The Real Refugee Crisis Is In The Future
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Dorothea Lange Farm family fleeing OK drought for CA, car broken down, abandoned Aug 1936 Perhaps Angela Merkel thought we didn’t yet know how full of
[See the full post at: The Real Refugee Crisis Is In The Future]Is it even possible to rebuild the Middle East to support its current population as the oil runs out and the climate changes? I think this is what ecosystem overshoot looks like.
They don’t call it the Empire of Chaos for nothing. You have to examine the possibility that the goal of the present situation IS to cause war and chaos in Europe, just as they did throughout MENA and Sudan/Nigeria et al. Very profitable. And kills people. And people demand solutions of governments and security corporations by ceding more individual power. So really, what’s not to like? Of course if it’s NOT intentional someone has to explain what’s going on here because nothing makes sense.
Is it possible to support the Middle East population? Well of course it is! We’re doing it right now, this very minute. We did it all the decades up until we decided to bomb and destroy them. So clearly it’s very, very possible.
Is it possible for them to live without outside food imports, something that hasn’t happened in 100 years? Well you don’t live with local shoemakers, local cell phone manufacturers, local fish farms, why should they have to live only locally when you don’t? But let’s say they had to. There have been a wide variety of people and methods that turned the desert back into green. As green likes green, once you start, it actually feeds on itself. Australian Permaculture specializes in water conservation and development, but Africa has also created oasis from raw desert many places. There are the water-collection devices for trees, https://designtoimprovelife.dk/groasis-waterboxx-self-watering-trees-reclaim-desert-land/ a man in Nigeria I believe had 15 minutes of fame for creating an oasis in the desert using nothing more than a shovel and water conservation (similar to permaculture techniques) and Fukuoka has applied his practices to reversing the desert. https://www.context.org/iclib/ic14/fukuoka/ which is brutally simple: take desert seeds, roll in clay, and spray everywhere you can. The seeds themselves decide which and when to sprout, greening the land with natives. Once they start water conservation and soil remediation, men can follow on later with more food-friendly varieties. Africa has been developing a high-intensity rotational grazing with MORE cattle which is improving the land. And on and on.
They problem is not that you CAN’T reverse the desert and feed the people, the problem is that nobody WANTS to. Even an illiterate farmer with a shovel could do it guerrilla-style, like “The Man Who Planted Trees.” But no one values it. They value, war, power, and telling other people what to do. Even here, we are arguing what the *government* ought to do when they have overwhelmingly proven they could care less what the people tell them, AND how many thousands or millions die from it. Why would you talk to or include them? Go around them and help yourself, help your brother.
You don’t need a big EU initiative to green the desert and make food throughout the Middle East. If you wanted to feed those potential refugees and stop them from fleeing you Europe, you could just fly there, buy a shovel, and get started. So do YOU want to? Or just tell someone else to do it? Or just opine about the refugee crisis and how important men are corrupt? We know they are. So proceed accordingly and go around their plans.
The stage is set, and has been for years, despite the advance warnings related to Population Overshoot and all it’s consequences. The sad part is the human pain it will entail. Any so called ‘solution’ must deal with the underlying issue of having to live in balance with our resource base. China’s one-child policy (while fraught with issues) was probably the only real attempt to deal with the forth coming problem.
The location of your accident of birth, in many ways, is the ultimate determination of survival because life is not “fair or rational”. It only…ultimately… obeys the rule of physics, and where you are on, that playing field, will determine your possibilities.
Dr. Diablo has his finger on the pulse of what could have been done. We could have intelligently approached the population issues… but genetically I believe we are not wired to deal with long range problems, only short term staring you in the face, problems. The battle over remaining resources will only intensify as each group/tribe/clan/family/country tries to corner what they need to survive.
As we loosened the restraints on population growth – via medications, better sanitation, more food, and quit killing off large numbers of young men in major wars, our numbers went from 1 billion to 8 billion in less than a 150 years.
We needed to recognize that reality and exercise thoughtful use of our resources. Birth control was the gift that we ignored. I always said, if we provide resources (food, medicine, tools) to others, we should also provide education & birth control so that we would not reach “overshoot”. But alas, this would only happen in a responsible forward thinking population.
We are like microbes in a petri dish; eating until all our food is gone and wallowing in our waste products. But perhaps that IS what is basically, survival of the fittest. Those who think & plan ahead & act will be the few that will survive, if any do,
Neoliberalism is an efficient catalyst for social chaos. And it wasn’t engineered that way by accident. It has become so insinuated in Western political and economic infrastructure that its demise will only occur by the most basic and “inhumane” of mechanisms.
I have read many of your articles on this subject via Zerohedge and each one has left me asking the same question: has the author not read Practicle Idealism / Richard Koudenhove Kalergi ?
