The Price We Pay For Progress
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Jack Delano A welder in the roundhouse of the Chicago and North Western Railroad’s Proviso yard 1942 It’s rare that I reach back into the past
[See the full post at: The Price We Pay For Progress]The earth shakes
The water is receding, the tsunami is coming, all in its path will perish.
Words change nothing
Actions are too feeble
Knowledge changes nothingGia will succeed
Wow Ilargi; just wow!
I’m a huge fan of Jung; always have been.
I’ve spent a lot of time in my retirement years going back into history trying to make sense of today.
It is not a straight line; but rather convoluted and broken in many places.
The piper is not being paid; the cost of that is death of our species; not the planet/Gaia.
In the west, at least, we’ve become a death culture…
Here in Asia, lessons have not been learned, the west is a chimera to be followed and emulated…The Price We Pay For Progress
Every society …. socialist, capitalist, dictatorships, tribal chiefdoms, etc
Since the beginning of recorded history
its even mentioned in the bible
the beggars, the poor, the homeless, the destitute, the suffering, the shunned, the outcast, the ignored,
Why?
Why are we not succeeding at eliminating the worsts conditions of all our societies on earth?Its not yellow vest, or umbrellas ….
While we slept the kids were organizing.
Even if we are retired senior, maybe we can help the gran kids
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_strike_for_climate
The day of the Global Climate Strike for the Future was to be the most widespread of strikes, with tens of thousands of children in at least 100 countries and over 35 US states walking out of school, supported by some of the world’s biggest environmental groups.[45][46] Leading up to the strike, the website FridaysForFuture.org listed 1659 events planned in 106 countriesGreat essay. I’ve often thought along similar lines, which I have come to express thusly:
Every time we build something, we destroy something else to do so.
Capitalism is ultimately based on consumption and there is an inherent need to stimulate ever more consumption, as capitalism must expand, else it implodes as the profits can no longer pay for the cost of capital.
As Marx pointed out, capitalism also results in competition between capitalists, resulting in a steady stream of inventions and improvements in products and production as each capitalist enterprise strives to gain market share. And, capitalism naturally tends toward monopolies, as the winners force weaker participants out of the market.
Most people now live their lives in the confines of cities and as a result, much of the destruction is hidden from the consumer, so they will not easily reduce their impacts.
Ultimately, the long term value of all that consumption will exceed the short term value to the producer and consumer and then it will be game over.
Our use of fossil fuel energy is the foundation of the present world economy and as those fuels become ever more difficult to acquire, the energy return on energy invested will decline, thus more expensive, leading to a mad scramble to keep things going by switching to other sources of energy.
This situation will be exacerbated by the realization that climate change is a real problem, therefore the burning of carbon based fossil fuels must be curtailed even before they reach technical exhaustion. That will make the mad scramble even worse, which Craig Dilworth called a “Vicious Circle”, perhaps to the point that human civilization and population, as we have come to know it, will not survive the collapse.
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