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Deep thought of the day
Social scientists tell us that having more material goods doesn't make us happier, but that we buy them in order to retain parity with our social group.
It is very difficult to resist this urge to keep up with the Joneses. It is, however, possible to voluntarily adopt a different set of Joneses with a lower standard of material wealth, in order to create a social context in which its easier for us to restrain our material consumption.
David Roberts is staff writer for Grist. You can follow his Twitter feed at twitter.com/drgrist.
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Comments
View as Flat
wiscidea Posted 9:27 am
29 Jan 2008
"It is very difficult to resist this urge to keep up with the Joneses."
Assuming this is meant to solicit advice...
I immersed myself in a personal and informal study of Philosophical Buddhism last year and no longer care much about keeping up with the Joneses. I'm also much more relaxed, a bit less angry, and more compassionate.
Most of the books I read can be found on my "library" list at LibraryThing.com. Not all were helpful, but I'd happily page through them and recommend one or two if someone is specifically interested. I suggest sending an email rather than clog this thread.
I also found two podcasts very interesting... the one from audiodharma.org, especially Gil Fronsdal's talks, and the one from zencast.org. I suggest being highly selective, however. A large number of the topics, in my opinion, are not so interesting.
Sorry if anyone is offended. I'm not telling anyone what they must do. Just pointing out what helped me. I look forward to learning about what others have done to extract themselves from the rat race and discuss how we might work together to spread the word... no need to keep up with the Joneses.
Peace.
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LGT Posted 10:15 am
29 Jan 2008
Once the individual (group) becomes cognizant of the need for a new set of values (or perish), however, voluntary simplicity offers a viable alternative without having to kowtow to any religious doctrine.
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Craig Allen Posted 10:32 am
29 Jan 2008
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odograph Posted 10:40 am
29 Jan 2008
I frequently encounter greens (and peak oilers) who have somewhat aged Mercedes diesels. That has always struck me as a shrewd purchase.
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Pangolin Posted 7:33 pm
29 Jan 2008
Run into a long-term illness and you'll soon be disabused of the glamour of "voluntary" simplicity. To combat climate change we are going to have to commit to supporting every last person on the planet regardless of employment status. If I'm destitute and my next meal depends upon screwing the planet the planet goes.
Climate change solutions cannot only be physical. We have to behave as the earth is a garden and all it's residents members of our family.
Put the Carbon Back
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amazingdrx Posted 8:01 pm
29 Jan 2008
Joneses who break the cycle of money, power, sex, status. Is this necessary to instill in the next generation?
Many who have all but thrown off this typical status culture, cling to it for the sake of their offspring, trying to give them the tough, comptetitive success obsession.
Reminds me of a post from long ago on voluntary houselessness, a patriotic zen green lifestyle. Camping along with other nature lovers, saving money and energy and resources. Mortgage foreclosure? Well...
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog/_archives/2005/6/18/ ...
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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justlou Posted 10:30 pm
29 Jan 2008
Keep it up folks! Question what drives this system and why alternative visions of living on earth are forced to the "kooky" margins.
Ok, quit your "fuckin' A man" dude dreaming and get back to humping for bucks. You'll have time for all that leisure after you accumulate your load and retire inside a gated community somewhere in the sun ... with the Joneses.
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wiscidea Posted 12:51 am
30 Jan 2008
So... I've found some other Joneses to compete with. The group I belong to actually organizes tours of one another's ecological restoration projects. This gives a whole new meaning to "clean up the house... we're going to have guests"! How can I help others care for the environment, if I can't care for the flora and fauna around my home? I didn't realize, until now, that I'm competing for a different sort of status... one not so harmful to the biological world.
More examples of better Joneses???!!! We need more examples!!!
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Biodiversivist Posted 4:33 am
31 Jan 2008
Some people are hoping that eventually we will find the answer to happiness through all of this research.
Unfortunately, happiness is not an equilibrium state. It comes and it goes, and what makes us happy for a while will lose its effect with time, like any drug. A raise at work will give you a temporary spike, but not if you discover that everyone else got a bigger one.
Evolution has wired us to be this way, to keep our genes moving into the future, probably by motivating us to keep looking for that unspoiled green pasture or hunting ground and to move higher up our monkey troop hierarchy. That is why employees leave and start competing businesses, and why human beings have spread out over the planet like water on a table.
The highest probability for more periods of happiness between feelings of unhappiness is to have the freedom to pursue it. Our founding fathers had it right. Caged animals are unhappy because of that lack of freedom.
Being trapped in 9-5 work weeks in office cubicles, cars and buses takes away much of the time needed to pursue happiness. We in turn use the money we earn to buy status symbols that give us temporary endorphin dumps (we are happier for a while). The dumps are genetic, involuntary reactions that lead us through life in the name of evolution. The problem of course is that these material objects that are substituting for a sense of accomplishment or engagement consume resources and pollute the environment.
Not all groups value the same symbols of ability. Moving to a group that values things other than homes and car size allows you to meet your urges with small homes and cars. Change our status symbols. Doing that requires praise and envy for good ones and open critique of environmentally bad ones (supersized homes and cars).
Why doesn't an NBA player hang out on high school basketball courts? We all gravitate subconsciously toward social groups where competition gives us the most endorphin dumps. It's in our genes. That is how 4H and fairs came about. That is why everything has levels of competition.
Happiness, like beauty, is relative and fleeting.
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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wiscidea Posted 6:28 am
31 Jan 2008
THANKS DAVID!
And I forgot to salute picoallen for his/her remarks. It is clear that what I see happening around my home is also happening in Australia, which shows adopting a different set of Joneses can work in different areas.
THANKS PICOALLEN!
Here as another example of adopting a better set of Joneses AND harnessing competitive instinct. Some of the Grist visitors from Madison, WI, might even be participating in this. I myself am afraid to get involved... more on that in a moment.
The program is called EnAct and it works like this...
"An EnAct team is a group of five to ten households that meets informally and supports each other in taking actions to live more sustainable lifestyles."
"The EnAct team approach helps participants learn from each other to explore their environmental values and put them into practice."
"A Program Manager or Volunteer Facilitator leads the kick-off meeting and offers support to the team throughout the process."
