KaiserJeep wrote:
If you have two or more children, congratulations, planet killer. YOU ARE THE PROBLEM, regardless of your personal beliefs, regardlless of how much of your own food you grow, or what your lifestyle is.
It's really very simple. Your personal responsibility for the end of the Earth is proportional to how many people you caused to be added to the planet. Your lifestyle and beliefs about anything including all the topics at PO.com are irrelevent.
GAME OVER, MAN.
No real argument with your post. You have nailed the source of the problem. So if you conclude Game Over and I conclude that we are still in overshoot regardless of how enlightened our policies then one could conclude that we must surrender with total futility our fate.
And yet we have an emerging young generation who will increasingly recognize this fate but at the same time say F you Kaiser Jeep, F you Ibon, you old baby boomers who failed to fix this. We aren't going to simply roll over or bend over to this futile prognosis.
My point being that as we move through the brutal consequences of overshoot and as our death rate increases we are still going to produce young generation after young generation whose inherent optimism is going to move our culture in ways we cannot yet anticipate.
I don't care what name applies to your economic system, it is a label for the way we exchange goods and labor, keeping score with currency.
The basic accounting in an economic system will not change as I see it. I agree. But to what degree brutal consequences give rise to self regulation is an open question.
Put yourselves for a moment in the heads of the emerging young generations who will be born later this century rising up through the consequences and calamities of overshoot. As these generations mature I can imagine all kinds of self regulating rules emerging that are born from adapting to reality, not born from some ideology. After all, they will rise up through a global population going into decline due to overshoot. That is so radically different than the past couple of generations of growth.
Unregulatred capitalism bloomed and flourished during abundant resources. That was the external environment, the field so to speak, that capitalism was able to spread through in ways AD for example has made very clear. You cannot separate capitalism from the abundant resource base it was able to feed on.
Emerging generations later this century will adapt to a radically different constricting field. There will be very interesting cultural self regulation mechanisms applied to our economic system, our morals, our ethics.
That is worthy of contemplation.
One of the reason I say we need to lean into the consequences and embrace them is that they will be the teachers of our future generations.
KJ, you are obsolete and have no way to conceptualize how these future generations will move through overshoot. You are just too pissed off how we fucked everything up.
So am I. But I can still see through the hubris to a time up ahead where we implement self regulation. Imposed from consequences.
We are one of the most adaptive species on the planet. We did a F'ing great job of adapting to abundance.
We will do an equally amazing job in adapting to a world of increasing constraints.
We may end up truly worthy of being once again called human.
We are still however deeply into Kudzu Apedome
Patiently awaiting the pathogens. Our resiliency resembles an invasive weed. We are the Kudzu Ape
blog: http://blog.mounttotumas.com/
website: http://www.mounttotumas.com