I skipped to the end first and then realized I didn't need to read the rest.
"“We are heading for a crisis-driven choice,” he says. “We either allow collapse to overtake us or develop a new sustainable economic model. We will choose the latter. We may be slow, but we’re not stupid."
I find it hard to believe that the world is "full" when a) we produce more than enough food for the population and b) even though I live in the most densly populated state in the US I (out of shape nerd) can walk to untouched wilderness from my house just by picking a compass point at random.
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It's a logistics and self sufficiency problem. We produce a lot of food but the centers of production are very much concentrated. To solve the problem we need to first solve the logistic problem of getting food to people right now and then develop ways for them to produce their own so they don't need to rely on expensive imports.
Can't get much further North than I am right now.
Out the window behind me is miles of park land. It I walked through the wall in front of me I would reach Patriot's Path in two or three minutes and be able to follow it along a burbling brook. Two days ago I was driving to a friend's house and passed three old barns and one meadow with horses grazing in it. None of this involves leaving the county.
Even North Jersey has sub-suburbs.
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Graffiti outside Latin class.
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Last edited by Symmetric Chaos on Jun 10th, 2011 at 10:31 PM
Arable land is decreasing as the worlds aquafiers are drying up. People producing all the food they need locally will be very problamatic in the future.
And the rising cost and decreasing production of fossil fuels will make transporting it far more expensive in the future. We are now on the verge of a global food price explosion. Wait to see what happens then.
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Alaska, and a few western states, have what can still be called truely wild places. Even the Great Smokey Mountains, The Adirondacks, The appalachian trail, etc, don't really qualify.
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Lets see...Tokyo has a population density of 2 700 people/square kilometer, there are 7 000 000 000 people on this world, so we need about 2 500 000 sq kilometers for the whole population The United States has about 10 000 000 sq kilometers of land. So we can fit the whole population 3 times over in there.
I don't know ... I don't buy the "the earth is full" crap ... like Sym said, we are facing logistical issues ... but the earth is not full
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Okay, untouched wasn't exactly the right word. For purposes of deciding if the planet is full what matters is if we are using that land for agriculture or housing, we're not. My home state has an average population density of over 1000 people per square mile yet most of them can reach huge tracts of open space by driving for about an hour.
In the US, at least, we don't use most of our land even in areas that are highly developed (I have heard that Europe is much different in this regard, supposedly no square mile of Britain has not been reshaped by humans). That's probably a good thing, I like walking along Patriots Path, but it also means we have a lot of space to expand into if we get desperate.
Calling the planet "full" is nice and dramatic but it mischaracterises things in a very blatant way that simply invites mockey. Anyone who has ever left a city knows that we have lots of space to use. I've been in part of the Great Plains where I could see for dozens of miles in every direction without even another car to be seen, to places where the road literally goes off into the distance too far to be seen any longer even though the sign next to me says for kids to wait for the school bus, to ranches where the first step in getting there was to drive into the middle of nowhere and the second step was to head further from civilization.
So we have land, though we might not want to use it.
Experts say we have enough food, though we don't get it to starving people, and our skill at growing it is improving.
As far as humans go, how can we say the world is full?
In the article you linked to they don't even really show things that could be called fullness. They point out that China has poisoned its environment, but that's not a matter of too many people, that's a matter of dumping toxic waste all over the place. If you knowingly drink poison and become ill as a result no one should say it's because your body is full. That's nonsense.
The world is sick and much of what we're doing right now makes it worse. Tell people that. It's true.
This reminds me of Star Wars nerds discussing the problem with Coruscant, one being that the whole planet should melt from heat pollution of having nothing but cities.
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Graffiti outside Latin class.
Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
A juvenal prank.
If we don't live in harmony with the rest of the world, if we over pollute and overuse it's resources, then I would say we are a detritmint to and definitly seperate from other living things here.
The cliche is certainly true..."We are living on this world like we have another one to go to".
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“We are heading for a crisis-driven choice,” he says. “We either allow collapse to overtake us or develop a new sustainable economic model. We will choose the latter. We may be slow, but we’re not stupid.”
I'm not so sure about that. The Powers-That-Be are a greedy, possessive lot, this engendering its own short-sighted stupidity. I see the Haves and Have-Mores letting the lives of the Have-Nots -- the vast bulk of humanity -- deteriorate to where it starts to impact on everyone. Then the Powers-That-Be will start working on that "new sustainable economic model."
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Jun 10th, 2011 09:44 PM
