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Worshipping the Overshoot Predator

Re: Worshipping the Overshoot Predator

Unread postby dohboi » Sun 06 Apr 2014, 03:59:49

Just consider one likely consequence--the shifting of weather patterns such as south Asian monsoons, to other latitudes. There are well over a billion people in south Asia dependent on this annual source of rain to grow the food that allows them to (in many cases, barely) survive the year. If they fail even one year, millions, probably hundreds of millions, of people will likely die. Heat waves that would not have happened (only a tiny fraction of percent of likelihood that it would, to be precise) without the added effects of global warming, have already killed at least tens of thousands of people in Europe and Russia alone.

We live in the most incomprehensibly violent society that ever existed. Modern industrial civilization is waging war on the planet itself: already having essentially melted one of its (sea ice) ice caps, acidifying its oceans, changing its basic atmospheric chemistry, initiated a Great Dying of it life forms--only the 6th Mass Extinction Event since the beginning of complex life...

And of course all of these and more will make continued human life on the planet less and less viable going forward.

We're riding along that top red line in the graph (or worse). Read "Six Degrees" by Mark Lynas if you want some indication of what is coming down the pike in the next few decades.

Image

Image

ETA: And it looks like world food prices are continuing in March the upward trajectory they started on in the first two months of the year: http://www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation/f ... sindex/en/

Image

Another month of such increase, and we'll be at the second highest level of global food price for this time of year.
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Re: Worshipping the Overshoot Predator

Unread postby Newfie » Sun 06 Apr 2014, 19:19:36

Dohboi,

I don't think anyone is contradicting you, and I get your well taken point. A consequence of our history will be to cause unspeakable human calamity in the future. It boggles the mind to comprehend the possible scale of suffering. I sometimes think of a line from the first Starwars when an entire planet was destroyed...."There was a great disturbance in the Force." Or thereabouts.

It's just that these are two different phenomena. The case Diamond ( and E.O. Wilson) is making is restricted to describing our history and trends to date. How did we get where we are? What are the evolutionary forces? Why is a ruling elite so prevalent in our cultures? What role do they play? And it has been to reduce daily violence through ritualized revenge via laws. Averaged over 100 years, 1900 to 2000, the violent death rate in Germany is several times lower than in even the most benign primitive tribes. Primitive tribes violent death rate is so high because they are constantly in a state of violent retribution and revenge.

Your point is to look at the ultimate consequences, to draw a straight line and look at the trajectory, which is grim.

I think Ibon's point, if I may be so bold as to speak for him, is to hope that we may evolve a religious or cultural mind set that will allow the survivors of your noted violence, to go forward without repeating our history. I hope Ibon's is right, but I am not optimistic. Not that any of us will ever live long enough to know.
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Re: Worshipping the Overshoot Predator

Unread postby dohboi » Sun 06 Apr 2014, 20:18:45

Points well taken.

Ultimately, though, we have to start rethinking the function of lots of small scale violence in human evolution. More on that later.

Also, Diamond has also pointed out elsewhere that elites in complex societies tend to become more and more isolated from the fundamental processes that keep the society going. They live in a kind of cloud world, and therefore they tend to make more and more decisions that more and more doom their complex societies to total collapse. When that collapse happens, violence tends to break out again with a vengeance.

So I would say it is more like that the elites postpone daily violence for a little while, only to cause it to come back with great ferocity.

I would also add that certain kinds of violence that elites cause tend to be invisible to the elites, and even to much of society. Many many people died in mined of various sorts that were set up to support the power systems that support the elite. But people don't tend to see that as 'violence.'
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Re: Worshipping the Overshoot Predator

Unread postby Newfie » Sun 06 Apr 2014, 20:57:31

Agreed.
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Re: Worshipping the Overshoot Predator

Unread postby ralfy » Sun 06 Apr 2014, 23:51:13

Strummer wrote:
The problem with those numbers is that they don't show the total population numbers and the ratio of violence. That's what Pinker (and Diamond) got right.


