Signs of a declining culture. They’ve reached the top popularity of search engines. If someone isn’t looking for a processed burger from an abused animal at 12am, they’re wondering why their period is late or when the deadline is before they can murder their child.
Globalization of overpopulated masses clumped together and huddled into the same factories livestock are put in with no interest in true companionship or emotion for one another. We are numbers, branded and sold.
Burgers have over took porn! These certainly are dark times.
So sensitive you forget to live. Death is a part of life, an aborted fetus is far better to be seen than an abused infant that has tasted the world and trusts the person who kills it or abuses it for decades. An animal must be processed in order to eat it. There are more mouths to feed than in the past. Nicieties need to be overlooked in order to feed all those unaborted mouths. Abort more infants and save the animals. or birth more animals to feed the unaborted… there are the choices because I gaurantee I have no plans to become a vegetarian and I think most folks feel the same way.
This isn’t about the symptoms of the perpetrator. There is no choosing one over the other if the problem is to be solved.
eh? Wouldn’t the solution be one of those choices…
Echo you overlook the fact that non life is the only solution to your problem that you see. So kill off or birth more. Or we could sterilize almost every human child born and allow only the best of the best to procreate, that should solve it for you. We could dehumanize the humans that way. Create a breeding breed of humans. Let the unworthy die off , how’s that? We could slow food production down too and starve off more in the interest of time that is.
We may only be numbers in your eyes but not in mine. We are just a species trying to find our way with out having directions.Our mind tends to become oblivious when it becomes overwhelmed with amounts of things. Too many humans means we have to shut down a portion of emotions and reserve it for those that surround us… We are not an endangered species. We are overpopulated and death is needed for the species to find its way and to survive.
Have you put thought into what causes the symptoms?
yep overpopulation, Too much, it overwhelms one’s ability to grasp , we may understand trillions but, it does not mean we have the ability to fathom it. If you want sensitivity for all others than all others must be made personal, and that cannot happen because there is not enough time in anyone’s life to get to know all others. we can just try to help when we can but, to truly wholeheartedly care removes your own life and ability to live. Death is a must if there is to be life. Help and care for those in your corner of the world first last and always. Encourage others to do the same in their corner. The more we care for those that surround us the more care there is in the world. If you take too big a bite you will choke. You can’t cure the disease by killing the body
You’re thinking on a globalized scale…
try smaller.
Maybe this technocracy thing isn’t working out after all- John Zerzan
It’s hard not to be sarcastic, truly. Those who see it right before them while the rest are caught up in the future. [twilight music]
Ever see a city from the top of a skyscraper?
No, I’d rather see nature from the top of a mountain.
As would I that is why I live in the country. I lived within huge cities all my life up till about 10 yrs ago. Perhaps this might put it into perspective. Ever see a large ant hill with thousands of large ants with in?
Yes, and I’d rather live tribally…if this is where we are getting to; in a small community. This is steadily becoming unrealistic. Before I could peacefully reside in such a state I would need assurance that it wouldn’t be destroyed and overrun by capitalists who need room to build a factory, but I can’t be sure of this, so I would live more a fairy tale than they in hopes that my lifestyle would last and live on.
It’s an improbable dream, but it has its merits, and followers.
Chances are we are nearing a collapse. Civilizations rise and fall, and when capitalism is replaced, so will many other prospects along with it.
So, in essence, tribalism will always live on. It’s an inevitable force of nature. I’m simply waiting on it to hit my doorstep.
Capitalism will always exist. Socialism and Communism look really good on paper until you apply humans. Ever see a Socialist leader or a communist leader live in a crappy one room apartment just like the regular people have to? Nope and you never will. The boss always gets the best.
If you want to curb greed then do so within your corner, convince others to do so within your corner for they will spread it outward. Its not that people do not care, echo, its that there is just not enough time to care for everything that should be cared for so they have to become numb. Tragedies will alwyas happen. Animals and humans will die and be born. this is a world of life and death. Live your life while you can share when you can and just be the best that you can be. that is more than many people are able to do, because there simply is not enough time and there is too many bodies.
Not everyone has that attitude.
Not everybody agrees with you as to when life begins. Get over it.
