oowolf wrote:And I plan on planting even more trees this spring, if possible. Life is miraculous, WHY do we expend so much energy destroying it?
Because all of feel entitled to evaluate the relative worth of different living things, and because energy resource depletion has put all of us into an Overcrowded Lifeboat scenario. Somebody has got to become shark food, but who should it be? That's obviously the question in most wars, but even if regarding a decision of whether to clearcut a stretch of forest, that really is still the question.
Among people, there are better and worse. Not only in terms of character, but also in terms of sheer "animal" quality. In the sense that strong is better than weak, or that smart is better than stupid, or that dexterous is better than clumsy, or that more stamina is better than less. And is beauty entirely in the eye of the beholder? No. It is, in part, an indication of health, and poor health isn't a matter of opinion.
But those inferior ones have been empowered to make, or to take part in making, decisions. They will mostly select themselves for survival, and if their betters must become shark food in order for them to live another week, then so be it, they will think.
And that's unfortunate, since inferior people, being stupid, habitually unalert, inclined to abdicate their social responsibilities to institutions, lazy, immoral, physically weak, clumsy, easily fatigued, loaded with heritable defects, and, to sum it all up, unable to survive for long without the bounty and the technical props of the oil era, will rather they lived another short while by sacrificing those of us who could have lived on Earth perpetually without the aforementioned bounty and technical props.
Most humans are mediocrities. When mediocrities make the choices, or determine them through market forces, the bulge in the human quality bell curve tends to travel worseward over time. Money transfers the measure of man from his genes to his bank accounts, and during the period of eugenic neglect, entropy degrades the biological character of democratic, economic men. The masses cannot govern society well, and they should never have been allowed to try. Money should never have become the measure of men, should never have become the primary goal for which men strived, should never have become the determiner of their influence. Mass democracy and capitalism were both evolutionary blunders, subject to the usual harsh and massive corrections when fossil energy declines and as nature's laws consequently reassert their suzerainty.
Jerry Abbott