There's some data on that here:

http://democraticpeace.wordpress.com/20 ... st-of-all/

Conflict-related deaths increased in relative and absolute terms compared to the last four centuries. If democides are included, the numbers may increase across several centuries.
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Re: Worshipping the Overshoot Predator

Unread postby Ibon » Mon 07 Apr 2014, 00:05:40

Newfie wrote:
I think Ibon's point, if I may be so bold as to speak for him, is to hope that we may evolve a religious or cultural mind set that will allow the survivors of your noted violence, to go forward without repeating our history. I hope Ibon's is right, but I am not optimistic. Not that any of us will ever live long enough to know.


A crisis of the proportions we are contemplating could have this impact. And our species doesn't get that many of them that could represent such a potential cultural leap. Opportunities like this are inherently risky propositions and there is good reason you are not optimistic.
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Re: Worshipping the Overshoot Predator

Unread postby Newfie » Mon 07 Apr 2014, 07:38:26

Thanks.
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Re: Worshipping the Overshoot Predator

Unread postby dohboi » Mon 07 Apr 2014, 17:42:37

There's been some recent discussion on elites:

http://www.resilience.org/stories/2014- ... themselves

Why the elites are so ruthless that they destroy themselves

Ag, the whole idea that something as complex as political views could be reduced to a one dimensional scale has always seemed rather ludicrous to me.
Image

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-vj0U0prgXSo/U ... llapse.png

The crux seems to be that elites leach off the wealth of both the commoners and of nature in order to create a kind of Super Overshoot that damns themselves (as well, of course, as everyone else) to a severely reduced future. Or as Ugo Bardi put it:

society literally commits suicide by having the elites draw so much wealth from the accumulated resources that nothing is left to commoners - who die out. But, as the elites don't produce anything, the wealth stock disappears and the final result is that they also disappear. The elites are so ruthless that they destroy themselves.


The main problem with the model as applied to our current situation is that it doesn't look as though 'nature' is on the rebound, nor will it be for the foreseeable future.
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Re: Worshipping the Overshoot Predator

Unread postby dohboi » Wed 09 Apr 2014, 02:31:40

More on the issue of defining and recognizing violence in our current set of predicaments:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre ... cupy-earth


Call climate change what it is: violence

Social unrest and famine, superstorms and droughts. Places, species and human beings – none will be spared. Welcome to Occupy Earth


If you're poor, the only way you're likely to injure someone is the old traditional way: artisanal violence, we could call it – by hands, by knife, by club, or maybe modern hands-on violence, by gun or by car.

But if you're tremendously wealthy, you can practice industrial-scale violence without any manual labor on your own part. You can, say, build a sweatshop factory that will collapse in Bangladesh and kill more people than any hands-on mass murderer ever did, or you can calculate risk and benefit about putting poisons or unsafe machines into the world, as manufacturers do every day...
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Re: Worshipping the Overshoot Predator

Unread postby dohboi » Wed 09 Apr 2014, 13:40:11

How about this for an overshoot predator:
He was just doing his part to solve AGW.

Officials capture one-ton crocodile that ate 4 people


A 2,204 pound crocodile suspected of eating four people and injuring several others has been captured by wildlife officials in Uganda.


http://nypost.com/2014/04/06/officials- ... ate-4-men/

(Thanks to JimD at neven's forum for this.)
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Re: Worshipping the Overshoot Predator

Unread postby dohboi » Mon 21 Apr 2014, 10:34:39

Probably many of you have already seen this presentation, but if you haven't, it is a nice clear proof of the absurdity of continued economic and energy-use growth.

http://fora.tv/2011/10/26/Growth_Has_an_Expiration_Date
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Re: Worshipping the Overshoot Predator

Unread postby Newfie » Fri 09 May 2014, 22:22:20

Ibon's,

On another thread Pops had pointed to some writing by this guy.

He can be kind of dense, but I like where he is going.

Im struggling a bit with this bit. I thought you might like it.

http://www.feasta.org/2013/08/10/inform ... nd-belief/
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Re: Worshipping the Overshoot Predator

Unread postby Ibon » Sat 10 May 2014, 13:32:35

Newfie wrote:Ibon's,

On another thread Pops had pointed to some writing by this guy.