"Team members take turns hosting the six topic meetings (solid waste, transportation, energy, water conservation, water quality, and food choices). At each meeting, team members discuss their progress on goals from the previous unit and choose actions to take for the next unit."
If you are interested in forming a similar organization, their home page is...
http://www.enactwi.org/index.html
A description of how the program works is at...
http://www.enactwi.org/how.htm
Did I mention that I'm afraid to get involved? Yep. Because there would be a lot of pressure to live in greater harmony with the environment. I think I'm doing okay, but I really do have to work harder. But having all those people scrutinizing my every action?! Damn poor excuse, isn't it? Perhaps admitting this is the first step toward participating.
Peace.
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Sean Casten Posted 7:40 am
31 Jan 2008
So - at the risk of being overly argumentative - I'd agree that catching up with the Joneses doesn't make people happy. But chasing the Joneses just might.
There was a study back in 1978 where psychologists measured people's overall happiness over a pretty broad population and over a long period of time. They then segmented their population (don't ask me how they had the foresight to do this) into two groups: those who had a limb amputated during the study period and those who won the lottery, on the basis that those two events would be pretty good surrogates for extremes of happiness and sorrow. As I recall, they found that immediately after the lottery/amputation event, people's emotions moved in predictable directions. But several months later, people equilibrated back to their initial state. In other words, really happy people are innately happy regardless of what life throws at them and really grumpy people are innately grumpy no matter how many lotteries they win. Which at the very least suggests that catching the Joneses doesn't create any happiness. (I tried googling the paper and couldn't find it, but did find this dude who has blogged a lot about it.)
But against that, I'd argue that the pursuit of any goal does make people happier. Some, like wiscidea may be happier when pursuing a zen-ish centeredness, independent of material things. Others get it gardening, and anticipating how great it's going to be once those cleomes bloom. Some get it from teaching their kids and anticipating what they'll become. And some get it from working hard, spending more and anticipating a life when they've caught the Joneses.
There's also some interesting work in Behavioral Economics on this same subject, where people were asked to estimate whether they were fairly paid first by telling them their job and their salary and separately by telling them their job, their salary and the average salary of the other people on their street. Perhaps not surprisingly, the latter group was much more likely to report that they weren't fairly compensated, even though the additional information didn't actually convey anything meaningful about whether they were fairly compensated.
My point isn't to argue for keeping up with the Joneses per se. But aren't we all blessed with the inalienable right to pursue happiness? (So long as that pursuit doesn't involve pedophilia or some other act that clearly impinges upon the public safety, of course.) I accept that it is awfully shallow to define success by the size of your garage relative to your neighbors. But does that make it bad?
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bookerly Posted 10:23 am
31 Jan 2008
It may be that happiness includes winning for Type A personalities. But there is a problem with the idea that we are all hardwired to need to win. We aren't.
Or a fair number of us have defective wiring (did I really just type that?? My bad.)
If you stepped away from America, you might conclude that it is a culture failure, not something biological (Americans REALLY need to learn more about the world).
In traveling China, I have met people who didn't like Beijing, because they felt like people in Beijing work too hard. They preferred less money and a more sociable life.
In Chengdu, one of the characteristics of the local culture is spending time in tea houses. Where people sit outdoors (often) sip tea, chat with their friends, enjoy strolling massages or ear cleanings, play cards, just relax. The city is full of outdoor teahouses which have lots of people in them.
There are other similar places.
A popular joke. A rich businessman is strolling on the beach, a rare break from his busy schedule, but still talking and sending messages on his cell phone. He sees a poor man lying in the sun on the beach relaxing. Angrily he says "Why aren't you working?" The poor man replies "I like lying on the beach relaxing." The rich man says "If you worked long hours on a fishing boat, you could save your money, then someday buy a boat, then buy another. When you got rich, you could come and relax on the beach!" The poor man replies "I already am."
patrick in Beijing
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amazingdrx Posted 11:39 am
31 Jan 2008
Greener healthier, higher quality of life, financial security (instead of huge cash flow and consumption), worthy measures of fitness. Evolve! Hehey.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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Colin Wright Posted 3:12 pm
31 Jan 2008
From memory, a happy life is well-rounded, easiest when grounded in a fairly egalitarian community, and involves a certain amount of contemplation (as recommended by most spiritual/philosophical thinkers). His views are not too different from Spinoza or the Buddha, but based on atheism and a libertarian form of socialism, where people voluntarily come together to work for the good of all. Most of all, a happy life for him was one filled with "zest". (I like to remind myself of this one!)
I have no doubt if he were still alive, he would be organizing committees of intellectuals to bring government action on global warming.
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spaceshaper Posted 9:35 pm
31 Jan 2008
There's also some interesting work in Behavioral Economics on this same subject, where people were asked to estimate whether they were fairly paid first by telling them their job and their salary and separately by telling them their job, their salary and the average salary of the other people on their street. Perhaps not surprisingly, the latter group was much more likely to report that they weren't fairly compensated, even though the additional information didn't actually convey anything meaningful about whether they were fairly compensated.
This brings up a very interesting point that doesn't get mentioned enough in the ongoing debate about personal vs. political action on carbon emissions. I've also read of studies where subjects acted against their own self-interest when they perceived others would do even better from their action. If we feel that we are sharing a burden equitably, we are happier individually. If we're carrying more than our share of the load, we're angry, recalcitrant and tend to act against our own best interest.
This is where government comes in. Pace the growing-the-green-economy folks, no change comes without cost, and equitable sharing of that cost will not happen without good government. And of course good government will not happen unless we insist on it.
The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.
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Sean Casten Posted 11:56 pm
31 Jan 2008
The specific research you're talking about is one that's been re-done a ton of times where one person is given 10 bucks and then told that they can share it however they wish with a second person. The second person cannot change the sharing %, but can reject, such that neither party gets anything. In a rational world, person 2 should accept anything, since even if they only get a nickel, that's a nickel they wouldn't otherwise have. But when they run the experiments, they pretty consistently find that anything short of a 70/30 split is consistently rejected - providing pretty compelling evidence that we are, first and foremost, social creatures. (e.g., the societal good created by some measure of egalitarianism is more important than the self-interest of a couple bucks, and we're willing to sacrifice to make sure our peers know that.)
