Hi there, Some more notes for where things are going discussion wise:
On 22/01/15 11:56, Jim Birch wrote: > The impacts of continuing along the current path are clearly disastrous. I > just can't see it wiping out the human race. Yes it is disastrous, as we see. But the logic of the second part makes no sense to me. The disconnect: 90% of the large fish in the oceans are gone. This culture did that. The last remaining old-growth forests are being plundered this minute to serve the economy over the real world. This culture did that. There's dioxin in every mother's breast milk. Again, us. This culture eradicated top soil in the 1950s and ever since then, agriculture has been running on fossil fuel which is in drawdown. That's not redeemable. This culture's growth economy is literally killing the world and systematically poisoning it before our very eyes. For instance, 250 species went extinct today thanks to this culture and these activities. What makes you think we cannot kill ourselves too? What makes you think that we can kill a planet and live on it too? The second point I'd like to argue is: On 22/01/15 11:56, Jim Birch wrote: > Biology is all about exploitation. No it isn't. And here's why: > ... look under any rock or in any ecosystem and you see warfare, uneasy > truces and exploitation. There are many problems with this. The first is, if you look under any rock or in any ecosystem searching only for exploitation, then exploitation is all you'll want to see and will see. Surprised? The second is that it simply isn't true. There are many complex relationships in a biotic community. Most built on cooperation and mutual aid. It's what makes life possible. Do I even have to argue this? For example, you yourself are made up of some 70% water and bacteria and other organisms that don't share your DNA. You yourself are a process. Is that an "uneasy truce"? All of this is cooperating, working together to keep you alive, to make you you. But to go back to the central problem with this view: What about looking under a rock and seeing it for what it is---a living biotic community? Or, more likely, a living biotic community most likely in draw down, most likely fighting back for it's life---the life that this very culture is destroying? Life essentially wants to live after all---which is why there are many complex relationships in a biotic community. Look around for proof. Hippos and their cleaning fish friends taking care of each others health and wellbeing. Fungus that grows throughout a forest nurturing many of its plant "competitors" and being a "chemical messenger" for the community it lives in. Is that "warfare" or simply being nice to your neighbours because that's what helps keeps you alive in the long run (and evolution is a long run)? See? This all falls apart when one looks at the real world without the exploitative lens of this toxic culture. And this is precisely one of the first things we must all do to decolonise our hearts and minds of this nonsense---the nonsense that is killing everyone and everything. Or, let's try it again. A possibly better metaphor: You look under a rock for exploitation. You (this culture) take those beings from under their rock, away from their family, from their loved ones, away from their natrual habitat, and put them into captivity, just so you can study the way they behave, so you can ultimately prove your prejudice---that it's a warzone and it's all exploitative. You inject them with drugs to test for various things, to look for their "selfish genes" and then plop them back under the rock, which, human impact has altered or changed the habitat of significantly (think pesticides for example). Do you really think that you would perceive their behaviour of wanting to live, of fighting back in the face of what you'd done to them as being exploitative? Whom commodified whom? Whom is really exploiting whom? Or to make this more analogous, what if you threaten to kill them (or more analogous yet, even began killing them on mass)? What would their behaviour say about your behaviour? Anyway, there's so much more to this ecology 101 lesson that many other more qualified people will be able to do so many orders of magnitude better than what I'm trying to do here. The main point I'm trying to get at though is that this notion that biology is exploitation is one of the reasons why we can kill this place. As we see. For one thing, it's the epitome of the capitalist mindset---one which is by definition out of touch with physical reality. Again, as we see. And it should also then be way too clear by now that it's this world view of domination and control over the world that is one of the things that helps us rationalise our destruction of the living world. The second problem flows on from there: and that is that this entire underlying view is a human supremacist view, a view formed and perpetuated by this culture---a culture based on domination, exploitation and control, which of course means it sees everything in terms of domination and control and nothing else exists. Nothing could be further from the truth however, and again, it's the clever trick of this toxic culture to have us rationalise it's destructive behaviours in this way. Still need more? It's baked into the rhetoric: On 22/01/15 11:56, Jim Birch wrote: > Species that didn't maximally exploit their environment are > no longer with us. No. What about the 250 species that went extinct today? Did they go extinct because they didn't "maximally exploit their environment"? I'd say not, but more that we killed them as they were trying to survive while we are killing the very world we need to live because "our brains are so big" and "we're so superior." (sarcasm) > This is built into the DNA of us and everything else. No it isn't. Again, what about everyone else and other beings who cooperate? > We didn't develop big brains or cooperation or anything else to be nice This is the classic one. What about indigenous humans whose cultures are *BUILT* on cooperation (not least because they would die without it), and still exist on the planet to this day, despite the genocide and attempted assimilation by this death culture? Do we really need to talk about this? The second part is, our so-called "big brains" don't mean we're superior. We're not. > or > something we developed them to be even more successfully exploitative. Nope. And we're back to where we started: It's this culture of humans that are exploitative, not all humans. It's this culture that inculcates the exploitation and rationalises it, as we see. > ... It isn't culture that made us exploitative, I guess my main point is that I'm trying to argue that it is. Anyway, taking this all the way back to the beginning, "surviving climate change" is entirely predicated on how soon we stop this exploitative culture from killing the planet by any means necessary. Thanks, Jore. _______________________________________________ Link mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
