Bible. They likely wouldn’t have gone to such great lengths to discuss the chronologies if the timelines were just meant to be figurative.

So if my assumptions are the Bible is not literal history but the stories were of great importance, then what might be the important event they’re talking about when they talk about the Fall of Adam and Eve? Is there anything at all in history that could give us any clue of any important event (important enough to inspire “creation” stories) that happened in that time and in that area?

Something huge did happen in the Levant about 8,000 years ago. It’s an event we all know about but for some strange reason not many have associated it with the stories in the Bible. (Actually there are very good reasons why not many scholars or scientists or theologians will make the connection, but that’s another topic) This was an event with such far reaching consequences that it still affects us today. Actually it is the event that gave birth to civilization itself! What else could be glorified so far as to call it creation? The event I’m talking about, of course, is the Agricultural Revolution.

This is already a wall of text, so if you’d like you can read some more about how the story of the Agricultural Revolution is the story of the Fall of Adam and Eve here:
http://noonespecial.ca/adam-and-eve/

Most of the OT is the story of the spread of civilization builders. In this context almost everything makes a certain degree of sense. It is surprising how much you can actually take literally when you understand the proper context.

Of course, this is just an interpretation. It is not indisputable fact and I could be wrong. (Though what an amazing coincidence it would be for the Agricultural Revolution to be happening at the same time in the same area as this religious revolution if the two didn’t have anything to do with each other.) However, I would suggest that my assumptions are the most valid (important cultural history) and that my interpretations are the most consistent with the text as well as with history as we know it.

So the trouble with a Christian’s metaphorical interpretation is that it ignores the historical context. Without that context, and with a book as long as the Bible, you can pretty much over-interpret it to mean anything you want.

With that historical context, you’re forced to consider a number of issues:
-religion is a function of civilization, not humanity. It is cultural.
-Agricultural civilization has expanded to the point of our global population crisis. “Go forth and multiply,” indeed. Done and done and much to our detriment. Those are the most destructive four words in history.
-religion enables our culture of extraction.

If we’re going to solve these problems of overpopulation and avoid total collapse of our ecosystem, we’re going to have to understand how we got here. Our civilization is based on many myths, religion is just one of them. This whole, “God loves us and will take care of us” BS has got to go. Too many people are looking forward to eternal life in heaven that they don’t recognize the negative impact we’re having in this life today.

A Pawnee goddess and what I did to her when I found her

Atira is the Pawnee goddess representing the Earth, and is seen as the “Sacred Mother” of every living creature.
From the Interwebz:

The Pawnee were hunters. When told to abandon hunting and settle down
to farming, their priest replied: “You ask me to plow the ground!
Shall I take a knife and tear my mother’s bosom? Then when I die she
will not take me to her bosom to rest. You ask me to dig for stone!
Shall I dig under her skin for her bones? Then when I die I cannot
enter her body to be born again. You ask me to cut grass and make hay
and sell it, and be rich like white men! But how dare I cut off my
mother’s hair? It is a bad law and my people cannot obey it.”

Because clearly agriculture is the superior lifestyle choice for humanity.

If you live in North America, chances are the land has recently undergone a name change. I’m in a place now called Hamilton, Ontario. It has had this name for less than 200 years. Obviously this area is much older than that. I found it rather embarrassing to know the area’s real name. I don’t even know who, specifically, the people were who lived here before we Europeans took over. Do you know the real history of your city?

Some cursory investigation found that this area belonged to a people who called themselves the Chonnonton, meaning, the people of the deer. It seems as though they are better known by names others have given them. The Hurons gave them the name Attawandaron, meaning, the people who talk funny. The French gave them the name la Nation neutre because they tried to remain neutral in the war between the Hurons and the Iroquois who were allied with the French and English respectively. The Wikipedia entry, Neutral Nation, is about them.

I haven’t done much research, but so far I haven’t found anything talking about the Chonnonton name for this area. Kind of sad, don’t you think?

Y!A: How do you think the creation account in Genesis would affect a Christian’s Worldview?

From Yahoo! Answers:

How do you think the creation account in Genesis would affect a Christian’s worldview?

My slightly off topic wall of text:

Which creation account?

Okay, no seriously. This is a really good question and one I’ve thought about for years.

First of all we have to try to make some sense of the stories. The easiest to understand in a historical context is, surprisingly, the fall of Adam and Eve.

So the idea of god was created by this one tribe to justify an agricultural regime that dominated neighbouring tribes and lead to the establishment and spread of civilization while this culture assimilated or destroyed all competition.

Consider:

And God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” -Genesis 1:28

Genesis 1 basically describes the actions of this fantastic all-powerful god who created everything. This establishes God’s authority. The story then goes on to suggest that this all-powerful being anoints us as masters of the earth. Not only are we allowed to take it over and subjugate it to our whim, it is our duty!