And if you want to be really interesting, they recently re-did the experiment with monkeys (but instead of dollars used, cucumbers and grapes - AKA, "monkey currency"). Monkeys like cucumbers, but prefer grapes. And when the #2 monkey gets a cucumber, he will not only reject the whole offer, but often throw the cucumber back at monkey 1. Suggesting this is all rather hard-wired into our genes...
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amazingdrx Posted 12:10 am
01 Feb 2008
Humans try to think their way to happiness. Contemplation is great but it just isn't enough, without the regular exersize that our evolution as hunter/gatherers prescribes, no amount of rationalization will achieve the desired zest.
Which brings up the topic of hybrid plugin bikes. The obvious way to get the needed exersize and stop the copious GHG from transportation. Quality of life coincides with less consumption in this case. Less consumption of gasoline.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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Sean Casten Posted 12:13 am
01 Feb 2008
My basic point is that while there are certainly cultural differences, I think the things that make people happy do not change that much from one area to the other. Yes, people in very poor countries make do with less and seem plenty happy. But I will wager that the beach-loving guy in China would be no less aspirational than the Joneses proverbial neighbor if he suddenly lived in a world where a 3 car garage, 48" plasma TV and milky white teeth were plausibly attainable (and all present in his neighbors). After all, I've certainly not found that first-generation Chinese immigrants to the US are content to limit their lifestyle to the one they had in China!
At core - per my response to Spaceshaper - we've all got that same set of monkey genes that's happy with cucumbers until we find out that the dude next door has grapes. This isn't a type A vs. type B issue in my opinion, but something much more fundamentally human in that we all want to be able to pursue a better life for ourselves. For some, that better life may include fewer material possessions. For some, it may include more. For some, it may simply be having enough food to keep your kids alive. But in all cases, if you take away a plausible path towards the individual's definition of a good life, bad sh*t happens.
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amazingdrx Posted 12:23 am
01 Feb 2008
How many people do you know that rent a storage area for the stuff they bought in the past and the more stuff they buy everyday? They onmly visit it when they add new purchases. Mainly made on credit cards and purely for status satisfaction.
The satisfaction lasts only a few minutes, then it's back to the store. Filling a McMansion with stuff is the upscale version of this.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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caniscandida Posted 3:24 am
01 Feb 2008
BioD is right when he refers to a common understanding of "happiness," and says that "happiness is not an equilibrium state, it comes and it goes." Certainly, "happiness-in-time" is a silly notion. And it is both silly and shabby, even shameful, if we can conceive of ourselves being "happy" while other sentient beings are suffering.
And that is why competition, or competitiveness, whatever virtues it may have (I for one have all my life been highly doubtful that it has any), surely does not have a part in any enlightened understanding of "happiness."
What Russell was apparently pointing to, by his use of the interesting term "zest," was a better redefinition of "happiness-in-time" as "hopeful progress toward true, final happiness." How he might avoid giving that latter concept a religious or metaphysical coloring, I happily and zestfully look forward to finding out.
Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.
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Biodiversivist Posted 3:32 am
01 Feb 2008
Do you win jobs from other applicants? Do you win female companionship from other suitors? Do you win the respect of your English students? Do you have any expectations of winning others over to your perspective?
Does it feel good to land a teaching job? Does it feel good to attract the attentions of the opposite sex? Does it feel good to be respected by students? Would it feel good to win others over to your perspective? Those good feelings are not coming from ghosts, gods or spirits. They are coming from electrochemical stimuli--the equivalent of the hard wiring analogy you insist does not exist.
Type A personalities are just people further out on the competitive continuum. Type B is right next to them and a long way from type Z. How competitive you are is a function of your personality, but we all have a need to compete, even those reduced to begging on street corners must compete for the best street corners.
If you stepped away from America, you might conclude that it is a culture failure, not something biological (Americans REALLY need to learn more about the world).
You are saying that the Chinese you teach English to know more about the world than the Average American. Granted, the average American can be pretty ignorant but so can your average Chinese.
By "it" you mean working long hours? Spend some time in Japan. Peasant Chinese farmers also work very hard. They just tend to also be very poor. Give a million dollars to one and watch what they do with it. And then there is old age. Not everyone has an inheritance waiting for them.
Your travels through China are giving you good feelings (hormone dumps). You are not chained to a plow or rice paddy. You don't do hard physical labor in the hot sun. These people want to learn English to gain upward mobility. It is not out of some esoteric quest for knowledge. They want to be better positioned to compete for better jobs. You are helping them accomplish that.
In traveling China, I have met people who didn't like Beijing, because they felt like people in Beijing work too hard. They preferred less money and a more sociable life.
How is that different than meeting people here who don't like New York City for the same reasons? The Chinese economy is hot in large part because the Chinese are working their butts off.
Where people sit outdoors (often) sip tea, chat with their friends, enjoy strolling massages or ear cleanings, play cards, just relax.
Sounds a lot like a Pub to me.
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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bookerly Posted 11:49 am
01 Feb 2008
Dear Sean,
It is not the idea of striving that I object to, but the idea of keeping up with the Joneses (which I am interpreting to mean being status conscious to the point that it doesn't make sense).
Of course people strive and work hard, but the basic idea that we all derive satisfaction only from material success is, it seems to me, not true.
And claiming that this is hard wired into our systems gives many people a signal that there is nothing that can be done about it.
We need to (in my opinion) be careful about the differences between striving and caring only about things. And there are cultural differences in this regard (not only in China).
Dear BioD,
You are mixing apples and oranges. See my comments to Sean. I am not saying that people don't strive. Or even compete (more on this in a moment).
But, material success is not the only measure of people's lives. Many people (outside the US) put family before wealth and money, or even success. Social networks and social satisfaction play a bigger role than collections of possessions.
You over use the term "win". This is part of our disagreement. I don't try to "win" female companionship, I never think of myself as competing, but rather trying to find a good match. The idea that this is competition is not really accurate. (If I met someone I was interested in, and she told me that she had a better match, I would be happy for her, why not? I am not trying to "beat" the other person, merely find the good harmonious match for myself.)
