I think this is pretty well exemplified by the story of Fritz Haber—the German chemist essentially developed chemical warfare during World War I, and later was awarded the Nobel Prize for extracting nitrogen from the air for fertilizer. According to wiki, half the world’s food base is dependent on his process. And yet, that now means over-saturation of nitrogen has created environmental damage to other nutrients in the soil essentially creating dead soil. And run-off from agriculture pollutes the oceans increasing algae growth and killing fish and other plant life. The pursuit of more has its consequences.
But I’m not sure what lesson to learn. Should we not provide food to half the population, ala Thanos from the last Avengers movie? Resource scarcity, rather than discouraging reproduction, increases to beat the odds of survival. The selfish gene doesn’t care about individuals, but the survival of the gene as a whole. For instance obesity isn’t always a sign of excess—there is a hypothesis that fattening is a physiologically regulated response to threatened food supply. ( https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0031938416301615) I don’t think we choose to live in greed so much as it is an intrinsic part of being alive. We do need to learn to suppress our instincts though, but I think that needs to come from us doing more about it rather than less. Improving agricultural practices, reigning in excesses of rent-seeking, food regulation and environmental responsibility at a scale larger than an individual… among a tonne of other things we’re working on as a collective race are positive steps are resulting in great outcomes. I don’t think the problem is you ordering food at 3am… it’s that the food might kill you. People needing more isn’t the problem, producing it to the detriment of people is the problem. We need factories; we just also need the factories to be better. On Tue, Jun 19, 2018 at 8:00 AM Srini RamaKrishnan <[email protected]> wrote: > We build a way of life based on greed and fear, the twin engines of > capitalism, and then innocently wonder why things keep blowing up. > > The frantic search for a hair of the dog cure to climate change is only > further proof of the depth of the addiction. It may even work for a brief > while. > > No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created > it. ~~ Albert Einstein > > > The immediate problem of climate change isn't rising sea levels - it's mass > unrest, political upheaval and the inevitable dawn of authoritarian regimes > and bloody revolutions. It's absolutely certain that Humanity will go mad > before it perishes. > > > If you don't think it's possible, look around, chances are it's already at > your doorstep, but called something else. The recent Sterlite protests in > Tamil nadu that killed a dozen (?) people is due to climate change, and > more importantly consumerism driven pollution. The bad actor isn't the > polluting factory, it's the consumer demand driven by anxiety inducing > advertising, and a hollow way of life that is sustained by materialism. You > can have a a good life or cheap goods, pick one > > > It's trivial to solve climate change with current technology and know how - > I mean really - just give up this way of life. Not just plastic bags, but > give up the whole thing - not overnight, but in a planned fashion it can > be executed with no new tech required. Take a page out of the Amish > playbook, and climate change can be solved. > > > It's unrealistic of course, because the people won't allow it, and more > importantly the corporations and governments won't allow it either.honest > truth - We who dare to change the world can't dare to change the human. > > > We don't have to wait for the eventual takeover by AI or aliens, it's > already here. The fiscalized world, the idea that constant growth is good > is the ideology of the cancer cell. > > > What's good for the economy isn't good for the human, as evidenced by the > obesity epidemic, the depression and stress epidemic, and many other > euphemistically named life style diseases. > > > Is it progress of I can order pizza at 3am on my smart phone, get my > resulting clogged artery replaced with a smart stent and work six days a > week to pay for it? > > > We need to zoom out and look at all the things going wrong because we > choose to live in greed (I'd have said "choose to live in sin", and I'd be > accurate, since greed is one of the seven cardinal sins, but that would be > too biblical, but then again what we are facing is an Armageddon, so... ) > -- Cheerio, Ashim D’Silva Design & build www.therandomlines.com instagram.com/randomlies
