What you just wrote Bozh was a very interesting way of putting it and the it from some of the data I have been looking at the Oceans the next few years the sybarites will surely think.

What do you put forth as wisdom?

What teachings are used to put forth this wisdom?

Thank you.

Max Shields, do trust you are self sufficient with food stuffs. One day the orators will disappear. Survival will be at the end of the sharpest stick.

Prepare.

RH2, maybe the masses need to be irritated!

My father said: “You do not know what people will truly do until they go hungry”.

Peace.

I agree with your assessment, “nature is non-negotiable and so survival of the species will depend on the choices we make, NOW.” At the same time you have correctly identified the obstacle, “fascism is in play”. Let us hope that the will of the human species to survive will overcome fascism. Thank you for your thoughtful contribution !

The problem is size. It seems we (collectively speaking) skirt the issue as we dissect capitalism. But whether it is capitalism or socialism, it seems to come down to size, both in terms of population and land mass use.

This is not an indictment of the human species and who shall survive or not. It is a predicament which is non-negotiable. Human survival, it seems, will come when we realize our limits and recess to a more sustainable living pattern.

Big has been the mantra. Our economics of hypergrowth and biggness are clearly unsustainable and exacerbate any attempt at solving our problems. Our energy needs are such that no alternative will match the “winning lottery ticket” discovered in the mid-19th century – fossile. That fuel built all of this stuff we call civilization, the infrastructure the massive skyscrappers, the auto, buildings, heat/coolants, ipods, tvs, the commodity list is truly endless including our food, the most fundamental of energy sources. It is all fossile based. It is finite and ending. It is as James Howard Kunstler aptly and poignantly described in a book of the same title: The Long Emergency.

In that context we can drop little Obama and his energy schemes. They will go un-noticed except in flowery speeches. They are complelely inadequate; as are all his policies. And war as the main tool for dealing with the world continues to destroy lives and what remains to a future.

The solution is simple, the implementation is complex. It means a complete transition and recession from an economics of growth, a decentralization of nation-states. The chopping up of the meg-states like the US, China, India and Russia (although the latter seems headed in that direction).

For the US it means re-constituting the land use to regional states with stronger local democratic power; and a central govenment that is minimal, serving the regions. De-industrialization, and particularly, demilitarization of the world’s economies as we know it. It means eliminating empire as an organizing principle. This includes corporations as we know them. Person-hood and human/civil rights belong only to people NOT corporate entities. Land must be a common wealth, not privatized, and monopolies of all kinds must be eliminated and brought into the public domain to ensure such preditory creatures are driven out of existence and the services and goods needed are available to all (health care, basic needs, education, fresh water, air, etc.)

Sustainability must be enforced. A barrel of oil, must be replaced by an equivilent, renewable energy source (wind/solar). This will curtail hypergrowth and the consumer/commodity living styles.

It’s a start. There are movements in this direction. It will probably take a collapse for those movements to actually transform the existing model of empire and tyranny. Fascism is in play, and could win out for a while. But nature is non-negotiable and so survival of the species will depend on the choices we make, NOW.

Thank you for the explanation. I did not intend to preach. I only allowed myself to call a spade a spade. I do understand your dilemma. I really wish I could help. Your dilemma is one of those which growingly make me hopeless on this planet. Everyone is involved in the chaos, but few have the final say in it. Please forgive me, if I have irritated you.

The vast lands were populated by individuals whom had a dream of destiny. Little did they know they were being set up for a fall by the power elite. This elite did not have the balls nor intestinal fortitude to tame the land. Once done so, in they came to rob the land and make slaves of the once proud landowners ang their kin.

Please, those of you, hold the historical rape scenario. Trying to make a point here of the reason for what has transpired.

This is the reason that one day even the “corporate family farm” will disappear. Thank Monsanto, Cargil, and Dupont among others.

We will survive as we know how to grow. Learned that down on the farm, not in the classroom. Other than total annihilation, may I suggest purchasing a farm.

Where is the problem? You have answered the question yourself. This is exactly the dilemma, you must be the corporate equivalent to survive. I think the whole world is on the horns of a dilemma. Preventing you from producing your own seed is the result of indifferent capitalism.

The notion of reducing the world population to 2 billion is not thoroughly absurd. But who should belong to these happy 2 billion survivors? Others should vanish, but not me? The dinosaurs vanished altogether and there seems to be no reason, why human beings would be an exception. Charles Darwin’s survival of the fittest is thus neutralized. There had been no “fittest” among dinosaurs. Either we vanish altogether, or we should mend our behavior to postpone our disappearance. Have you considered mobilizing your colleagues to protest for an agricultural reform? Diagnosing the disease alone is not a cure, is it?

I will not be able to buy seed which to grow seed as seed purchased has been modified not to produce ‘producing seed’. Therefore no one can feed their family for they have no seed.

I grew up in a time which the family farm was in its’ waning years. Most in the urban jungle will ‘never’ know this, let alone the community that came with this.

We grew, we harvested, and we lived healthy, interactive lives!

Now we must be the “corporate equivalent” to survive. We still hold the ‘family farm’ most high.

We have been forced to comply.

You are being forced to comply.

Where is the problem?

There is more than a little truth to your note above about overpopulation. Scale, both in terms of population and in terms of governance, culture, and economics plays perhaps a much more significant role in our human problems than all of the isms, ideologies, religions, and economic dogmas combined.

Much is easily workable and tolerable (if not comfortable) with many human devised systems (political, economic and cultural) when they are sized to meet human-scalability.

There is, while challenging to put a fixed number on it, an optimal population size, both in terms of geographical and general as it sprawls. Humans are high consumers of energy, demand more per capita than any other species (and that includes the poorest and most downtrodden among us). This has been termed carrying capacity. Rather than looking within the world we create to understand our impact on the planet and the human systems we struggle with that produces war and destruction, it is much more fruitful to understand the collectivization of humans and how we transform the natural landscape and that that tendency to erode and destroy is magnified expotentially by our sheer numbers, we can begin to understand that human population is unsustainable and the systems we create, regardless their perfection or lack thereof become worthless.

The same is true of areas we occupy. As we spread across the well over a million square miles in North America, governance is impossible. What we have is a highly multicultural society which is appeased through mass media. Political parties, owned by corporations, must play the democracy gave, by manufacturing consent to homogenize what is total heterogenious. A blanket of myth is layered through the MSM machinery to pretend that there is a place called the United States of America. No such place exists. It is pure fiction that is united only in symbolic ways, perhaps the need to wave the American flag comes from this utter lack of cohesion. The flag is a fake way of saying somehow there is a there there.

So, I’m in agreement. Our problems cannot really be dealt with soundly because there are too many of us and the nation-states larger than say, Denmark are simply unmanageable.

As much as capitalism seems the “enemy”, there really isn’t a workable system for this massive 7 billion and growing population.

Population will probably need to recede to about 2 billion or so. But, the human species, seems destined to repeat itself and will probably, after a fashion overpopulate. It will be nature that keeps pushing back population, not the dawning of a new sustainable age.

But, overpopulation is worse.

Nobody said that population dynamics were anything less than brutal. That is the way it is. But, and this is an important but, if we really want all live humans to share resources, then we have one choice (a zero sum game, really) and that is to allow the natural system to kill off a lot of people. We tinkered with the system … now we pay the piper.

Granted, the bureaucrats are wrong in their behaviors … still the ultimate reality is that the earth has a limited carrying capacity. What that means is that we can not keep everyone alive and expect sustainability. So, the problem for you is:

Decide which you want.

RG the LG