He can be kind of dense, but I like where he is going.

Im struggling a bit with this bit. I thought you might like it.

http://www.feasta.org/2013/08/10/inform ... nd-belief/


This is a very good article. The explanation of how we got to where we are and the split between indigenous and non indigenous cultures is clearly described. How we are now a global population of industrialized citizens where nature and natural systems are "out of sight out of mind"

So we have the truth spelled out clearly. This however is not knowledge that will set one free. As you said Newfie it can be dense. And if it so for you and me how is it then for the vast majority of the worlds population solely and unquestionabally adapted to industrial "ecosystems".

That is where these articles can only go so far. Articulate explanations that offer no traction toward any real or meaningul change. At most able to reach a small sub culture following. Kind of like some of us here at PO.com. A very tiny tiny subculture.

Cerebral knowledge of our dilemma is not a vehicle toward change or transition. Why? From the article:

In a quite literal sense it is the pathological world view, whose members are not rooted in a place, who are almost entirely blind to nature and quite unaware of their own ignorance of it, as well as their dependence on it.

If you are not rooted in place and within natural ecosystems, you can read this article, make sense of the logic, but there is no traction since the industrial ecosystem we live in creates a set of demands of your time and energy that end up dominating your world view. And so these occasional articles will surface in magazines, books and journals as one voice in a myriad sea of opinions and voices......The cruel irony is that cerebral based explanations of our growing non indigenous global culture can only bounce around within the boundaries of this non indigenous bubble we live in. There are no indigenous bushmen reading this! There will never be a collective light bulb moment of realization in our culture from the cerebral written word. Change will come from a deeper place.

As the title of this thread suggests.
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Re: Worshipping the Overshoot Predator

Unread postby Newfie » Sat 10 May 2014, 15:28:40

Agreed.
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Re: Worshipping the Overshoot Predator

Unread postby dohboi » Mon 12 May 2014, 12:45:21

ON THE EDGE
--Noam Chomsky

For the first time in history, humans are now poised to destroy the prospects for decent existence, and much of life.

The rate of species destruction today is at about the level of 65 million years ago, when a major catastrophe, probably a huge asteroid, ended the age of the dinosaurs, opening the way for mammals to proliferate.

The difference is that today we are the asteroid, and the way will very likely be opened to beetles and bacteria when we have done our work.

Geologists break up the history of the planet into eras of relative stability. The Pleistocene, lasting several million years, was following by the Holocene about 10,000 years ago, coinciding with the human invention of agriculture. Today, many geologists add a new epoch, the Anthropocene, beginning with the industrial revolution, which has radically changed the natural world.

In the light of the pace of change, one hates to think when the next epoch will begin, and what it will be.

One effect of the Anthropocene is the extraordinary rate of species extinction. Another is the threat to ourselves. No literate person can fail to be aware that we are facing a prospect of severe environmental disaster, with effects that are already detectable and that might become dire within a few generations if current tendencies are not reversed.

That is not all. For the past 70 years we have been living under the threat of instant and virtually total destruction, at our own hands. Those familiar with the shocking record, which continues until this day, will find it hard to contest the conclusions of General Lee Butler, the last commander of the Strategic Air Command, which has responsibility for nuclear weapons. He writes that we have so far survived the nuclear age “by some combination of skill, luck, and divine intervention, and I suspect the latter in greatest proportion.” It is a near miracle that we have escaped destruction so far, and the longer we tempt fate, the less likely it is that we can hope for divine intervention to perpetuate the miracle.

We might wish to consider a remarkable paradox of the current era.

There are some who are devoting serious efforts to avert impending disaster. In the lead are the most oppressed segments of the global population, those considered to be the most backward and primitive: the indigenous societies of the world, from First Nations in Canada, to aboriginals in Australia, to tribal people in India, and many others. In countries with influential indigenous populations, like Bolivia and Ecuador, there is by now legislative recognition of rights of nature. The government of Ecuador actually proposed to leave their supplies of oil in the ground, where they should be, if the rich countries would provide them development aid amounting to a small fraction of what they would sacrifice by not exploiting their oil resources. The rich countries refused...


