sartesian wrote: >I believe it is important, essential really, that "we" not be stampeded into >supporting, reproducing, endorsing scarcity theorizing for several reasons, >first of which is that there is little data to support the grand theories of >peak and depletion. Second of which is that scarcity is an ideology deployed >to "curb" the "unsupportable," as Hubbert would have called it, demands of >an "unsustainable" population, i.e human welfare.
There is little data to support any grand theories one way or the other. Either that or there is data that can be marshalled to support whatever one wishes to believe. I say this as an expert witness whose job it is to marshall data for arbitrations. The other side is always able to marshall its data that emphatically and unequivocally backs its case. Sometimes you have to crawl deep inside the so-called data to know whether it does or not. In the case of resource depletion, only data after the fact might be decisive but even that could be pooh-poohed as failing to take into account the as-yet unknown. Scarcity is hardly the problem. The problem is learning to live responsibly with abundance. We haven't learned to do that yet and unless we do the population is unsupportable because most of it is already not being supported while a tiny fraction of it is being gorged. Scarcity or no scarcity, non-renewable resources *are* finite. That's why they're called non-renewable. Or do you consider Bill Rees and Mathis Wackernagel hopelessly Malthusian, too. Not being myself versed in the collected works of M. King Hubbert, it's conceivable that your image of him as a raving Malthusian has some basis in something he wrote. I will admit I've encountered followers of Hubbert who give off an unmistakable whiff of Malthusianism. There is also, however a humanistic side to Hubbert that is incompatible with strict Malthusianism. So while not a stampeding endorser of Hubbert, I find some of what he has to say intriguing and useful. Some, I find awkward and nerdish. You seem to have an axe to grind against either the man or his epigones. I suppose working backwards from Kim Sung Il, I might disown Marx. You put "curb," "unsupportable" and "unsustainable" in quotation marks and couple them with the phrase "as Hubbert would have called it." Are you then "paraphrasing" something you project Hubbert "would have" said but never actually said? Or are you constructing a phrase out of separate words that Hubbert actually used? One needs to know what deep design lies behind such a peculiar and radically ungrammatical construction. Tom Walker 604 255 4812
