[Cog]

I see no crisis.

[Timo]

Newfie, you're absolutely right about Cuba. In spite of our embargo against Cuba, they have managed to do quite well for themselves, doing just fine on finite resources. Politics aside, we would do very well to learn from them how they managed to educate the entire public, and provide universal health care to everyone on such a limited monetary and resource budget. Note that i'm not claiming that their levels of education or health care are the equivalent of everyone else in the world, but nonetheless, zero illiteracy, very low unemployment, and universal healthcare are pretty impressive. All of our efforts to starve the beast have proven futile. It appears us Yanks think too much of ourselves. Cuba is a very good example of a society living within its means.

[Cog]

Cuba aint got any central air or NASCAR. Why kind of existence is that? Sure we can all live in mud huts and grub around for roots and bugs but is that really the type of existence you doomers are looking to do? If so, go out and do it RIGHT NOW.

[Timo]

I can always depend on you, Cog, to reply with nonsense. You're so predictable. Thank you for being rock-solid in whatever it is that you think.

[Cog]

Are you moving to Cuba Timo? Sounds like a paradise to me.

If Cuba is that outstanding worker's paradise that doomers have fantasized for so long, then why not move there? Do it for the children and planet. Give up that central AC and cold beer. Prove yourself a true climate change warrior.

Doomers, particularly those who think they can change the inevitable, are the biggest hypocrites I have ever encountered. At least with me, I consume and wreck the planet with no apologies. What doomers do is incessantly whine, point out their geographic utopia, and fail to move there and take part in it.

[Timo]

Actually, i would love to travel to Cuba. From everything i've seen (which is not everything, obviously), Cuba looks like a time warp back to the 1950s. Here in the US, we refer to that era as the Good Old Days. As for moving there, i'd honestly be open to the idea IF their political system wasn't so closed and repressive. Other than that, though, Cuba seems to be a model of self-reliance. It would actually be refreshing to escape the absolute Hell of living through US presidential elections every four years here!

[vtsnowedin]

A It would actually be refreshing to escape the absolute Hell of living through US presidential elections every four years here!

No one is forcing you to pay one bit of attention to politics at any level. Just pop in a Netflix instead of watching local TV with the news and political ads. and you can be totally unaware of who is in office and what they are doing on the job. There are a lot of people that do it that way.
When you make out your next tax return you won't know who to blame but that is a small price to pay for the Bliss of ignorance.

[Newfie]

Cuba aint got any central air or NASCAR. Why kind of existence is that? Sure we can all live in mud huts and grub around for roots and bugs but is that really the type of existence you doomers are looking to do? If so, go out and do it RIGHT NOW.

Cuba did what many US states can't. It relied on its own resources and survived.

But if you want to be proud of leaching off your kids be my guest.

[Newfie]

Are you moving to Cuba Timo? Sounds like a paradise to me.

If Cuba is that outstanding worker's paradise that doomers have fantasized for so long, then why not move there? Do it for the children and planet. Give up that central AC and cold beer. Prove yourself a true climate change warrior.

Doomers, particularly those who think they can change the inevitable, are the biggest hypocrites I have ever encountered. At least with me, I consume and wreck the planet with no apologies. What doomers do is incessantly whine, point out their geographic utopia, and fail to move there and take part in it.

Cog,

You are projecting and throwing inflammatory rhetoric. Unfortunately some rise to the bait.

You response is totally off the point of the topic, a real troll.

No one is saying anything of the kind. Period.

Try to follow the point......many regions/state in the USA are utterly incapable of living in a self sustainable manner. I would wager NONE of the states are sustainable at this time. That means close the borders and still maintain your same population. Can't be done.

Some states are obviously closer to it than others. Arizona and NJ would both see massive die offs.

This thread of conversation started with Ibon making a similar observation for some SW states/areas. I expanded it to other regions in the US. I noted that Cuba, which was in much better shape than any of the US states, had a hard time.

Please do try to be rational and engage the discussion with relevant comments. I know you can.

[Ibon]

Funny the topic of Cuba came up here. The past two days I have discussed Cuba with an old Cuban American friend and with a lawyer who is making his 3rd trip down there next month with investors.

The flood gates will open there soon, all that tranquil 50's pace of life and resilient sustainability will be overwhelmed soon with hundreds of thousands of investors seeing this virgin island as a potential new market.

The casino lights will soon once again be flashing there.

But they wont see me. I will keep the memories intact of my 3 trips there in the 90's.

[careinke]

Are you moving to Cuba Timo? Sounds like a paradise to me.

If Cuba is that outstanding worker's paradise that doomers have fantasized for so long, then why not move there? Do it for the children and planet. Give up that central AC and cold beer. Prove yourself a true climate change warrior.