This is not an attitude shared by all of humanity. This arrogance is not human nature. This wouldn’t make any sense to the Kalahari Bushmen, the Yanomami or any number of other tribal peoples. This IS an attitude shared by all the Abrahamic religions. It is also an attitude shared by all the other cultural descendants of the Agricultural Revolution in the Fertile Crescent. This attitude isn’t really even shared by descendants of other agricultural regimes. There is a distinction between Eastern and Western philosophies largely because they are descended from different agricultural regimes. They certainly influenced each other and they have more in common with each other than either does with the Pirahã, for example.

It is no coincidence that the descendants of the Agricultural Revolution are the people who took over the world and the Pirahã didn’t. Read “Guns, Germs and Steel” by Jared Diamond. You won’t regret it. One thing the Pirahã didn’t have was a sense of entitlement or destiny.

Aspects of the justification for agriculture, an example being the creation accounts, permeate western civilization.

We have a twisted sense of entitlement and an inherent specialness that has enabled us to cause a period of mass extinction not seen since the fall of the dinosaurs. In my experience, many people, especially Christians, get visibly offended if you say that humans are animals.

Many of us, religious or not, delude ourselves into thinking that civilization IS humanity. (Islam’s concept of the pride of Adam is a clear example of this) Throughout history, civilization has expanded and conquered through assimilation or destruction. Soulless savages were considered sub-human and deserving of domination and death and that the land they lived on was free to be taken. There are countless examples of this in history and its still happening today. There’s an oil company in Peru that is starting to develop a well in a remote area of the Amazon to great controversy. Nearby lives one of the last *uncontacted* tribes in the world. This oil company is denying they even exist.

We have an economic system based on the principle of continuous growth. This is not sustainable by definition. We’re rapidly converting the world’s biomass into human biomass — us and what we like to eat, the rest of the ecosystem be damned. There will come a point when there can be no more. What then? Why are we seemingly in such a hurry to find out?

There have been Christian politicians in the US that have suggested the environment is not important because good Christians will be raptured long before it ever becomes an issue. Before? Another went so far to suggest that it was sacrilege to worry about the environment because that was admitting that God wasn’t taking care of us. I’m not saying all Christians are this ignorant. Plenty of Christians recycle and that’s great. But bandaids don’t heal decapitations and I don’t see them trying to come up with a truly sustainable economic model. I don’t see them challenging the primacy of civilization or trying to come up with something new. Instead, I see them challenging scientific concepts like evolution because evolution undermines the authority of the magic being that gives them these delusions of grandeur.

Of course its not just Christians or religious people who share these delusions. The point is the justification for this aggressive agricultural regime involves many myths and god and creation are just a few examples. Western philosophy and the Abrahamic religious traditions all share a common cultural ancestry — these early agriculturalists with their excuses.

More evidence of this is that the Abrahamic religions and Western philosophy share a certain degree of eschatology. Adam and Eve were kicked out of the Garden and it was assumed disaster would come because of this new attitude. “Dreams of Millennium” by Mark Kingwell was a really interesting take on Millennial anxiety and examined how we’ve always been obsessed that the end times were coming soon. Of course, again this is not human nature, this wouldn’t make any sense to the Pirahã.

Sorry for the wall of text but this is obviously something I’ve thought a great deal about and believe in very important. Congratulations if you made it this far.

The Global Food Crisis

Another from Yahoo! Answers:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/?qid=20080716023212AA2930M&cp=11

Question: As we appear to be on the brink of a global food crisis, is it time to rethink farming methods? How?

Given that we appear to be on the brink of a global food crisis, should we be making the world’s farms even bigger and more efficient, or should we be making them smaller? Is it time to dismantle the industrial food machine, or should we be cranking it up to the next level?

My Answer:

If there really is a global food crisis it goes hand and hand with the global population crisis.

More food results in a larger population. This is an ecological fact that is unavoidable. Humans are no more immune to the laws of ecology than we are the laws of gravity.

A larger population requires more food, and more food results in a larger population. We are caught in an endless cycle and it began with the Agricultural Revolution.

We’re only now really beginning to feel the effects of it…

The “Industrial Food Machine” keeps on growing and encroaching on natural ecosystems, replacing thriving native plants and animals with the kind of food we like to eat.

Genetic manipulation and other artificial selection techniques have vastly limited biodiversity of our crops. We’re already aware that we’re dangerously close to losing the banana (1) to extinction. It’s a race against time as scientists try to genetically manipulate bananas while a virus is spreading across the world destroying banana plantations. Bananas have thrived for millions of years through natural selection and we’ve screwed things up to the point where bananas are dependant on our science for survival. How long before everything else is dependant on us too?

We like to think we rule the world and know what’s best for it. Unfortunately we’ve only shown time and time again that we are only looking out for our immediate economic interests. If diversity is important in a stock portfolio, why can’t the bean counters understand it is even more vital to an ecosystem?

