Re: ML ALERT: Life Or Death - Corporate Media Or Honest Media? Archived Message
Posted by Ian M on May 23, 2019, 9:31 pm, in reply to "Re: ML ALERT: Life Or Death - Corporate Media Or Honest Media?"
That Bill McKibben quote: 'So we’re not playing for stopping climate change. We’re playing maybe for being able to slow it down to the point where it doesn’t make civilizations impossible. That’s an open question. There are scientists who tell you we’re already past that point. The consensus, at least for the moment, is that we’ve got a narrow and closing window, but that if we move with everything we have, then, perhaps, we’ll be able to squeeze a fair amount of our legacy through it. But Betsy is right, an already very difficult century is going to become a lot harder no matter what we do. It’s at this point trying to keep it from becoming not a difficult and even miserable century but a literally impossible one.' - http://www.newyorker.com/news/the-new-yorker-interview/bill-mckibben-and-elizabeth-kolbert-on-the-un-extinction-report I've seen so many people parrot this line about 'civiliz/sation' being in danger without any apparent understanding of what they're saying. Attenborough framed it in those terms, Thunberg too. Personally I would welcome global changes that made 'civilizations impossible'. What 'legacy' are they talking about? Art, science, architecture, medicine, technology? All pre-date the adoption of farming and growth of cities and exist outside the dominant culture, albeit in less complex, intense or extreme forms, and there's no reason to suppose human beings won't continue in these endeavours without a state superstructure curating them (always in the ways that supports its insane goals) in the future. The real 'legacy', ie: unique contribution of civilisation can be seen in famine, epidemic disease, extreme hierarchy & social inequality, slavery, environmental degradation, chronic genocidal warfare, and a way of life that frustrates our species' needs at every turn. All of these horrors, in their extreme forms at least, stem from the practice of agriculture and the concentration of massive human populations in cities. I don't know what kind of world we're heading for, but I feel like I should point out that the impossibility of civilisation doesn't mean the impossibility of human life. In fact the reverse might be true - that the continued existence of humanity depends on our ability to ditch the civilised way of life and find more sane ways of living in the world. People calling themselves environmentalists should ask themselves what they're trying to save: the living planet or the dominant culture (hint - you can't have both). Rant over - it was a good alert otherwise! Further reading I've linked to a couple of times before: http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/jason-godesky-thirty-theses cheers, I
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