Its amazing to me that you constantly touch upon limits but in talking about this latest human crisis it seems that your credulity can be stretched no farther. The whole point about why Europe seems not to care is that we have essentially overshot on population. Not just in Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, but in Europe and to a lesser extent here as well. You can focus on bad and selfish priorities from govt but that misses both the underlying cause of and fix to the problem being faced. We have neither the military ability nor the moral capital to “fix.” these broken places. Syria isn’t broken because of the US, much to the hand wringing of our more liberal media outlets. Syria is broken because of the self imposed low expectations of the Arabs who live there. It only appeared not to be because of the iron fist imposed by dictators, which we gladly ignored for multiple decades. Africa too, is disorganized, poor and rapidly rising in population. Are you advocating that we tell the Africans how to live, and how to reproduce, or not? I for one am ok with that, but lets get your soft bigotry of low expectations right out there in the open, if that is what you are saying.
For centuries countries could pretty easily absorb waves of immigration brought on by war and famine. That phase of our evolution is over, at least until we get a new cheap energy source. So if we and by we I mean the industrialized world are to yet again shoulder the burden of absorbing millions of people from poor under-developed places; how will we pay for it? I’m guessing the answer comes in the form of cutting entitlements to those already enfranchised. I am willing to be wrong.
Overshoot is an interesting subject, with so many so sure of themselves. Words such as “we humans aren’t wired in our DNA to deal with long-term issues…” Really? Why? For some thousand years most human societies worldwide lived in harmony with their environment, did not promote overpopulation and destruction, even when they most often had the physical means to do so. They did not *choose* to do so, as they had different values than ourselves. The did not *want* to make the world terrible, to destroy what made their area good for them. So is this a “human” thing, or is this a, “your western culture is pathologically insane” thing? Because if it’s the latter than we are both able to, and have a duty to, re-prioritize survival, teach our children to think ahead as was once done, come back in line with resources, and escape the death cult we seem infatuated with.
There are about a hundred ways to increase productivity, efficiency, and do the transfer with our present population of 7 Billion, which we are feeding now, thank you very much, but everyone seems fixated on how we must, must, must kill a few thousand million of them, of the other guy, of ourselves, before even attempting the smallest remediation.
Hey, I’ve got an idea: let’s NOT kill 1-2,000 million people. Isn’t that an inspiring goal? Buck the trend. How about we figure out how to save those people and make the world a nice place again, where population is stable without starvation and mass-murder, the way so many hundred or thousand cultures were doing themselves, for so many thousand years. And if you don’t know what cultures I’m talking about, find the indigenous people who lived closest to you, take off your western goggles about primitivism, and research how they lived. They had careful technology of their environment, their lives had value and meaning no less than yours, they were happy and sad, fulfilled and desirous, somehow without an iPhone and gifs of dancing cats. We are probably wasting more than half the oil doing stupid, unnecessary things, mostly in the first world–that’s your neighborhood. We are probably wasting half the food in inefficiency, unnecessary transport, and permitting only 1-A quality. We probably have half the people doing nothing useful, pushing bond portfolios, writing laws, creating apps, or being unemployed. We probably have half the non-arable earth that could be made arable or productive in some way. So at least take off the icing before you tell me there’s no cake.
It IS possible. But only if we stop saying it isn’t possible, well, because everybody just KNOWS it’s true and the only solution is to murder a couple million somewhere for some reason or another. No, it’s not. Let’s not do it. Let’s fix it. Start today.
Dr. Diablo,
1) you are definitely right in that we can “do it” if we were motivated enough. The problem at this point though, is the reality that all those cultures that “lived in harmony” were basically killed off, by those who would not.
2) I agree that our current western lifestyle is NOT the way we need to live and is in fact harmful to our psyche. But convincing those who are “addicted” to lights, action, noise, etc in enough numbers to make a difference in the amount of time we have…. unlikely.
3) We are only able to feed 8 billion people because of our reliance on our high energy technology, which is not going to last. It sounds cold blooded, I know… as in heartless but it is a hard real world limit. Especially as the continued use of industrial methods destroy the life in the soils.
4) As Michael Greer pointed out, “problems have solutions, predicaments do not”. Do I think we could create a better “solution” to the migrant issues, yes, but not really. Only temporary solutions that will fail in the end as the resources disappear… If you have enough food to feed 10 and 100 show up, what is your solution?
For example, 5 years ago, Egypt had enough land to feed 30% of their population…(and that was NOT a western diet)… did they stop building on their farming land. Did they reduce their population growth? No… they imported. As prices increased, people starved. Did they reduce their population?
It stares us in the face, and yet we do not make the changes needed. I change, you change, but the majority do not. They pretend there is no problem… that’s why I say it’s hard wired into most people, not 100%, but the majority. Because it IS a survival characteristic, the capacity to live “appropriately” to our environment is possible, just not the dominant genetic component at this point in time.
Dr. Diablo,
just wanted to comment that I’m amazed that Europe has, to some degree, pulled together to deal with the immigrants pouring in (sept 6/7th). Your focused comments about the need to actively do something to deal with the tragedy that was unfolding, were shared.(As Ilgari said, Merkle’s hand was forced by the potent media photography that brought it “home” to the everyday man). It’s powerfully motivating to see people stepping up to the plate to help out.
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