How many of you remember Smokey the Bear? I’m sure many of you do, it was one of the most successful marketing campaigns in history. Smokey taught us that forest fires are a bad thing and that we should do whatever we could to prevent them at all costs. Noble idea, for sure, but the fire prevention strategies of the US Forestry Service has done far more to endanger the country’s forests (2) than the fires they were preventing. To make a long story short, we didn’t consider the important impact fire had in a forest’s ecosystem and now fires are much worse than they ever were in the past. The problem wasn’t that the fire prevention programs didn’t work. On the contrary, they worked very well. The problem was that the strategy was a horrible idea from the start. We thought we knew what was best for the forests and now we’re wrong.

Back to the food crisis, we seem to think the answer is in more efficient food programs, better farming techniques, etc, that will allow us to grow more food. This is the same approach we’ve had for thousands of years and it is the strategy that has gotten us into this mess in the first place. If you grow more food, it is inevitable that our population will increase and require even more food next year!

Is this such a bad thing? We can grow more food right? Sure, at the expense of biodiversity, at the cost of losing the banana and our forests.. when will it stop? When every square inch of this planet is a farm growing the type of food we like to eat?

What happens in the inevitable event of a major crop failure or drought? It will make the Irish Potato Famine look like a mugging.

We have two options and they are alluded to in the original question. We can either:

A) Stop pretending we rule the earth and start acting like we’re part of the ecosystem. We need to break the cycle of increased food production and population growth. We need to protect natural ecosystems by not interfering with them.

B) We need to take complete control of the earth and its systems. We need to grow our own food in gigantic farming laboratories rather than farms. It sounds insane and it may be. We’ll need to know exactly what we’re doing.

Anything else, quite frankly, will lead to horrors never before seen in human history. I can only hope that we don’t take the whole biosphere down with us.

For the second option, I really don’t think we have the will or knowhow to do something in the scale that needs to be done. I don’t think our politicians have the guts to think long term. I don’t think our corporations have the patience to see this through.

As for the first option, it would be easier, but I don’t think our culture has the wisdom to realize that it is our vision that needs to be changed. Whatever programs we come up with will only delay what is ecologically inevitable. We need to stop with the programs. We need a new vision. We need a new mind.

Source(s):

(1) Popular Science article about the potential extinction of the banana: http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/20…

(2) How Smokey the Bear has been destroying US forests: http://www.perc.org/pdf/Forest%20Policy%…

Post Script:
Some of the answers other people presented were quite interesting. It’s fascinating to see how nearly everyone can see that there is a problem, not many are identifying the same problem. For example, some people seem to think the problem is with the distribution of food, rather than the production of it. Honestly this seems a litlte strange to me. The countries that would seem to have the highest levels of malnutrition tend to be the ones with the highest mortality rate. However these are the same countries with the highest birth rates. This stands to reason and makes perfect sense. If you live in a region where only 20% of children born reach the age of 20, it makes perfect sense to have as many children as you can. If you have 10 children, chances are two will reach adulthood. If we flood the region with imported food to the point where 40% of children survive, that will result in a population explosion in a region that is incapable of sustaining an increased population.

Don’t believe me? Canada and the US share a population growth rate of approximately 0.9% per year. This means our population will double in approximately 78 years. Ethiopia, the world’s stereotyped “hungry country” has a population growth rate of 2.7% per year, resulting in a doubling every 26 years. And what are all these extra people made out of? You guessed it, food.

So if the region can’t sustain these extra people AND we keep sending them more food, what happens in the event of a drought, a decrease in aid, etc? It won’t be pretty. The ecological reality is that more food equals more people and more people require more food.

We need to break the cycle. Next year, instead of producing more food as we always have, why don’t we try something different?

How Smokey the Bear has been destroying our forests.

Surely you remember Smokey the Bear who told us, “Only you can prevent forest fires.” It is widely acknowledged as being one of the most successful public relations campaigns in history. Smokey taught us to respect the forest and make sure we put out our campfires, etc. The campaign worked wonders as the number of human-caused forest fires saw a sharp decline in the 70′s and 80′s. The campaign was one in a series of programs since 1908 designed to execute their strategy of preventing all forest fires at all costs

Of course, not all fires are caused by humans. Probably 50 per cent of them are caused by lightning which is something we can’t control. The important thing to note here is, fire is a naturally occurring event in a forest. The Forestry Service’s program was thus included to prevent all fires at all costs, and immediately extinguish all fires at all costs.

