Guardian UK: Is there any point in fighting to stave off industrial apocalypse?

[marmar]

Is there any point in fighting to stave off industrial apocalypse?
The collapse of civilisation will bring us a saner world, says Paul Kingsnorth. No, counters George Monbiot – we can't let billions perish



Dear George

On the desk in front of me is a set of graphs. The horizontal axis of each represents the years 1750 to 2000. The graphs show, variously, population levels, CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, exploitation of fisheries, destruction of tropical forests, paper consumption, number of motor vehicles, water use, the rate of species extinction and the totality of the human economy's gross domestic product.

What grips me about these graphs (and graphs don't usually grip me) is that though they all show very different things, they have an almost identical shape. A line begins on the left of the page, rising gradually as it moves to the right. Then, in the last inch or so – around 1950 – it veers steeply upwards, like a pilot banking after a cliff has suddenly appeared from what he thought was an empty bank of cloud.

The root cause of all these trends is the same: a rapacious human economy bringing the world swiftly to the brink of chaos. We know this; some of us even attempt to stop it happening. Yet all of these trends continue to get rapidly worse, and there is no sign of that changing soon. What these graphs make clear better than anything else is the cold reality: there is a serious crash on the way. ..........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2009/aug/17/environment-climate-change

[Wednesdays]

1. K&R

:kick:

[Apollo11]

2. K & R

:kick:

[glitch]

3. George Monbiot always worth reading. K & R

as is David Korten, excellent sig. He's on Keynotes this week on FSTV btw.

[Gregorian]

4. OK, this is the most important thing on the entire forum. But it won't be recognized as such.

The one thing that Gore showed us. The one thing that this series of videos showed us- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY

That one thing is the exponential function. We either ask why everything looks exponential, or it kills us.

But we have to educate before we can even understand enough to realize that our personal decisions are the driving factor.

But screw all of that. You are going to continue breeding and driving. So if we get that out of the way, I still have a partial solution. War. Stop the war machine, and you will stop a fairly big fraction of the immediate global warming and environmental pollution. Not to mention human misery. But that has a problem too. People who work in the military industry need jobs. So if you go around and around trying to figure out a solution, it ends up there is only one. It looks like there are two solutions. But one of them is over. We most likely are not going to all live off the land. So running around in cars, trying to make money so that we can buy things that someone else grows for us is going to not change easily. So the other option is to stop making new humans. But that's not going to happen either. I'll never understand why people feel the need to breed, but since that's the case, we're going to see the exponential curve get even more vertical. But none of this means a thing to most people, since they don't see the problem, and don't know what an exponential is. So why the hell do I bother posting?

[Blue_Tires]

5. bookmarked for later...

[Karenina]

6. +1