The way in which we frame things matters. By framing everything in competitive terms, we miss subtle differences and nuances. There is a difference between working hard to care for your family and working hard to buy the biggest SUV on the block.
I am not trying to beat anyone out of a job (I have too much work, want some?? PLEASE!!). Nor am I trying to "win" by being good, I am trying to help my students.
You may not see the importance of framing, in terms of how we think, but I disagree. When I used to run 10K races, I was quite happy to be at the back of the pack, huffing and puffing along with the other penguins.
Do I ever want to win? Sure, but it is not a driving obsession with me.
If you are a type "A", then maybe you can't really understand type "B"s (grin). People for whom something matters often can't understand that other people don't really care about it. (I often saw this during political campaigns, the true believers could not comprehend those who were only casually concerned with their issues).
And look harder at different cultures, there are differences, which suggest that "keeping up with the Joneses" is not biological, but is indeed cultural.
(I feel this great temptation here to tell you, "you win".)
patrick in Beijing
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wiscidea Posted 2:11 pm
01 Feb 2008
Type A might be dedicated to winning, but they define the goal. It does not have to be financial success, material possessions, or a large number of children. It might be professional success, a collection of published papers, winning a court case, curing an illness. It is not helpful to equate Type A with consumption and waste of resources. We could use a few Type A folks working on achieving breakthroughs in photovoltaics, energy efficiency, wildland conservation strategies, peaceful resolution of international conflicts, et cetera.
Environmentalists might want to find ways to channel Type A folks into careers and pastimes that protect and restore Earth's ecosystems.
Hardwired to Win:
So what? Doesn't everyone want to succeed? If someone visiting this website wants to persuade everyone on Earth to be a vegetarian, probably not a bad thing if they are hardwired to try to achieve their goal. Just have to persuade people to want things that don't harm the Earth.
Or is someone suggesting that we are not only hardwired to win but to keep score by adding up the value of our material possessions? If this is true, then those hardwired to accumulate far more than they need or impress a potential mate are the defective ones. They are wasting resources for no apparent purpose. Imagine a hunter-gather thousands of years ago... how successful would he be if, rather than carry a few high quality weapons, he tried to collect more and larger weapons than all of the other hunters? He'd be too weighted down to accomplish anything or he'd have to constantly fight others to protect his stuff. (Poor example, but I tried.)
Peace.
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Biodiversivist Posted 3:46 pm
01 Feb 2008
I wonder how many times have we had this same discussion over the years? Note that you are the one who introduced the word "winning" into the discussion.
It may be that happiness includes winning for Type A personalities. But there is a problem with the idea that we are all hardwired to need to win.
Sean reflects my opinion here:
I don't suggest that the goal is to win - it is to strive
You have attempted to reframed the discussion to paint your debate partners as type A personalities who are obsessed with winning:
...it is not a driving obsession with me [winning] ...If you are a type "A", then maybe you can't really understand type "B"
In reality, I suspect that few Grist readers or contributors are any more obsessed with winning than you are, myself included.
But, material success is not the only measure of people's lives."
That's a strawman. Nobody said it is. You have to be careful using strawmen around me ; )
Many people (outside the US) put family before wealth and money, or even success.
Personally, we spend a small fortune to educate our children. Your suggestion that only people outside the US put family before wealth and money is not only grossly inaccurate, but contradictory. I also spend a lot of time and resources caring for an aging parent.
By your own description, you are an aging hippy expat, wondering China for pleasure, not obligated to care for children, a spouse, or parents. You have simply exchanged material possessions for a carefree life of self-indulgence. To each his own. I'm not assigning any kind of value judgment to your choice of lifestyle, I'm merely pointing it out to demonstrate that one size does not fit all.
Civilization would collapse if everyone emulated your lifestyle, as it would if everyone emulated mine. The Clovis point would never have been invented.
My hope is to see status seeking channeled into more environmentally benign forms. We need to dissuade those Chinese (and Americans who have different but also destructive symbols) who can now afford to do so, from eating wild animals like turtles, reef fish, shark fins, and tiger parts--along with buying SUVs and ivory.
And look harder at different cultures, there are differences, which suggest that "keeping up with the Joneses" is not biological, but is indeed cultural.
Look again Patrick. The difference is wealth. Rich people behave the same in all cultures. Your worldview, like most, was formed as an adolescent. The time frame for you was in the late '60s when anthropology and sociology professors were teaching the then popular, but now defunct idea that human beings were purely creatures of culture. I learned the same thing and also accepted it whole-hog at the time. There was no such thing as a human nature. As I recall, your own father was an academic. The difference is that you believe to this day what you were taught then.
Social networks and social satisfaction play a bigger role than collections of possessions.
Myopic and one dimensional. To you, and certainly to me, but it is naive to assume this is true for everybody. There are many niches to fill in human civilizations.
Don't take this as a personal attack, Patrick, we have enjoyed many discussions over the years. I take the time to discuss this particular topic at length only because I see your dated perspective as being detrimental to the environmental movement. It is well over three decades old, dog-eared, and leads to a dead end. There is a human nature and status seeking is eating the planet. Old-school environmentalism has become an anchor. It is a blind spot preventing us from finding viable solutions. Status seeking is a social primate instinct and it is eating the planet. Look to the Catholic hierarchy or the defunct Soviet Union for an examples of what happens when you attempt to squelch instinctive urges (sex in one case and status seeking in the other).
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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Biodiversivist Posted 3:51 pm
01 Feb 2008
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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amazingdrx Posted 3:53 pm
01 Feb 2008
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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bookerly Posted 8:34 pm
01 Feb 2008
Dear BioD,
We certainly prove the failure of culture, since we don't communicate very clearly.
Begin by reading the post at the top of the chain. It says "Social scientists tell us that having more material goods doesn't make us happier, but that we buy them in order to retain parity with our social group."
I didn't write, I have however tried to keep my remarks relevant to the idea expressed therein.
We have indeed had this discussion before (smile). But it is not about winning or losing, it is (I hope) about attempting to do that most wonderful and difficult of all human interactions, communicating.
I am delighted that I have misunderstood your position and that we can substitute the word "strive" for "win".
