Folks -- Professor William Catton is Professor Emeritus in Sociology and Human Ecology at Washington State University. In 1982 (isn't it hard to believe that was 1/4 century ago!) Professor Catton wrote "Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change", which some people have said is among the most important books ever written. Anyone can download and read a significant excerpt from this book at a website owned by Minnesotans for Sustainability at:
http://www.mnforsustain.org/catton_excerpt_overshoot_1982.htm In this book, Professor Catton describes Homo sapiens as transitioning through a high energy lifestyle into Homo colossus, a detrivore living on the accumulated detritus of ancient planetary history, and destined to crash after blooming like a wine yeast in a vat full of grape detritus. He describes our "Age of Exhuberance", which is over. It is not a pretty picture, and should not be made to appear so. Here is an example of the ugliness of our predicament according to this document: "It was thus becoming apparent that nature must, in the not far distant future, institute bankruptcy proceedings against industrial civilization, and perhaps against the standing crop of human flesh, just as nature has done many times to other detritus-consuming species following their exhuberant expansion in response to the savings deposits their ecosystems had accumulated before they got the opportunity to begin the drawdown." In variious other writings, Professor Catton discussed the denial of humans to their self-inflicted predicament. Man as a detrivore in a bloom and crash scenario is a novel way to look at it. I think ecologists would find his discussion of "phantom carrying capacity" and other concepts of interest. Just yesterday I heard on the radio mention of the quandary the Chinese will have moving forward, holding 20% of the world's population with well under 10% of the world's arable land, and losing arable land relentlessly due to human-induced land degradation as well as global climate change. Sounds like a formula for a crash, even though their standard of living is miniscule (still) compared to ours. Maybe denial is the way to stay sane until the very end. Catton describes our predicament as unintentional and related to our normal desire for prosperity as follows: "No group of leaders conspired knowingly to turn us into detrivores. Using the ecological paradigm to think about human history, we can see instead that the end of exhuberance was the summary result of all our separate and innocent decisions to have a baby, to trade a horse for a tractor, to avoid illness by getting vaccinated, to move from a farm to a city, to live in a heated home, to buy a family automobile and not depend on public transit, to specialize, exchange and thereby prosper." _________________________________________________________________ Download Messenger. Join the im Initiative. Help make a difference today. http://im.live.com/messenger/im/home/?source=TAGHM_APR07