Doomers, particularly those who think they can change the inevitable, are the biggest hypocrites I have ever encountered. At least with me, I consume and wreck the planet with no apologies. What doomers do is incessantly whine, point out their geographic utopia, and fail to move there and take part in it.

Cog,

You are projecting and throwing inflammatory rhetoric. Unfortunately some rise to the bait.

You response is totally off the point of the topic, a real troll.

No one is saying anything of the kind. Period.

Try to follow the point......many regions/state in the USA are utterly incapable of living in a self sustainable manner. I would wager NONE of the states are sustainable at this time. That means close the borders and still maintain your same population. Can't be done.

Some states are obviously closer to it than others. Arizona and NJ would both see massive die offs.

Off hand, I'd say Washington, Alaska, Texas And Oregon could all handle it with relative ease given the right mindset. Heck, with regenerative geoengineering, California could do it too.

[Newfie]

Maybe, but California is not likely with the same population they have now. Way too many people living in San Dieto and LA which is basically desert.

Remember, they have to import fossil fuels or otherwise generate energy.

But, yeah, they may be the ones with the best chance.

What % of the US population is that?

[Ibon]

Let's play with this theme a bit and see the ramifications. Take Illinois and Wisconsin as two states. All those rich prairie soils that currently form vast monocultures of subsidized corn and soy.

When you would remove the massive distribution chain of food and veggies that make up part of modern industrial agriculture what would happen.

Of the vast monoculture fields of corn and soy grown in Illinois for example less than 1% is actually eaten directly by humans as unprocessed food. Most of this crop is either exported, processed into junk packaged food or converted to fuel. That is a vast amount of wasted calories and wasted farm land being used to basically keep people sick and diabetic. Let's be honest. If this modern distribution system collapsed not only would these crops cease to be subsidized but also so would the current imports of veggies coming into these states from far away California where produce is hand picked by undocumented aliens and driven 5000 miles across the country.


So, you drop away the international market for these crops and you remove packaged food and suddenly the population o Wisconisn and Illinois, even with Chicago and Milwaukee, have to fend for themselves. Could they do it. Of course they could.

Instead of 5000 acre farms of monocultured corn and soy you would suddenly have small truck farms growing a huge assortment of temperate crops. Greenhouses would add warmer climate crops to the mix. Corn still grown would be used for corn products like tortillas, grits, hominy, corn bread, Soy would be made into fermented protein products and tofu. Canning would be rediscovered. Preserves. Sauer kraut. In wisconsin fruits would be preserved and dried. Dairy products and beef in Wisconsin would be traded for crops grown in Illinois.

Local farms would shrink, small agro towns revitalized, food crops diversified. What does this build? Resiliency.

It wont happen without the collapse of the modern industrial agriculture.

Of course, it could be argued that the loss of efficiency of modern industrial agriculture would constrain these populations. But it is not the case for illinois or Wisconsin or the Skagit valley in Washington State. But it is the case for bio regions like you find in Arizona or Nevada or Sub Saharan Africa. Crops produced are being used super inefficiently and being turned into Cheetos and fuel and exported to keep population is distant countries artificially elevated. This is poor management of our global population.

If the ag industry in the US was no longer an export crop than overpopulated countries in other areas of the world would lose the ability to import cheap corn and grains from the US. This would rapidly start curtailing excess population.

We often talk about collapse but we fail to understand that so much of what we consume today, so much of the transport involved in this consumption , is moving around useless process food and junk and by no means is essential for survival.

We would lose ceaser salads from california and peaches from Chile in January. How many of you reading this have the memory of eating the first fruits of summer, the first greens of spring, the first ear of sweet corn in July after a long cold winter of eating canned veggies? Do you know how much more appreciation and joy that first peach brings compared to the tasteless unripe shitty peaches you can buy any month of the year in any Walmart superstore?

The ramifications go on and on if you really take a minute to think about it. The more I think about this the more I am convinced that counter intuitively, the more that industrial agriculture would collapse, the more that the global trade we have would collapse, the better we would be. More healthy, more wellbeing, more strengthening and resileincy of local bio regions.

We are basically screwed by our own design.

[Tanada]

Ibon, as pointed out by others when people say modern agriculture is "more efficient" you should always ask them, more efficient at what? More efficient at using mass quantities of fossil fuels? More efficient at limiting consumer choices to tasteless mass produce that is picked green so it can be firm enough to survive long distance shipping? More efficient at building a monocrop system of agriculture that wears out the natural fertility of the soil and requires mass influx of pesticides, herbicides, fungicides and fertilizers?

