hello again,
ok, this is the last peep out of me on this quite OT thread. i will
gladly carry on the conversation privately with anybody who is
interested in doing so.
after a few days reflection, i can see how my original post was as
emotionally motivated as it was intellectually motivated, and so a few
things were not particularly well thought out.
what can i say, my entire worldview shifted drastically in a fairly
short amount of time, i was emotional, sorry.
something which some of you have pointed out is that i can probably put
my IT skills to good use in working towards a solution. this is probably
a very good idea which i may consider along with my permaculture
studies. some people seem to have concluded that i intended to save the
world single-handedly by giving up computers, that is clearly
nonsensical and is not what i meant to convey. i do think a culture
moving away from unnecessary and unsustainable technologies is a must
however.
some of you mentioned the idea that going backwards or regressing is
what i was advocating. someone even mentioned isolation in a commune
behind a plow. that is not what i am advocating, quite the opposite.
current agricultural practices are incredibly primitive. the so called
‘green revolution in agriculture’ in the mid 20th century essentially
just took an incredibly naive system (ecologically speaking) and poured
gallons and gallons of petroleum on top of it. something akin to trying
to improve on the recursive factorial algorithm by running it on faster
and faster machines. the principle problem with these practices is
precisely the plow and the notion that mono-cultural agriculture can be
sustainable. many civilizations have fallen due to this most basic of
naive assumptions. ours is up next in line.
i can recommend an excellent book on the history of these issues called
“dirt, the erosion of civilizations” by David Montgomery, a professor of
earth & space sciences at the univerity of washington.
you may also be interested in a BBC documentary that explores the food
crisis which petrocolapse is threatening great britain (and everybody
else) with. it goes into permaculture in the last 1/3 of the film.
http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=farm+for+the+future&emb=0&aq=f#
some people mentioned the dubious notion of ‘the singularity’. at this
point in time, in contrast to for example, the dire warnings of the
worlds climatologists which are science fact, the highly speculative
notion of ‘the singularity’ is science fiction verging on religion. i
think that that is something to keep squarely in mind. but even if it
were not fanciful wishful thinking, the energy required for that kind of
phase transition simply will not be available. just about everything
including growth economies are about to start shrinking. finally, the
question of whether it is even desirable needs to be asked, when we
already have 3.9 billion (see below) year old ‘technologies’ which quite
readily sustain life when not abused.
here is a video by somebody i believe has a firm grasp on the
relationship between populations, economies, technological progress,
etc. and their underlying reliance on energy and resources. he touches
on theories like “the singularity” at one point.
the biggest problem with the techno-fixer mentality that i have however
is that i do not believe our technologies to be all that fantastic. can
you get the brightest minds in engineering today and have them build a
system which can be sent to say, mars, and which can reproduce while
diversifying, and last billions of years while morphing to survive
various cataclysmic planetary wide shifts in climate, and impacts from
space etc… we can hardly keep the wheels on our bloody mars rovers from
falling off, and you want me to believe that there is a technological
singularity looming? the technological singularity happened several
times over the past 3.9 billion or so years, with the emergence of
autocatalytic networks, going into early bacteria, and then eukaryotes,
etc. we have all around us 3.9 billion year old technology honed by
massively parallel incremental design (evolution). it is many many
orders of magnitude more complex and resilient than our tinker toys, it
is our life support system, and we are destroying it’s capacity to
support human life. it will outlive us.
there were some comments which along the lines of, just let ‘evolution’
happen, don’t get in the way. it is difficult to argue with such a
position. when somebody says we must all die, while bowing down to the
alter of this so called ‘evolution’ which is essentially just a culture
of plunder gone rampant, and an incredible hubris vis a vis our
rudimentary technologies. i just consider that one of the many
sociopathologies of civilization, or perhaps a coping strategy of
particular individuals who are educated enough to understand the data
science is feeding us, but not knowing which way to turn for solutions,
intellectualize and abstract away the very real dread which most sane
human beings feel when felt with the prospect of annihilation. human
beings lived for hundreds of thousands of years before the culture of
plunder took over and now threatens all of our lives.
here is the video which affected me most, just because it shows just how
easy it can be working with nature using intelligent ecological design
to get what we want, e.g. health, a clean green biodiverse environment,
good fresh food, etc. instead of working against her as we have been for
about 10,000 years now:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7404455615181917912&ei=wnDnSZfSCaryqAOwg9HvBg&q=permaculture
so there it is, i’ll now shut up and let you get back to rubying.
_c