You are right, echo. You want me to be passionate and feel the way you feel. I can’t, I have been immersed too deep in life and death for too long to have such idealisms. As great as they are and as much as I could wish they one day succeed it won’t change in my lifetime. I can only live the best way I know how for the ones I love. The rest get only passing cares in the way of donations and some time given to charities that reach out to the abused and underpriviledged. I can’t embrace the world without harming my responsibilities. So I take a pragmatic view of life and death. I embrace both for both are a part of the same and both are apart of me. I can jest about death for I have no fear of it because. I have decided to live my life.
Tribalism simply isn’t feasible. Yes, sure, we’d all love to go back to a less populated world where we can all live in little villages and have plentiful food and resources. Unfortunately the only way to achieve this is:
The only way to reduce the human population to paradise levels is to kill of the majority of them. There’s numerous problems with this. First of all, how do you know that you will be one of those chosen to survive? Second, nobody will just lay down and die, the doomed tend to fight back. Thirdly, the only way to effect so massive an extermination in so short a time is:
Which would pretty thoroughly mangle the entire world, leaving no paradise for anyone who manages to crawl out of his vault unscathed.
And of course there’s the ethical question, is it really right to kill everyone else so that I can live my dream of tribalism?
youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY
The answer is no, of course it isn’t. Until you can find a means of population control or reduction that pleases everyone, we have to continue growing onwards and upwards until we smother ourselves.
Of course, there are ways to slow growth. Killing babies that the mother doesn’t want and will not care for is one way. Maybe that constitutes the first step towards having a small, tribal population again.
Please educate yourself, I am begging you. You’re too busy opening your mouth before you get your facts straight little man.
Premise Nine: Although there will clearly some day be far fewer humans than there are at present, there are many ways this reduction in population could occur (or be achieved, depending on the passivity or activity with which we choose to approach this transformation). Some of these ways would be characterized by extreme violence and privation: nuclear armageddon, for example, would reduce both population and consumption, yet do so horrifically; the same would be true for a continuation of overshoot, followed by crash. Other ways could be characterized by less violence. Given the current levels of violence by this culture against both humans and the natural world, however, it’s not possible to speak of reductions in population and consumption that do not involve violence and privation, not because the reductions themselves would necessarily involve violence, but because violence and privation have become the default. Yet some ways of reducing population and consumption, while still violent, would consist of decreasing the current levels of violence required, and caused by, the (often forced) movement of resources from the poor to the rich, and would of course be marked by a reduction in current violence against the natural world. Personally and collectively we may be able to both reduce the amount and soften the character of violence that occurs during this ongoing and perhaps longterm shift. Or we may not. But this much is certain: if we do not approach it actively—if we do not talk about our predicament and what we are going to do about it—the violence will almost undoubtedly be far more severe, the privation more extreme.- Derrick Jensen
Another way to talk about this is to contrast the language: overpopulation, zero population growth. How different would be our discourse if we spoke instead of overconsumption and zero consumption growth? This shift in discourse won’t happen, of course, because zero consumption growth would destroy the economy.
The United States constitutes less than five percent of the world’s population yet uses more than one-fourth of the world’s resources and produces one-fourth of the world’s pollution and waste. If you compare the average US citizen to the average citizen of India, you find that the American uses fifty times more steel, fifty-six times more energy, one hundred and seventy times more synthetic rubber, two hundred and fifty times more motor fuel, and three hundred times more plastic.[i] Yet our images of overpopulation generally consist not of those who do the most damage, the primary perpetrators (there couldn’t be too many (middle-class) Americans, could there?), but instead their primary (human) victims.