Up until the mid 1950's California was one of the biggest canning states in the country. They grew large volumes of fruits and vegetables until they were ripe, then they canned those fruits and vegetables at the peak of ripeness so that they were preserved as great tasting real food for distribution via rail or ship around the country, where they were consumed during the off season. In Michigan when I was growing up we raised our own food, peaches, plums, cherries, apples, pears in the orchard, grapes in the small vineyard, rhubarb and asparagus and berries from the perennial areas, potato and strawberries and egg plant and bell peppers and peas and beans and tomato and sweet corn and water melon and cucumber and zucchini and of course chickens, ducks, turkeys and geese for eggs and meat. On half an acre of land my parents provided about 35 percent of the food calories for a family of 9. If needed we could have provided all the food calories by expanding the garden and eliminating the yard, but both my parents worked outside the home, as well as all of us working on my uncles farm where we helped raise grass fed beef.

Over the span of my life I have seen nearly every diversified farm switch from multi-cropping to mono-cropping. We went from having a diverse fresh diet to having an "efficient" system that destroyed diversity in favor of over production of favored crops, like field corn. Field corn is so cheap we convert a large portion of it into corn syrup that we then add to all those green early harvested foods when they are processed just to make them more palatable for the end consumer. Go to your kitchen and look at the ingredient label on your Catsup bottle, and your jar of spaghetti sauce or your whole grain bread. Odds are extremely high all of them will have added corn syrup or sugar to make them more palatable.

The modern food system is a disaster. Most people just have not noticed how bad it is yet.

[Cog]

I'm wondering if it is even possible to go backwards with regards to farming practices. Modern farming resembles a mining process more than sustainable agriculture. Without the addition of artificial fertilizers, would the soil even be organic rich enough to support going back to more ancient practices?

I would surmise that soils on the mega-farms might be so depleted of organics that it might take considerable amendments before you could generate food from what was once very rich soils.

[Tanada]

I'm wondering if it is even possible to go backwards with regards to farming practices. Modern farming resembles a mining process more than sustainable agriculture. Without the addition of artificial fertilizers, would the soil even be organic rich enough to support going back to more ancient practices?

I would surmise that soils on the mega-farms might be so depleted of organics that it might take considerable amendments before you could generate food from what was once very rich soils.

Unless there is a generalized collapse you don't have to do it all in one swift step. There are plenty of steps farmers could take individually if they would not be punished by the regulatory practices of the government and financial system for doing so. With removal of the disincentives things would start to shift back to more rational practices, farmers are just as smart as any lawyer. Most of them know that they are totally trapped by the current system. Give them the freedom to use better land management and most of them will.

[onlooker]

I wish to elaborate on what Ibon and others have said over time. That the time is fast approaching when lifeboat ethics will demand we forsake others. First, I totally agree that a huge die-off is coming, that is a given. So I believe the choices will be wrenching and we should not minimize this. Timo, believes humans will probably not have any radical change in conscience and thus may not be worthy to persist. I believe in whatever way all this unfolds, it will reveal what and who we truly are and can be. Some here say we will devolve into barbarism. Ibon is more optimistic. Honestly, I can not say for sure. We have the potential for both. To unite in a harmonious way under the banner of sustainability and harmony with each other and with Nature. Yet, we can also descend into conflict that will reduce us into brutal barbarism like a Mad Max scenario. To me, this is the most fascinating aspect of what is too come. Perhaps what will most influence what direction we take is ironically, how bountiful or not resources are relative to population. The problem is people will not perish without a fight. So what happens, when a country like China or India is facing truly dire circumstances? The factors I cited about resources to population is exactly the circumstances right now. So, i am afraid this has set up conditions to foster a barbaric, violent and chaotic unfolding in the near future.

[Timo]

I'm wondering if it is even possible to go backwards with regards to farming practices. Modern farming resembles a mining process more than sustainable agriculture. Without the addition of artificial fertilizers, would the soil even be organic rich enough to support going back to more ancient practices?

I would surmise that soils on the mega-farms might be so depleted of organics that it might take considerable amendments before you could generate food from what was once very rich soils.

Unless there is a generalized collapse you don't have to do it all in one swift step. There are plenty of steps farmers could take individually if they would not be punished by the regulatory practices of the government and financial system for doing so. With removal of the disincentives things would start to shift back to more rational practices, farmers are just as smart as any lawyer. Most of them know that they are totally trapped by the current system. Give them the freedom to use better land management and most of them will.

Agreed. The only thing i'd add, though, is that the paradigm will have to shift from "agriculture" as a business to "farming" as a way of life. In the business of agriculture, farmers have little control over what they grow, and no control over their compensation for their product. Farming is much more variable and forgiving in that regard. Supply and demand falls down the the local or regional level, and away from the global level. That shift will make farming much more sustainable.

[Cog]

War and games will ensue when it gets to that point. From a movie but it seems logical to me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9w3E3eFMsLg