Into the 60′s and 70′s, the US Forestry Service found they were having to spend less money each year in fighting forest fires. This indicated to them that their fire prevention programs were working very well and everyone was overjoyed. Though strangely enough, from the 80′s to the present, the costs have skyrocketed as the number of forest fires have increased, as have their intensity. In California, the Redwood trees have been around hundreds, if not thousands, of years having survived many forest fires. Now, they are threatened as much as anything else. Many people are quick to blame this on drought and global warming. Only now are we starting to see a different picture of why forest fires are more devastating now than ever before in history. Only now is the Forestry Service (and others like it around the world) starting to realize the real reason, even though it is extremely simple.

In a forest, life and death is something that happens every day. Branches are felled and trees die. This kind of stuff piles up on the forest floor. Some is used by various animals and some rots away. Every few years a fire breaks out and clears this stuff away, returning the nutrients to the soil and helping new trees grow. These fires rarely destroy the entire forest, only what is on the ground. The larger trees are healthy and resistant enough to be able to handle these fires. Actually, in many cases, these fires actually help the forest keep its natural cycle. Some trees like the Lodgepole and Jack Pine have evolved to a point where they can only reproduce in the event of a fire. Their pine cones have a thick resin that protects the seeds. At 60 degrees Celsius, the resin melts and the seeds drop to the forest floor allowing a new tree to grow. Without the odd and regular fire, the natural cycle of the forest is interrupted.

Something else happens without the odd and regular fire in a forest. All that falls to the forest floor accumulates. You can imagine that a 100 years worth of dead branches and leaves is a much bigger pile than 20 years worth of the same. What does all this extra stuff end up becoming? Kindling. When the eventual fire does come, (as it is impossible to prevent all fires everywhere,) the flames burn higher, hotter, and faster because of all the extra fuel. The fire burns so hot and high that the giant redwoods or sequoias are burned to the ground. The fire spreads fast engulfing a very large area in flames resulting in massive damage. Very large fires can create their own weather systems as the superheated air rises rapidly sucking in cooler air as it goes. One result of this is high winds, which makes fighting the forest fires much more dangerous and difficult. Another result is what happens when a warm front meets a cool front — lightning! This can cause a new fire or otherwise keep the existing fire going. The end result? A completely destroyed forest as well as a high likelihood of deaths and destruction of homes.

So what can be done about this? Well, the Forestry Service has changed their tactics slightly. They have begrudgingly allowed for controlled burnings to clear out the undergrowth. This can be problematic as a few years ago, one of these “controlled” fires killed 100 people in New Mexico after it got out of control with all the fuel that was available to it. With all the cottages and homes being built in “cottage country” near, or in, these forests, there is a huge public resistance to allowing these controlled fires to be set. These people living in the area are also a huge incentive to continue trying to extinguish all fires at all costs.

Smokey the Bear, now says, “Only you can prevent wildfires,” to distinguish between controlled burns and accidental ones.

Another possible solution is to mechanically remove the undergrowth periodically. It has been estimated that it would take 77 years and upwards of $350 Billion just to undo the damage that all this “fire prevention” caused. By then, of course, the forests will have to be cleared again.

So in our infinite wisdom, what we’ve done in the past 100 years with our “fire prevention strategy” is cause worse fires and disrupt the natural ecosystem of our forests. Natural selection had kept these forests thriving for hundreds of thousands of years, and we killed them in 100. We should have left them alone, but we can’t now… In many forests, a fire with all the extra underbrush would completely destroy the forest and wreak havoc. Now we have to manage these forests, and that means managing the ecosystem, to the tune of many billions of dollars a year. If we didn’t have the foresight to leave things be, what makes anyone think we’re going to be able to manage the thousands of diverse ecosystems in forests all over the continent? Do we really have the bureaucratic wherewithal to devise programs for every individual forest and every species living in them? How many species will die off because of our inadequate management? Can we really trust the government (a foreign one at that!) with this?

We’ve royally screwed up and we’ve only just begun starting to pay for it. We screwed up because we think we know best and we think the planet is ours to do with as we see fit. We screwed up because we took management of the forest (and their ecosystems) out of the hands of “the gods” and into our own greedy grubby little paws. The natural selection that has worked so well for hundreds of thousands of years has been replaced by artificial human selection which has a very shoddy record.

If we can screw this up so royally, what else are we screwing up just as bad?

Food for thought.

Ghost Town. Posted April 27, 2004

GHOST TOWN: “beginning of a story about a town that one can ride through with no stoplights, no police and no danger of hitting any living thing. “

This is a fascinating read. Elena has a camera, a kawasaki ninja, and a government-issued pass to Chernobyl.

What’s the point for the millions of afica kids to be starvinq and diyinq over there? – Yahoo! Answers

Is religion good?

War, violence and resistance

Y!A: The problem with Christians’ metaphorical interpretations of the Bible.

A Pawnee goddess and what I did to her when I found her

Y!A: How do you think the creation account in Genesis would affect a Christian’s Worldview?

The Global Food Crisis

Source(s):

How Smokey the Bear has been destroying our forests.

Ghost Town. Posted April 27, 2004

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