Re: Witchcraft, plagues and human sacrificies .. Archived Message
Posted by Shyaku on May 27, 2019, 8:13 pm, in reply to "Re: Witchcraft, plagues and human sacrificies .."
Yes, and lets be honest, most of the unsustainability is in the global north. I have a personal opinion that what is sustainable is around 15 - 20x less consumption than we have now. Lets say: 1/5 the amount of people (say, 1.5 billion) and each consuming on average 1/3 the amount of resources. This figure is only a personal hunch, not based on anything. But it seems pretty doable in the absence of animal agriculture except on a miniscule/local scale and almost no fossil fuel, and 2 generations of 1 child per family. The problem why it won't happen is only inside us. Therefore, I totally agree that destruction comes from power and control, and the desire to exploit leading vast numbers of people the choice between survival and cutting down a few acres of forest for cash crops, for example. These are big, big, topics, but interesting. I will try to briefly follow up on synthesis and decay because people want my attention right now. Basically ecologically-inclined people seem to want to have it both ways: They want to say "Oh, the shit we are leaving here, like isotopes, plastics, will be around in billions of years". Then they say "We are not destroying the planet, the planet will do just fine without us". So I went ahead and stuck people with this paradox by showing a video in which the planet did just fine without us. Moreover, the infinite wisdom of nature found a way to totally destroy the indestructible shit So, eat it up :-) But this question seems to go further: It speaks to steady states.... Sustainability is a steady-state. In your cells, you produce metabolites, and you break them down. So the metabolites are only present at tolerable levels. There are complex feedback loops, exactly as in the macro world. If you want to measure the rate of break down, you add a drug that inhibits the synthesis and measure the rate of drop in levels of the metabolite. We are not in a steady-state with nature, we have a synthesis rate that is not matched by the rate of decay right now. I did a thought experiment by inhibiting synthesis of crap by removing the human race and playing the video and observing the rate of decay. Its not perfect, e.g. it doesn't account for fires and earthquakes etc. but it makes the point that sustainability relates to matching synthesis with decay. There are some things whose decay we can accelerate, in feedback loops, and there are others (maybe some plastics and isotopes, diamonds and some precious minerals) that we cannot. Here, the question is can we kick the can down the road by greatly slowing their depletion/toxic production, or not? I am not so dogmatic as to say at this point that we cannot.
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