Are you not type "A"? From your comments, I had understood you to be self-identified as such. I am not trying to describe type "A"s as all bad, merely to make a personal observation that type "A"s seem (to me) to believe that everyone is really a type "A". You seemed to agree with me when you said
"Type A personalities are just people further out on the competitive continuum. Type B is right next to them and a long way from type Z." Did I misunderstand this?
I still disagree with it. I put it down to the idea that type "A"s do not seem (to me) to believe that other people are really different from them (which is how I am still interpreting your remarks, if I don't get it, please explain further).
You said "Personally, we spend a small fortune to educate our children. Your suggestion that only people outside the US put family before wealth and money is not only grossly inaccurate, but contradictory. I also spend a lot of time and resources caring for an aging parent.". Oh dear, you have misunderstood me. I was not referring to you personally, but to American society in general (I always think of the bumper sticker "We are spending our kids inheritance".)
Certainly no culture is monolithic, I never wish to imply that. But there are cultural differences generally. Americans as a whole seem less concerned about the future of their offspring. When I say this, I am referring to the terrible deficits we will pass on to them, and to global warming as well.
The fact that most people seem to think the idea of sacrificing for the sake of the future is repugnant is not my fault. (For more examples, we can see the trend of older Americans consistently voting against spending money on public schools, which spending doesn't benefit them).
Your description of me is very interesting "By your own description, you are an aging hippy expat, wondering China for pleasure, not obligated to care for children, a spouse, or parents. You have simply exchanged material possessions for a carefree life of self-indulgence.".
It isn't particularly accurate, but it is always interesting to see how others perceive one. For that, I thank you!!!
(Remember, please, this is the internet, what people choose to disclose about themselves may vary, for reasons that are not always apparent!).
(BTW, I wish my life were carefree and self-indulgent!!! Most people who know me think I need a little more of each. And alas, I don't wander very much, I work a lot. As to the rest, it is certainly colorful, I showed it to a friend, who is still laughing. But I do thank you for this!! It is a valuable gift.)
The old culture vs. hard-wiring debate. Contrary to what you say, the discussion continues. It did not end in the 1960's. If you wish to discuss it once more, we can begin. But while hard-wiring is much beloved of certain groups of scientists, the evidence for it is weak (and still under attack).
Even your own statement that "Look again Patrick. The difference is wealth. Rich people behave the same in all cultures." undermines your basic argument.
If we are hard-wired, than "all people" should behave the same in all cultures, not just the rich. Or are you suggesting genetic differences among the rich?
Finally you say "There is a human nature and status seeking is eating the planet. Old-school environmentalism has become an anchor. It is a blind spot preventing us from finding viable solutions. Status seeking is a social primate instinct and it is eating the planet."
I disagree with you. It is not "status seeking" which is eating the planet, it is greed (not the same thing in my mind, see, I knew we have trouble communicating!!).
I have no idea what you mean when you say "old school environmentalism has become an anchor". Please explain if you like.
The decision to build a coal power plant as opposed to a nuclear plant as opposed to building windmills is not about status seeking. It is about monied interests acting only on their own behalf.
One might better argue that the American cult of individualism is eating the planet.
One might further toss in the idea that people are not hard-wired to act in this way, but are rather taught this from an early age by a social order that sees benefits to having people adopt these beliefs.
pace,
patrick in Beijing
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caniscandida Posted 2:46 am
02 Feb 2008
BioD seems to be flip-floppishly saying that
the instincts of our primate mind are destroying the planet; but also
the suppression of the instincts of our primate mind is predictably very destructive too.
I think what he means is:
yes, no good can come of the suppression of instincts; and
the problem with our primate instincts is that they are currently directed to bad ends; leave it to with-it, up-to-date, enlightened environmentalists such as BioD, and those same instincts will be re-directed in a much happier and more wholesome way.
I think.
By the way, celibacy, or the abnegation of sexual activity, is absolutely correct and natural for people with a true vocation to the monastic life. Inasmuch as it is a suppression of anything, it is the suppression of a post-natural passion that, if indulged, would not allow the true nature of those people to flourish.
On the other hand, the Roman Catholic Church's transfer of the obligation to remain celibate to all priests was unnecessary, undesirable and wrong, and has been the cause of much misery and woe, in the first place the strangling of the natures of very many men over many centuries.
What your alleged dog-earedness, Patrick, has to do with any of this, escapes me. Following the discussion is leaving me dog-tired.
Greek for "dog" is kyon, kynos; and the Cynics were those followers of Socrates who rejected all luxuries and all the unnecessary, "unnatural," man-made props of conventional human existence, and so remained living so simple and austere a lifestyle that they were said to be "like dogs." (Cf. Saint Francis of Assisi, Henry David Thoreau, and Chris McCandless, among countless others.)
So, if ever we needed reminding, the abnegation of competitive greed, wealth, acquisitiveness and possessiveness has always been a part of human nature. It has not always been prominent, but it has always been present.
The nasty, more common sense of "cynicism" comes from the tendency of (some) Cynics to hold other human beings in contempt, as being disgracefully motivated by material appetites and greeds.
It strikes me as a form of cynicism in that sense, to assert that biology is destiny, that human beings are entrapped in their primate brains, and that they can never be counted on to act otherwise than how their competitive, status-seeking primate instincts direct.
Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.
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wiscidea Posted 2:54 am
02 Feb 2008
But I find the self-righteous blanket condemnations of cultures, technologies, habits, lifestyles, jobs, philosophies, diets, et cetera not particularly helpful.
There is far too much of this, not only on the Grist website, but throughout human society.
A quick reading of Jared Diamond's "Collapse" will reveal that human beings throughout histroy and around the world are very capable of destroying the the environment.
When one attacks entire groups... say, "Americans"... it causes individuals who might not fit the generalization to assume a defensive posture. This is not helpful. I'd say the person generalizing AND the person on the receiving end have to modify their behavior to diffuse this.
Now... when Asian governments manage to stop the killing of sharks for their fins, the killing of bears for their gall bladders, the collection of turtle eggs, te killing of rhinos for their horns, the killing of tigers for their reproductive organs, whaling, et cetera, they can assume the moral highground and condemn the rest of us.
