look what the U.S. is doing now

[suckseed]

http://www.startribune.com/stories/587/5642933.html

I was just reading Carl Sagan's Cosmos. In the chapter 'Who Speaks for Earth?', he talked about the future of the Earth's inhabitants, the necessity for population growth to be controlled if we are to survive, and what a shame it is that so many people focus on their perceptions of God and the afterlife while ignoring what science is telling us. Yesterday there were several stories in the news about how the ice sheets in the Arctic are melting even faster than they have been this year
In my opinion, too many people focus on themselves and how to surround themselves with more and more in the way of material possessions, and spend little or no time thinking about ways to keep what few unspoiled areas of the world are left. It's easy to keep the larger issues out of our minds when we live in cities and spend all our time either working or recreating. I'd like to encourage folks here to at least think about contacting their state representatives about this matter. I remember watching a local tv reporter interviewing an animal rights activist and asking him,"What is you people's ultimate agenda?" I thought to myself, "Well, what's yours?" Do we really need more humans? Traffic's getting worse every year, and few resources are not being depleted faster than they're being used. Google up some Amazon rainforest news. Costa Rica has gone from being almost entirely forested to having only a thin cresent of old growth forest in the last 60 years.
I also think that we humans waste an incredible amount of energy and resources competing and warring with other nations whose people look or think differently than us, and often justify this by claiming the other folks are less human than we, using their religious beliefs as proof more often than not. What tragic irony it will be if there's either no God at all, or that we've completely distorted his/her/its desire to see us continue to evolve and progress to the time when we can engineer a way to seek out other suitable planets (Sagan estimates there are over 200,000 of them in our galaxy alone), and we end up blowing ourselves up in a nuclear war, or wither and die because we couldn't get past our constant need to consume, until human civilizations become unsustainable.

[popperluv]

Its going to get alot worse before it get any better.

[Ecstatic]

Sad to say, I think you're right.

[LG]

'When the well's dry, we know the worth of water', Ben Franklin said, all those years ago. Humanity's need to consume all that is useful and produce waste can cost us in the not too distant future. Global climate change is already a reality, though George Bush has paid lip service to the Kyoto protocol, refusing to acknowledge facts discovered by men better and smarter than himself.

America leads the world in consumption of resources and in the production of waste, but all this has come at a cost- America's 200 years of growth have been achieved through genocide, slavery and oppression, not just through hard work and resourcefulness. Other nations have not been blameless either.

We need to curb population growth but also consumption and waste and pollutant production. We already have much of the technology.

Two interesting and quasi-scientific ideas I once read about follow:

The Gaia hypothesis theorises that the earth operates as a more or less closed system, capable of achieving a homeostatic balance just like a living organism. The earth's system can take a certain carrying capacity before bending, but when the balance is tip, mechanism are put in place to counter this imbalance, bringing about a new balance, which may be different from the previous one.

The problem for us humans is that although we cannot destroy the earth, nor its systems, we can upset the balance so far that the homeostatic mechanisms that are thrown into place by the earth's organism produce a new equilibrium that may or may not include us. As a result, even though we cannot bring about an end to the world, we can unfortunately bring about an end to our existence, making humans a footprint in history, less important in terms of geological time than the dinosaurs.

The second theory I have heard of is that Malthus was only half right. In essence Malthus predicted that consumption would outsrip production , that humans exponential population growth would outstrip our capacity to produce food and other goods.

Maybe not, says scientists. Some suggest that technology can usually find a way to increase production (and so far usually has) but that the capacity of the earth's system to absorb impacts cannot grow exponentially. This means that we will not neccessarily run out of energy, but we will affect the earth so badly with the pollution it produces that it cannot recover. This will lead to a serious imbalance- refer to the first theory above.

Good thing I did my A levels.


Noter: For Americans amongst you who don't know what I mean by A Level in this case, is or find it amusing, it doesn't mean anal (well not in this sentence, but see below). It means advanced and it's a kind of exam for which you have to study for up to two years. As is the O Level.

Now if Allanah were interested in furthering my O/A Level education of a different kind, I'm always willing to broaden my knowledge.