One might take a speech of President Obama’s two years ago to be an eloquent death-knell for the species.

He proclaimed with pride, to ample applause, that

“Now, under my administration, America is producing more oil today than at any time in the last eight years. That's important to know. Over the last three years, I’ve directed my administration to open up millions of acres for gas and oil exploration across 23 different states. We’re opening up more than 75 percent of our potential oil resources offshore. We’ve quadrupled the number of operating rigs to a record high. We’ve added enough new oil and gas pipeline to encircle the Earth and then some.”

...In the moral calculus of currently prevailing state capitalism, profits and bonuses in the next quarter greatly outweigh concern for the welfare of one’s grandchildren, and since these are institutional maladies, they will not be easy to overcome.

While much remains uncertain, we can assure ourselves, with fair confidence, that future generations will not forgive us our silence and apathy.


http://www.pen.org/nonfiction/edge-noam-chomsky
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Re: Worshipping the Overshoot Predator

Unread postby Ibon » Wed 04 Jun 2014, 21:24:13

Why are some of us who are rational educated ecologists, scientists, physicists beginning to use words like reverence, sacred, higher power, worship etc. when pointing out the path that lies ahead? I cannot speak for Gail in her latest blog entry as she only mentions the briefest explanation of her "higher power" but I can maybe add some insights why we are seeing these references more and more.

Let’s start from the most pragmatic reason. Transitioning through overshoot with ever tightening constraints will limit the degree to which we will be able to provide a solid education for a significant percentage of the world’s population who today by and large "believe" in higher powers through their traditional religious beliefs and live their lives accordingly. So if our deepest interest is to move the world’s population towards consensus around adapting to a new set of values toward our mother earth then we should consider that framing this within the dominant way most humans think would be quite wise. Upcoming consequences may very well modify existing religious doctrine toward taboos and commandments that create the moral imperative toward sustainability or if all hell breaks loose novel religions might emerge as a result of potential biblical type consequences that will embed in their founding commandments this moral imperative. This is a pragmatic justification for referring to a “higher power” going with the flow of the way most humans structure their belief systems and how they will likely frame the upcoming crisis.

This last paragraph may not ruffle many feathers of those faithful to reason and science since the über rationalist can preserve his/her superiority and cynicism over all those poor fellow humans still stuck in their primitive religious superstitions. But let’s move a little more into challenging territory and address the very collective cynicism that our modern industrial societies have developed through time, and how that cynicism is less about reason and more about a degenerate aspect of modern culture that emerges when we pass through several generations no longer being beholden to external limits. More simply what happens when we assume the role of petty “gods”.

Before the industrial revolution, before fossil fuels, germ theory and all the wonderful technology of the past 100 years humans everywhere on the planet were living with a background base line of quite a bit of uncertainty and few givens or guarantees of a long and prosperous life. Famine and disease would occasionally sweep through populations, plagues and crop failures and severe weather etc. Take a look at this link of longevity historically and imagine how it was back in the days of two iconic Europeans; Mozart who died of Rheumatic fever at age 35 or Chopin who died of tuberculosis at age 39.

http://filipspagnoli.files.wordpress.co ... -trend.gif

Think a moment about how the uncertainty and impermanence of life influenced the focus and intensity of these artists, the love within a peasant’s family, the appreciation of a successful harvest or hunt, the joy of a feast, the devastating pain of the death of a child. The hunger and loss as a plague ripped through an urban area. How does this backdrop of uncertainty affect the world view and quality of life of a society? In this scenario was a person more inclined to look up at the heavens or gaze onto a prairie field of flowers and see the divine? And more likely to accept the fate of a dying brother or sister? A sense of the divine was combined with an experience of hardship and toil. A life fused with this combination of toil and reverence, how the tempered honing effects of famine and disease played upon the collective psyche of past cultures and just for a moment contrast that with the self-entitled, fearful, parasitic, petty value system we see amongst modern humans living in a satiated and capitalist society where the assumption of a long life of consumption is largely unquestioned. Back then pain and pleasure were more intensely experienced and mediocrity was practically non-existent. Today we have mediocrity in abundance and we medicate ourselves from feeling to intensely pain and our pleasure is more directed toward the short term variety of acquiring stuff rather than the joy of composing a nocturne or creating a folk song by the freshly harvested wheat.