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caniscandida Posted 3:36 am
02 Feb 2008
In principle, DR's suggestion seems safe enough, that by leaving behind one "set of Joneses" and cleaving to another, we can and do choose to consume less of this and that.
But by his own testimony, WiscIdea tells us that as a consequence of his cultivating "philosophical Buddhism,"* he has no desire to keep up with any Joneses at all. It would be uninteresting, and even frigid, to second-guess him, and insist that of course he is still trying to keep up with the Joneses, only now they are Buddhist Joneses.
And as for those who like to reduce all human activity to competition and status-seeking, it would be not only wrong but mean to insist that when WiscIdea reports that he now is "a bit less angry," he is engaging in a competition, smugly comparing himself to those who are irascible, or who do not appreciate the value of becoming less angry, and striving to match those who are totally free of anger, as a good in itself.
____
*Why "philosophical"? Because what might seem to be religious and artistic trappings are stripped away? But what is wrong with looking at a Tibetan painting, a Thai sculpture, a Japanese calligraphic scroll? And why should it strike dread, to refer to one's meditation as a "religious" practice?
Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.
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John former Marine Posted 4:10 am
02 Feb 2008
The people with the means to exploit others have fine-tuned this labor machine to the point that we're all putting millions of profit into their pockets but still trying to survive by not heating our apartments and living on borsht and rye bread like our grandparents. It's time for a revolution. If the output in the USA has doubled since 1980, then we should all be sharing in that...or having the option to work half as much and maybe have more time to go camping/canoeing than our grandparents did. Wait...I get two weeks a year. My grandparents had months off...
Maybe it's just the French in me speaking but I think it's almost time to pull that old guillotine out. Anytime I hear those politicians talking on the radio it all becomes "waa waa waa" and what I'm hearing is "let them eat cake." Off with their heads!
We need a new labor/environmental movement! Not one based in the status quo that's just about selling eco-gadgets...
Shu pas a vende.
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caniscandida Posted 4:29 am
02 Feb 2008
And while we are at it, how about a big round of applause for the guillotine, the most humane and most honest form of capital punishment ever invented.
Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.
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John former Marine Posted 4:48 am
02 Feb 2008
I guess I'm not sounding like a very good pacifist vegan about now but I really do think we need a new labor movement. It's funny, you hear about this and that group striking every other week in France. In the US? Only the TV writer's strike. Come on...these people write total garbabe to keep us all "entertained" and they're the only "major" stike that the media has paid any attention to lately. Maybe we don't have to take the heads off those people, but can we at least get together and make them give up their powdered wigs?
Back to the guillotine though...except for the applauding crowd, if you keep the blade sharp it probably is actually a lot more humane than what we've got now...
Shu pas a vende.
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wiscidea Posted 5:08 am
02 Feb 2008
I freely admit I'm selecting a different set of Joneses. Seems inevitable for human beings to compare themselves to others. To deny one is keeping up with all Joneses, simpy means you are keeping up with non-Joneses, which of course, are just different Joneses. Hmmmm... I'll leave this to the philosopers to figure out.
I didn't mean to brag by saying I'm a bit less angry. In my case, persistant anger, especially toward the current occupant of the Oval Office, was becoming a threat to my health and interfering with more-productive activity. There are certainly circumstances where anger is useful if properly employed. I guess it is up to the idividual to decide what is proper. I've wasted an enormous amount of time harboring anger and arguing with people over matters that really are not all that important to me. At times I find this an enjoyable game, but more often than not it becomes a desructive obsession (see my comments regarding hunter-gathers, found at the most recent cloned animal thread for an example; or look at my rants supporting personal tranportation).
So... I don't know if being totally free of anger is something to strive for. As far as I'm concerned, less anger is a good thing, especially if it slows one down a bit so they are not blinded by rage and make matters worse.
Why philosophical?
The term "religion" seems to imply -- as it is currently used -- belief in some sort of supernatural force and acceptance of certain principles based on faith alone. The Buddha himself told his followers to not accept teachings simply because he said they were a good idea, because a holy man told them they were true, or because they learned about them from an ancient text. He admitted that his ideas were suggestions, he found them useful, and encouraged others to try following his suggestions for a while. He did not preach discarding reason, but encouraged learning from experience. He also tried to avoid expressing opinions about supernatural forces and what exactly happens after we die. There appear to be hints regarding his personal views, but he admitted that the "truth" regarding such matters was not accessible.
So I identify myself as someone interested in -- not strictly adhering to -- Philosophical Buddhism. I do not view the Buddha as a deity, looking down upon us, someone to pray to, someone existing beyond a mortal realm. The Buddha was just a respectable guy who had some very good ideas and it might be worthwhile for folks to look into those teachings and try living accordingly for a little while.
Basically... we are all connected, nothing exists independent of the rest of the universe, our greed and clinging to material possessions causes pain (fear of losing stuff, violence to try to prevent this), compassion is good for everyone, no one is superior to anyone else, no one really knows what's best for everyone else, violence toward other beings is violence toward ourselves. I doubt I have all of this corrrect, but I'm not claiming to fully and accurately understand what the Buddha had to say. I lot of it seems lost in translation.
Please, caniscandida, do not interprest my rejection of religion as rejection poetry, art, literature, spirituality, monks, contemplation, et cetera. I hate to say "et cetera" because it makes such things sound insignificant, but I just don't want to download pages from a thesaurus. I find religion's structures, statues, paintings, sculptures, poetry, its most valuable contribution to human civilization. It is beautiful and inpirational, even if stripped of the supernatural. It still communcates important information, inspires, or elicts pleasure. I was originally drawn to Buddhism because of the art it has inspired. And it is difficult to sever the final thread that connects me to Christianity because its trappings are so interesting.
Why should it strike dread, to refer to one's meditation as a "religious" practice? Because if I were to say I meditate for religious reasons or refer to Buddhism as a religious identity, I would immediately inherit centuries of irrational baggage pile high upon and distracting us from Buddhism's core values. As far as I know, I'm a philosophical Christian as well. It has just been less interesting and more difficult to figure it out.
