[CrashList] Stan's Scenario

[Karl S North]

Stan et all,   Generally I find your scenario persuasive, and maybe partly because it reflects a third world perspective (Haiti, Cuba...). I do find two statements off the mark, and out of character with the rest of your piece, which seems well-informed and thought out.   Stan: We have overshot our energy base with our aggregate population.   Karl: It was not the teeming hordes of Asia that used up all the planetary oil within a century, it was your average Euro-American, with an ecological footprint said to be some 30 times bigger than that of the average individual on the Indian subcontinent. So far, then it is less aggregate population than the accelerating consumption of the planet's more affluent classes that has overshot the energy base and propelled us toward the crash.   Population is of course eventually a factor; even the average West African subsistence farming community, with a per capita income of $100 to spend on non-renewables, has, thanks in part to Western medicine and imperial agricultural extraction, a population that is now beyond the capacity of its resource base. But if we all had lived like West African farmers, the crash would be much farther away.    Was the necessity for accelerating consumption that is inherent in capitalism entirely responsible, or would the present state of the planet have happened anyway, only slower? All I can say is that in rural West Africa I experienced a rich culture that did not require constant material gratification, so at least another ethos for the human species seems possible.   Stan: Mechanized agriculture, without which there would now be mass starvation,   Karl: Think of what Cuba has done in only a decade to build a de-mechanized agriculture that avoids starvation. Here in the Northeast low input organic farm families have grown enough food on 2 acres to feed 100 people. Merchanization only seems necessary because of the way  the capitalist food economy has structured access to food and land, and structured food production on land. For example, 70% of grain production in this country usurps (and gradually destroys) the nation's best soils to feed animals, but we could produce all the meat and milk we need from permanent pasture on relatively poor upland soilswith virtually no machines at a fraction of the energy cost. Modern low input agroecosystems not only work, they are sustainable. And they can feed the world, at least at present population levels. And if a solution to the first and most fundamental failure of capitalism that Marx pointed out, the alienation of urban from rural society, could be found, then feeding the world with a de-mechanized agriculture would be a lot easier. the  Marx emphasized  was a   Karl North Northland Sheep Dairy "Mother Nature never farms without animals" - Albert Howard "Pueblo que canta no morira" - Cuban saying