We forget how the collective mind set was just a couple generations ago when acceptance of a lost child to disease was the norm, when external weather events caused severe choice constraints as to available food which often lead to starvation. A deep resignation and acceptance to these vagaries was the status quo just a couple of generations ago. It is important to stop a moment and think how different this was to our current collective mindset after 2-4 generations of control and mastery at satiating hunger and controlling disease.

Ask yourself the question, keeping Kyoto and Rio and Copenhagen in mind, how a purely rational society made up of reasoned individuals focused on their self-interest will ever develop the values of caring for our mother earth without a sense of the sacred or divine. The most stubbornly rational will say that we have a failure of long term thinking and planning and put our immediate needs over the long term care of our planet. In other words to reach sustainability we need to engineer more rationality and reason into our society in order to better manage our population, waste, consumption. To be better engineers like some future Star Trek society. Ask yourself if you think the past 4 generations of self-indulgent control is moving us closer to this Star Trek society or if we are degenerating toward ever more parasitic Kudzu Ape like invasiveness on the planet. Is it only a lack of long term engineering and planning or is there a spiritual deficiency that sets in when we remove the external forces of limits as were present in the days of Mozart when the OP lived in our midst?

How do we go about once again cultivating a society which preserves it’s faith in reason while allowing the emergence once again of a sense of the divine? To worship and hold sacred our mother earth? An appreciation of the diverse flora and fauna as not only our source of food but also as our brethren with whom we share this kinship of life? For surely almost all of our problems with overshoot and overconsumption would shift if this sense of the sacred would replace the cynicism of being a petty god chasing comfort and security through symbols we call money.

Now we come to why I worship the Overshoot Predator. Not for the death and despair of those who fall victim to his wrath but to the honing affect his presence has to the survivors AND to the quality of life it provides to those Chopins and Mozarts and rural peasants whose lives are cut short but nevertheless were lives well lived, arguably in many ways lives better lived than what we see in the vast majority of Kudzu Apes today. Remember that this was the grist of the mill that accompanied human cultural and physical evolution for 99% of our species history and provided our species with the integrity to lead us to where we are today. And this happened to be the way we stayed largely within carrying capacity for the vast majority of our species history, including most of the time since we developed civilizations. Contrast that to the values we modern humans have developed when given a chance through fossil fuels and germ theory to assume control for a couple of generations. What dignity lies in so much self-indulgence, so much over working and saving for a comfortable retirement or to buy a larger home or new car? What meaning would a 401K have had in Mozart’s generation when the average longevity was 30 years?

We will not willfully call forth a sense of the sacred. We will not willfully worship a “higher power”. Free choice is not leading the reasoned and rational human toward an ideal Star Trek society. It is leading us to a degeneracy which low and behold is creating imbalances and instabilities in our biosphere that will cause what to happen?

It will call forth a higher power; the consequences that will correct our collective self-indulgencies. Now perhaps we come to Gail’s point. In this grand scheme of things we are creating the very imbalances that will bring forth the consequences that will familiarize ourselves once again with a state of reverence, a sense of the sacred, a sense of the divine.

For the Overshoot Predator will rise again through our squandered opportunity of how we have played god. What Gail is asking is if this might not be the way an ordered universe indeed functions. I think this is a very valid question. As an ecologist it rings true. We are only the first clumsy attempt on our planet of a sentient species having reached this level of control. What is to be expected other than that we would fail miserably?

I ask all cynics and Ueber rationalists to ask themselves a moment if solely through our own devices we will lead ourselves out of this overshoot quagmire?

I say we need an agent of the divine. The Overshoot Predator.
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Re: Worshipping the Overshoot Predator

Unread postby Newfie » Thu 05 Jun 2014, 07:40:10

I get it, I think.

You may well be right.

