- Tod aus luft Archived Message
Posted by Ian M
on December 10, 2022, 11:58 pm, in reply to "Re: Grayzone: Dutch farmers battle technocratic forces driving them into oblivion"
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https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v28/n02/steven-shapin/tod-aus-luft On Fritz Haber, inventor of the process of synthesising ammonia from atmospheric nitrogen and hydrogen, usually provided by natural gas - currently using approx 3–5% of global production or 1-2% of total energy supply ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process#Economic_and_environmental_aspects ) and supplying about half the nitrates in global circulation. He was also instrumental in creating various poison gases for military use in WW1 and created a precursor to Zyklon B, later used by the nazis to gas their victims in the death camps. Seems a lot of his family members committed suicide, starting with his first wife, then his son, then his granddaughter: 'also a chemist, she had been told her research into an antidote for the effects of chlorine gas was being set aside, as work on the atomic bomb was taking precedence.' - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber#Personal_life_and_family The 'basis of modern survival', but at what cost and for how much longer? A deep green perspective: 'That’s the pattern of civilisation. It’s drawdown and overshoot so it produces way more people than can be supported so you keep conquering and eventually you would reach the sort of automatic limit. Then, of course, along came fossil fuel and that was just a huge accelerant on this whole process. Regardless of that, this is where civilisations end. They use up all the stuff and there’s no more food or water or energy. Then there’s a slow decline. We are now facing this on an absolutely vast global scale because the whole thing has gone global. And, we have added that incredible accelerant of fossil fuel particularly in terms of food. This is where stuff gets really scary. There were six billion less people here. Because of fossil fuel, scientists learned this thing called the Haber-Bosch process. It was originally used for making bombs because they need a source of nitrogen. After WW2, it got turned to “peacetime” uses. All those bomb factories were turned into fertiliser factories. That was the beginning of the so-called green revolution and the human population quadrupled in response. By adding gas and oil to the food supply, they were able to make various grains like rice and wheat that grew really short. The stuff we don’t want got shorter, we don’t eat the cellulose, but the grain head. The part which we do eat got really big. They were able to grow plants that would do that if they had the correct inputs and the inputs, of course, are chemical fertilisers. So that happened. They pushed those plants to their absolute limit and created an absolute mountain of surplus grain. The human population responded the way that it does when there’s a lot of food, it quadrupled. So it didn’t actually solve any of the problems it just made them four times worse. That’s where we are now, this civilisation is going to end the same way that they all do. It is inevitable. You can’t fight physical reality. I get called all kinds of names for pointing this out which is honestly shooting the messenger. It’s not like I take any pleasure in pointing this out. We are in a really grim situation. That is the reality. [...] I live in a similar climate to you in the Pacific Northwest. In a climate like this, it would take about a square mile to support one human as a hunter-gatherer. Now you can compare that with an agriculturalist where it only takes one acre or two to support a human and you might think “oh wow what a better use of the land you can get way more people.” But like you’re saying, that’s just completely the wrong side of values. Why is the goal to maximize the number of humans you can support on a piece of land, especially when supporting that human is only temporary? You’re going to destroy that land by doing that. Ultimately, you might get more humans out of it but they’re all going to die. Like at the end, that’s where it’s going to. That’s where this story, that’s the conclusions of it there. Everybody there is going to die unless they expand and take somebody else’s land. It doesn’t even really work to say, “oh but you can get more humans.” Yeah you can temporarily but it’s not a way of life that can go on. It’s going to have its limits. But the point is that when you are living in that hunter-gatherer way, which is what we did for 2 million years, all of our progenitors leading up to humans. That’s what we were doing. You’re sharing that land with millions of other species.' - https://dgrnewsservice.org/civilization/after-industrial-civilization-with-lierre-keith/ I |