I wish "religion" just meant a system one follows for organizing their lives and communicating their values, based on faith or reason. If it were so, I would be a very religious person. I have a set of principles that guide my decisions. As long as "religion" implies belief in some sort of supernatural force and acceptance of certain principles based on faith alone, I have no desire to apply the label to myself.
Thanks for the question.
Peace.
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bookerly Posted 7:03 am
02 Feb 2008
Dear Wiscidea,
When you speak of labeling groups ("Americans", anyway), you may be speaking of me (laughing)!! Yes, I do!! It is of course intentional, and I am glad I got your attention (now if only I could figure out a way to do it that was helpful.... sigh...).
But, please remember, name aside, I am as American as anyone else posting. When you said "when Asian governments manage to stop .... they can assume the moral highground and condemn the rest of us". I wanted to stand up and cheer!!!
Here's the thing, that behavior you find annoying in "Asian governments" (who are not involved in posting here, it is alas, only me, your fellow American), is exactly what America does to the rest of the world!!
Big Grin!! You made my day!!!
Alas, you did so by generalizing, but well, there you go...
And I should have given you props for your earlier comment as well, eh, I got a bit distracted there. The idea of "Enact" sounds pretty useful, is it able to find a way to deal with class and race? It sounds geographically based which might make this difficult.
I agree with your comments about all of us being connected (wherever you derive them from, to each their own path). It seems to me that our inability to see this at a deep level is one of the factors keeping us from progressing.
Dear CanisCandida,
Will Madame G. return to visit us once more? I am not sure.
I do thank you for your kind words (I am still chuckling over the description of me as a hippy - how lovely!!!).
How wisely you write when you say "It strikes me as a form of cynicism in that sense, to assert that biology is destiny, that human beings are entrapped in their primate brains, and that they can never be counted on to act otherwise than how their competitive, status-seeking primate instincts direct."
But we should also note that primates show instincts for not only competition but for cooperation, for playfulness, for love, for relaxing in the sun and grooming a friend. One of my concerns is that I feel too often, we see the competition as the ruling house, misunderstanding the richness and complexity of who we are, and who we can be.
patrick in Beijing
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bookerly Posted 7:12 am
02 Feb 2008
Dear JohnFormerMarine,
As a former labor activist (in America), I agree with you that the absence of a strong movement has damaged American society.
It is terrible. When we were organizing, we found the deck was stacked against us. These days, after 50+ years of attacks against the very idea of working people organizing by the mass media, it is difficult to gain much ground.
Will a revolution happen in America? I suspect not. People have big screen tvs full of sports and breasts (or whatever other body parts they fetish (note to CanisCandida, I am including male breasts of course (smile)), lots of cheap beer and other drugs, an isolating suburban lifestyle, and jobs which leave them too tired to organize if they knew how.
I struggle everyday with my own cynicism about the possibility for change in America, but perhaps I just got older and burned out a bit (my new life is renewing me in ways I did not expect, so much to learn!).
But the struggle itself is worthwhile whether we "win" or "lose", the journey may be the lesson.
patrick in Beijing
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bookerly Posted 7:18 am
02 Feb 2008
Ahem, since this movie showed the struggle of one family to survive and create a more just world, I thought it might fit here (okay, I just watched it, it blew me away, and what the heck).
Can I recommend "Mongol"? (Disclaimer, one of my best friends was on the crew, which is why I watched it, initially (and no, she is not famous, so I don't gain sideways status from knowing her)).
It is the story of Ghengis Khan, told from a different point of view. The scenery is beautiful, and the film is mythic in scope. (I am a sucker for mythic films well done).
The movie has cute children, meditation in a cage, lots of horses, and a very unusual love story.
patrick in Beijing
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ids Posted 7:25 am
02 Feb 2008
argues that the colonists' shared experience as consumers in a new imperial economy afforded them the cultural resources that they needed to develop a radical strategy of political protest--the consumer boycott. Never before had a mass political movement organized itself around disruption of the marketplace. As Breen demonstrates, often through anecdotes about obscure Americans, communal rituals of shared sacrifice provided an effective means to educate and energize a dispersed populace. The boycott movement--the signature of American
resistance--invited colonists traditionally excluded from formal political processes to voice their opinions about liberty and rights within a revolutionary marketplace, an open, raucous public forum that defined itself around subscription lists passed door-to-door, voluntary associations, street protests, destruction of imported British goods, and incendiary newspaper exchanges. Within these exchanges was born a new form of politics in which ordinary man and women--precisely the people most often overlooked in traditional accounts of revolution--experienced an exhilarating surge of empowerment. Breen recreates an "empire of goods" that transformed everyday life during the mid-eighteenth century. Imported manufactured items flooded into the homes of colonists from New Hampshire to Georgia. The Marketplace of Revolution explains how at a moment of political crisis Americans gave political meaning to the pursuit of happiness and learned how to make goods speak to power.
Of course, look where that got U.S.
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Biodiversivist Posted 7:29 am
02 Feb 2008
Begin by reading the post at the top of the chain. It says "Social scientists tell us that having more material goods doesn't make us happier, but that we buy them in order to retain parity with our social group."
The researchers stop short of asking the next question. Why do we seek parity within our social groups?
To be immune to status seeking urges one must also be immune to feelings of inadequacy. I have yet to meet such a person although people addicted to drugs provide a window into what such immunity would do to one's life. Attempts to avoid such feelings motivate us to do things, as evolution has dictated. All people in all cultures seek parity in their social group. That's why you and I comb our hair every morning, pull on a pair of pants, and smile when we want to show non-aggression. That's why Bantu men wear penis gourds, prize pigs, and smile to show non-aggression. Penis gourds and pants represent the difference in culture, but the basic behavior is the same.
Evolution does not promote happiness. It promotes genes. This concept of happiness, along with deity worship, is a human construct, often at odds with evolved urges.
Dave's insight, that one could reduce cravings for material displays of status by moving to a group that has less inclination for environmentally destructive displays is exemplified in the world of academia. Status seeking and competition is alive and well but their symbols--tenure, publications in prestigious journals, books, with the pinnacle being a Nobel Prize--are environmentally benign. But, if the researchers were to look at those academic types they would find the same thing. The parity treadmill does not make them happier either. The key is that their badges of honor are not eating the planet. We also can't all be tenured professors.