At least partially in response to the obvious arrogance and absurdity of those who want the poor to stop having babies but don’t mind the rich having SUVs (and nuclear weapons), there are those who claim—equally absurdly, and equally arrogantly—that all talk of carrying capacity is racist and classist. To even use the phrase carrying capacity in this crowd is to invite hisses and catcalls, as well as spat epithets of Neo-Malthusian. I suppose the argument is that because some of those who want to protect our exploitative way of living use carrying capacity as a means of social control against the poor—as an American Indian activist friend said to me, “The only problem I have with population control is that you and I both know who is going to do the controlling”—then the notion of carrying capacity itself must be racist and classist. This seems similar to me to suggesting that because Hitler claimed (falsely) that Germany was being attacked by Poland, and that therefore the Germans needed to attack, and that because this same argument has routinely been used (just as falsely) by the United States as well as other imperial powers, that anyone who claims self-defense is lying. (One could argue, of course, that because the constant importation of resources is necessary to the perpetuation of cities (and their political/historical successors: empires and nation/states), and because those who have fully internalized the values of these ever-expanding cities have come to identify their own survival with the perpetuation of the city/empire—instead of identifying with their survival as human animals within a community that includes both humans and a landbase—that all wars of empire are in some twisted sense wars of self-defense). These people seem to forget that the misuse of an argument does not invalidate the argument itself.
Worse, this argument, that the very concept of carrying capacity is a fabrication designed for social control, as opposed to a simple statement of limits, serves those in power as effectively as does ignoring or de-emphasizing resource consumption when speaking of overshooting carrying capacity, because it goes along with the refusal to acknowledge physical limits (and limits to exploitation) that characterize our culture. What would it take, I’ve heard peace and social justice activists ask, to bring the poor of the world to the fiscal standard of living of the rich? Well, another thirty planets, for one thing. It’s a dangerous—and stupid—question. Within our culture wealth is measured by one’s ability to consume and destroy. This means that attempts to industrialize the poor will further harm the planet. Because industrial production requires the exploitation of resources, the wealth of one group is always based on the impoverishment of another’s landbase, meaning that on a finite planet, the creation of one person’s (fiscal) wealth always comes at the cost of many other’s poverty. Those are why the question is stupid. It’s dangerous because it serves as propaganda to keep both activists and the poor playing a game that doesn’t serve them well, and which they can never win (although from the perspective of the activists, this may not be a bad thing: not only do they get job security, but they get to pretend they’re doing something meaningful while not threatening their own identity—or privelige—as civilized), instead of quitting this game and working to take down the system.
For at least the past ten years, there has been a lot of talk, primarily among those whose alleged concern for sustainability is a cover for exploitation but also among those who should know better, of something called sustainable development. In this phrase, development is essentially a synonym for industrialization, for destruction, as in the development of natural resources. Under this rubric, sustainable development is an obvious oxymoron. Industrialized people consume more resources, and cause more damage, than nonindustrialized people. The “development” of the industrialized nations has been and continues to be unsustainable for the industrialized nations and for the world at large, and the further “development” of the world will only make things worse.
Sometimes activists complain—sometimes I complain—that the United States spends boatloads of money on weapons, but gives comparatively little to the poor. I’ve grown to understand, however, that the best thing Americans could do for the poor is not to hand them crumbs anyway, nor to give (or worse, loan) their governments money for dams, factories, roads, and (of course) weapons, but instead to stop stealing their resources. I recently asked Anuradha Mittal, co-director of Food First, if she thought the poor of her native India would be better off if the United States economy disappeared tomorrow. She laughed and said, “Of course. All the poor would be.” She told me that former granaries in India now export dog food and tulips to Europe.
There’s a third way to look at population, which is, I think, as useless and harmful as the others. Even when people do accept the existence of carrying capacity and aren’t trying to use their talk of overshoot to maintain our current stranglehold over the lives of the poor—and to extend this stranglehold into the most intimate aspects and decisions (sexuality and childrearing) of their lives—they more often than not talk of population in terms of mathematics, in terms of exponential increase, in terms of some “natural rate of population growth.” It’s very simple: turn on your computer, plug the appropriate numbers into your handy-dandy formula—X number of people on Y amount of land containing Z amount of resources, where W represents the industrial educational level of women—and watch the little black and brown dots representing people fill your screen. But this formulation carries with it many dangerous premises, including the essential premise of mathematics itself: those to be studied and described are not individuals who make choices, but instead are objects who—or rather which—act with no great measure of volition. It presumes people do not make rational short-, mid- and long-term family-planning decisions based on their circumstances, experiences, and the social values into which they’ve been acculturated, nor do they give any thought to the personal, social, or environmental consequences of their decisions. Heck, it presumes people—especially poor, brown, uneducated people—breed with no thought whatsoever: where does thought, or choice, fit into these or any equations? It presumes they breed like rabbits. But that’s nonsense. I’m not even sure rabbits breed like rabbits.