But it still rubs me the wrong way. Perhaps too much personal pride.
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Re: Worshipping the Overshoot Predator

Unread postby dohboi » Thu 05 Jun 2014, 08:57:55

Still not sure I totally grok what you're trying to get at with your OSP thing. I have to admit, also, that I have less and less respect for Gail, as she seems to be a crypto-denialist. It does seem a bit...odd...to pick the "Age of Enlightenment" as your paragon for a time of faith. I'm pretty sure, cash strapped as he was, that Mozart would have appreciated a 401k, if not for him, for his loved ones. Voltaire lived at about the same time. He certainly appreciated the uncertainties of life. But for him, the violence of the universe was the surest proof against any kind of caring, omnipotent God.

I do think that as a species and society we have to 'grow up,' but to me that would imply starting to take responsibility for our actions and learning to limit ourselves, not just throwing up our hands and saying, "OSP (or any other higher or lower power) made me do it." But, as I've said, I'm pretty certain I'm still missing some essential element of the point you're trying to make here.
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Re: Worshipping the Overshoot Predator

Unread postby Ibon » Thu 05 Jun 2014, 10:24:15

dohboi wrote: But, as I've said, I'm pretty certain I'm still missing some essential element of the point you're trying to make here.


A couple of points. A higher power does not have to refer to a caring omnipotent god. It can refer to an order in the universe that in spite of all our efforts will result in humans being subserviant to it. Gravity is not a god but no matter how many times we jump off a 10 story building we will surely die.

Who needs organized religion when the miracle that is the diversity of life on this planet inspires more of the sacred and sense of worship than any biblical passage. And the vast vast majority of humans are numb to this?

We all dispair about how our culture at large is not even capable of discussing the fallacy of growth. Isn't it a little curious that we can so quickly judge the ignorance of our modern civilization and not leave the question open that we ourselves might be equally as ignorant to mysteries and truths about our universe that are acting on us as a society? It is arrogant to judge the stupidity of our modern civilization assuming that your knowledge is complete.

For the individual not getting what you want often ends up being your greatest gift. Desires not satiated churn the creative gears.
How artistic are the Swiss? How much edgy art or science do you see coming out of societies and cultures that have mastered their materialism?

If tomorrow the truth descends on our modern society regarding the fallacy of growth do you really think the baby boomer generation or those on either side of it will be able to activate change? A culture nourished on self entitlement and assumptions of wealth is not a culture prepared to apply knowledge and reinvent itself.

It will be a future generation that once again passing through the grist of the mill of living without these "givens" that will move us through transition.

We are at our best when not satiated and when each day is a blessing and gift with no assumptions.

The best caricature of modern industrial humans I have ever seen was that animated film Wall E

Mozart would surely have loved to have a 401K but the world would be a poorer place as his compositions would have flattened in intensity.

Compare a house cat to a mountain lion
Compare a cow to a buffalo
Compare a human to a chimpanzee
Compare a designer dog to a wolf
Compare a bear in a zoo to one standing on the edge of white water grabbing a salmon.

The funny thing about humans is that we acted more like top predators when The Overshoot Predator was in our midst. Once we temporarily gained control as we have today we have lost the edge and resemble much more fearful prey than predator. Like busy little mice scrambling for nuts and crumbs trying to secure our future, blind to the moment. When the OP was in our midst we were much less like mice, and more like men.
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Re: Worshipping the Overshoot Predator

Unread postby dohboi » Thu 05 Jun 2014, 12:24:22

Thanks for your thoughtful reply. For the record, I certainly do not think that my knowledge is anything like complete. I think consciousness of our own individual and collective ignorance (and immaturity) could go a long way toward creating something resembling a real sustainability consciousness.

I also do think that at a deep level a or the central driver of our predicament is a kind of deep faithlessness--that the world will more or less take care of us (at least collectively) without us having to totally dominate it. Not sure where exactly that started--maybe as far back as the Toba bottleneck, if that theory is still to be accepted?http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory

Certainly, agriculture and the civilizations it spawned seem to reflect and embody such a faithlessness.

Yes, domesticated animals are different than wild, and we are certainly domesticated. I'd say that started long before Mozart's time, and I'd say it's gone beyond domestication to infantilization (though perhaps those are ultimately similar).
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