Heal the Planet for Profit
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Parisians duck down to evade German sniper fire following Nazi surrender of Paris, 1945 If you ever wondered what the odds are of mankind survi
[See the full post at: Heal the Planet for Profit]It seems that the coming of Trump is inducing changes in NASA. They are now claiming that the sun has some influence on the earth’s climate. Outrageous!
“Far above Earth’s surface, within the tenuous upper atmosphere, is a sea of particles that have been split into positive and negative ions by the sun’s harsh ultraviolet radiation. Called the ionosphere, this is Earth’s interface to space, the area where Earth’s neutral atmosphere and terrestrial weather give way to the space environment that dominates most of the rest of the universe – an environment that hosts charged particles and a complex system of electric and magnetic fields. The ionosphere is both shaped by waves from the atmosphere below and uniquely responsive to the changing conditions in space, conveying such space weather into observable, Earth-effective phenomena – creating the aurora, disrupting communications signals, and sometimes causing satellite problems.”
Revolutions in Understanding the Ionosphere, Earth’s Interface to Space
To add insult to injury, they are claiming “Revolutions in Understanding the Ionosphere, Earth’s Interface to Space” – i.e. that this is new stuff that they knew nothing about and that their current understandings were 100% wrong. Strange. I thought they knew it all.
Wow, I’m a new registrant – what a feeling!
Great post Ilargi, because it gets to the root of the problem rather than the usual diatribe of how we can fix our litany of problems. The last part about what would happen if there was Fusion energy cuts through and defines the situation as untenable. I am certain that with fusion we would inflict the final insult on the mega fauna, just as you suggest. Humankind for whatever reason only knows full tilt, pedal to the metal, in a no holds barred race to decimate as much as possible in the raging insistence on going as big and as fast as possible.
A perfect example of this can be seen in the recent Mars episodes by the National Geographic, in which the French billionaire funding the fictional portrayal of a Human Mars settlement, gets his ego in a twist about accelerating the expansion of the settlement (ahead of what makes common sense). So he sends two extremely self involved people to have authority to make decisions, which are contrary to the concerns of the current leader. As a result they lose their energy source and end up getting colder and colder while the remaining energy ebbs from the batteries. Then all sorts of psychological problems begin to set in with the crew. To make a long story short, it was greed that causes the problems and it’s a perfect analogy to the human experience in which ‘what is’, ‘is never enough’. Ever work for a manager that was satisfied with the amount or speed of your work? No, because that’s the game, to push labor as hard and as fast as possible.
We have a nephew that works for Amazon as an electrician. He’s been working 10 hours a day, 6 days a week until Xmas passes. But that pace caused one of the electricians to get injured. So they have now just asked him to work 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. Get the picture. No compassion whatsoever in the pursuit of profit, just as Ilargi was explaining.
When shtf some day due to one reason or another, those having passed through the population bottleneck will be forced to live in the slow lane. That is until someone gains sufficient power over those remaining people to push them as hard as possible for the leader’s comfort, profit. Humans won’t change no matter what, but the circumstances certainly will.
We have grown up as zoo animals. It’s all most of us know. We can prepare garden beds and plant and tend and weed and water vegetables. That brings us closer to ourselves. It’s our real heritage. The shovel and fork we use have embedded energy. The city water does not fall from the sky, but when we put all the work it takes into growing our vegetables, we get wonderful vegetables. They are qualitatively different. Each of the first 3 years gets better as the soil comes to life Here is how it can be done in central Texas. https://www.johndayblog.com/2016/07/liberty-garden-central-texas-climate.html
For now, this costs more than buying vegetables at the store, even though they are expensive, but that baseline expenditure has fallen a lot in the third year. As I get better at growing from seed I will “come out ahead”.
The needs of a kitchen gardener are very different from those of a commercial grower, who plants and harvests all at once. The work is humanizing, and fills a template, which already exists in us, mostly unused.
Riding a bike is efficient, if you have enough skill and experience to avoid injury.
Big “if”. I’ve been doing it since 1965.It’s the purest strain of neoliberalism imaginable wherein the market will be used to cure the problems caused by the market. Of course it won’t work to fix anything but it will generate profit, which is the whole point.
The most astounding thing is that the vast majority of the worlds literate people do not have the slightest inkling that the entire belief system based upon The Market has descended into pure evil. The Market is the anti Christ.
My friend, John, above, mentions gardening. In your post here, Raul, you mention “overthrowing the way we do food.” So, what would a global strategy for localizing and permaculturizing food production look like? Woody Tasch at Slow Money has put years into innovating financial vehicles to get investors an ability to support local food production, which is no small challenge. Though I am a participant in the local, organic, farmers-market movement, I’ve yet to see organizing at a systemic level that outlines a scaled approach to how this transition would occur — and I think it would be politically and economically and spiritually compelling to a majority of people if it were put forward.
Very good, Illargi. You just about nailed it but I think you let a little bit of hope creep in, in the section starting “Mankind’s only chance …”. You probably know that there is no chance. That section probably accepts that humans can’t use that available energy benignly (humans are a species and so have a characteristic behaviour that can’t consciously be altered) and so the only chance it to somehow stop using all of the energy we can get our hands on; to do something different from what other species typically do. That also isn’t going to happen since we are a species.
The question then is what certain anomalous members of our species do with that awareness. That’s a tough one.
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