Sure, we can make probabilistic predictions of what certain percentages of people (or rabbits) will do under certain social and ecological conditions, but to talk of any “natural rate of population growth” without talking about the culture that causes—acculturates, inculcates, coerces, rewards—people to not only ignore environmental limits but to perceive, accurately, that their larger social fabric would collapse without incessant growth is to naturalize—make normal, make transparent, make seem as inevitable as gravity—something that is indeed not natural but cultural.
Non-linear—cyclical—cultures, those not predicated on growth but on dynamic equilibrium, maintain stable populations. Having reached the limits of what their landbase willingly supports, indeed—and this is well-nigh inconceivable to those of us raised in a culture where we are taught to perceive all life as horrific competition and humans as the bloody victors—having reached a population level that best serves the needs not only of their human community but of their nonhuman neighbors, they, believe it or not, reduce the number of children. They do this by breastfeeding their existing children for many years, by abstinence, by taboos, by the use of herbal contraceptives and abortions. Prior to conquest, American Indian women, for example, used more than two hundred plants, roots, and other medicines as means of birth control, making the decisions themselves as to whether to use them.[ii] When all else fails, some cultures, and I’m not promoting this, practice infanticide. This infanticide is often not gender-based.
Beneath these techniques are the real point, which is an intimate and mutually-beneficial relationship with their landbase.
“What nonsense!” I can hear you say, “Humans exploit their surroundings! Human needs are in opposition to the natural world, otherwise why would politicans say we need to balance the economy versus the environment? Balance implies opposition. Whether it’s a God-given right or an evolutionarily-ordained mandate, humans chop down trees, deprive all others of their habitat. It’s what we do.” But to believe this is to mistake civilization for humanity, an unforgivable and fatal, if flattering, error.
One of the central myths of our culture concerns the desirability of growth, a parasitic expansion to fill and consume our host. This was manifest from the beginning, as we were told in Genesis, “And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the Earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the Earth.”[iii] Of course we see the same absurd mythology of growth and exploitation today. Just last night I read, in language less theological yet expressing the same damn thing, a sentence by Joseph Chilton Pearce, an author well-respected for his attempts to change this culture’s destructive path: “The amount [of gray matter] we have is just what we need for certain goals nature has in mind, such as our dominion over the earth.”[iv] From its opening to its endgame, civilization has been nothing if not consistently narcissistic, domineering, and exploitative. And it is consistent in its attempts to make these attributes seem natural, to make them seem as though nature itself is to blame for our exploitation of it (“She was asking for it,” we can say with clean conscience as we pull up our pants and leave the darkened alley).
We can see the myth of growth at work in the Catholic church’s continued hostility toward birth control, attempting to get us to believe, as the ironic bumper sticker so eloquently puts it, that “every ejaculation deserves a name.” We can see it in the concern over falling birthrates in industrialized nations such as Greece and Russia. And we can see it in the commonplace acceptance of the very real fact that without constant economic expansion capitalism will collapse almost immediately.
This mythology is grounded in reality—cultural reality, that is—because from the beginning the very existence of cities has required the importation of resources from ever-expanding regions of increasingly-exploited countryside. It has required growth.
Well, that’s going to stop someday. At some point, probably in the not-too-distant future, there will be far fewer people on this planet. There will be far fewer than the planet could have supported—and did support—prior to us overshooting carrying capacity, because the great stocks of wild foods are gone (or poisoned), the top soil lost in the wind.
My saying this doesn’t mean I hate people. Far from it. A few weeks ago I received an email in response to my statement that the only sustainable level of technology is the stone age. The person said, “I don’t think the stone-age will support anything near the current world population. [Of course I agree.] So to return to this level implies either killing a lot of people or not having many children and waiting for the population to diminish. Or do we allow war or other pestilence to do the job? Is this what you are proposing?”
I responded that what I’m proposing, startlingly enough, is that we look honestly at our situation. And our situation is that we have overshot carrying capacity. The question becomes: What are we going to do about it?
-Derrick Jensen