George


George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

Forget about your diplomatic and political leaders
You already know where to look

And since when did leaders ever care about people

Perhaps we not discussing real issues, but rather tip-toeing around them.

From a historical perspective, it appears that humankind is the only organism on Earth that produces food, amasses more food than is needed for survival and made food into a commodity. Farmers have not been primarily motivate by an altruistic desire to grow food because they have wanted to feed a growing population, nor have they been selling food to increase human population numbers. The more food farmers grew, the more wealth they accumulated. Our (agri-)culture has evidently devised a spectacularly successful economic system that continuously expands the food supply for human human beings worldwide. What I am trying to suggest is simply this: An economic system that requires ever increasing food production, supposedly to feed a rapidly growing human population, appears to be inadvertently and unexpectedly enlarging the size of the human population on Earth.

That is to say, the predominant culture and its global economy appears to produce many wonders as well as potentially deleterious impacts. Would you agree that if our culture chooses to keep growing the global economy as we are doing now, then we will likely keep getting what we are getting now... for better and worse?

For a long time, the leaders of the predominant culture have chosen to continuously expand production capabilities, ones that give rise to the rampant economic globalization we see today. Unfortunately, an ever expanding, leviathan-like global economy appears to give rise to something recognizably unsatisfactory because it could become unsustainable.

If you will, please consider how the relentless hoarding of wealth and the conspicuous  over-consumption of resources by millions of people leave billions of people in the family of humanity hungry.

For fortunate millions of people with riches to recklessly consume limited resources, while billions of less forunate people go without adequate food to eat, seems somehow not quite right.

Inequity is sad enough; grotesque inequity will one day be considered intolerable, I suppose.

If leaders of our predominant culture choose to modify the way the unbridled global economy continuously grows and the way it inequitably distributes resources, then perhaps they and we will find more reasonable, sensible, fair and, equally important, sustainable ways of performing these practices better.

Perhaps it is a mistake for me to do so; but, nevertheless, I am assuming most members of the Grist Mill community can agree that the unbridled expansion of the global economy, given its huge scale and rapid growth, will result in this manmade economic colossus eventually reaching a point in human history when it becomes patently unsustainable in a finite world with make-up and size of Earth.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php

http://policy.wikia.com/wiki/Obama_advisors

George

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

Malthus and the equivalent of today's AGW Fundamentalist could not imagine, nor would they have granted deniers of the day, the possibility of the technical improvements we now take for granted.

Automated application of seed, water, and fertilizer based upon GPS data and computer models?

Geometric population expansion Fundamentalists laughed at the Deniers who suggested that as per capita production reached certain levels (known to be impossible by Fundamentalists) that societies would hover just above "replacement level".

But back to the toddler's view that there are poor people because there are rich people...

I suggest that you look for a job as a sustainability analyst in a sub-Saharan African village. They consume very little. They also produce very little. It doesn't leave a lot left over to support hand-wringing as a profession.

The only threat to "sustainability" is desire to regress.

"...a 90 percent chance that the US has contributed .2 degrees F of temperature increase in the last 50 years..." The IPCC Consensus in perspective