Your move to China is another example. You are now immersed in the modern Chinese semi-capitalist culture, where your teaching of English is highly valued. You have obtained a measure of status by doing so, although obviously not at a conscious level. I'll wager that your serotonin levels are generally higher than before you made this move. Had you made this move in 1968, instead of enjoying the fruits of a booming economy, you would have found yourself in a deeply impoverished country reeling from a mass famine that killed tens of millions of people a decade earlier. All of human history has been a repeat of this tendency to spread out. We have a family friend who has done the same thing. She was not being allowed access to the higher levels of the public school hierarchy and now teaches English in China, where her skills are more valued. So far, so good.
But to pull something like that off, one must have the intellectual acuity, freedom, and means to do so. Not many people do. It's not a scalable solution. The jet you flew to China on was designed and built by guys competing with each other as was the computer you use to tell your story. I would be precluded from following your example because spouses, children, and aging dependent parents have historically taken a dim view of sons and husbands who bail out of the country looking for a more leisurely lifestyle. Not to mention my genes would use hormones to electrochemically punish me for abandoning them.
Are you not type "A"? From your comments, I had understood you to be self-identified as such. I am not trying to describe type "A"s as all bad, merely to make a personal observation that type "A"s seem (to me) to believe that everyone is really a type "A". You seemed to agree with me when you said
"Type A personalities are just people further out on the competitive continuum. Type B is right next to them and a long way from type Z." Did I misunderstand this? I still disagree with it. I put it down to the idea that type "A"s do not seem (to me) to believe that other people are really different from them (which is how I am still interpreting your remarks, if I don't get it, please explain further).
You might want to start by attempting to define a type "A" personality. I think what you are trying to do is break the world down into two gigantic stereotypes, Type A's (whatever they are) and everyone else. You then go on to suggest that these type A's think everyone else is a type A? If that sounds somewhat nonsensical to you, then you now know how I see it as well.
You said "Personally, we spend a small fortune to educate our children. Your suggestion that only people outside the US put family before wealth and money is not only grossly inaccurate, but contradictory. I also spend a lot of time and resources caring for an aging parent."Oh dear, you have misunderstood me. I was not referring to you personally, but to American society in general (I always think of the bumper sticker "We are spending our kids inheritance".)
I didn't misunderstand you. I was only using my family as an example. The vast majority of Americans put family first. Certainly, the people I associate with do.
Certainly no culture is monolithic, I never wish to imply that. But there are cultural differences generally. Americans as a whole seem less concerned about the future of their offspring. When I say this, I am referring to the terrible deficits we will pass on to them, and to global warming as well.
China has taken the lead from America as the number one emitter of GHG. I would be keenly interested in any evidence you could offer supporting your contention that Americans as a whole seem less concerned about the future of their children.
The fact that most people seem to think the idea of sacrificing for the sake of the future is repugnant is not my fault. (For more examples, we can see the trend of older Americans consistently voting against spending money on public schools, which spending doesn't benefit them).
I don't recall blaming you for that phenomenon.
Your description of me is very interesting "By your own description, you are an aging hippy expat, wondering China for pleasure, not obligated to care for children, a spouse, or parents. You have simply exchanged material possessions for a carefree life of self-indulgence." It isn't particularly accurate, but it is always interesting to see how others perceive one. For that, I thank you!!!
(Remember, please, this is the internet, what people choose to disclose about themselves may vary, for reasons that are not always apparent!).
(BTW, I wish my life were carefree and self-indulgent!!! Most people who know me think I need a little more of each. And alas, I don't wander very much, I work a lot. As to the rest, it is certainly colorful, I showed it to a friend, who is still laughing. But I do thank you for this!! It is a valuable gift.)
I thought you would find that interesting ; ). Your description of me as a type "A" personality was also interesting. I cobbled that description together from your comments over the years, where you once described yourself as an "aging hippy." You have also said numerous times that you are childless and unmarried. Being an expatriate I deduced that you are not actively involved in assisting aging parents. You have been to Tibet and other provinces? The part about having few material possessions was also a deduction based on your consistent critique of material possessions. Description accurate so far? I have to say the carefree life of self-indulgence was a bit of an inference. We are all self-indulgent to varying degrees. But you say you work hard and are not carefree. Hmm, You have given me the wrong impression. Sounds like we are not so different after all. Does this make you a type "A" personality?
The old culture vs. hard-wiring debate. Contrary to what you say, the discussion continues. It did not end in the 1960's. If you wish to discuss it once more, we can begin. But while hard-wiring is much beloved of certain groups of scientists, the evidence for it is weak (and still under attack).
The evidence most certainly is not weak. The research mentioned in the OP is an example of the ongoing accumulation of knowledge in the area. It will always be under attack, as is the theory of evolution and global warming.
Even your own statement that "Look again Patrick. The difference is wealth. Rich people behave the same in all cultures." undermines your basic argument.
If we are hard-wired, than "all people" should behave the same in all cultures, not just the rich. Or are you suggesting genetic differences among the rich?
I said that if you give a Chinese peasant a million dollars he would immediately do with it what all rich people do. He will use it to obtain status symbols. The symbols may vary by culture but the urge to seek status, like smiling, is constant across all human cultures.
Finally you say "There is a human nature and status seeking is eating the planet. Old-school environmentalism has become an anchor. It is a blind spot preventing us from finding viable solutions. Status seeking is a social primate instinct and it is eating the planet."
I disagree with you. It is not "status seeking" which is eating the planet, it is greed (not the same thing in my mind, see, I knew we have trouble communicating!!).
But the definition of greed is relative. How do you eliminate this greed? Is greed a uniquely American quality? As Chinese wealth grows, are the Chinese becoming greedier, or is greed driving China's economic growth?
I have no idea what you mean when you say "old school environmentalism has become an anchor". Please explain if you like.
Myth 1: The American cult of individualism is eating the planet
Myth 2: Only greedy people seek status
Myth 3: Human nature does not exist
The decision to build a coal power plant as opposed to a nuclear plant as opposed to building windmills is not about status seeking. It is about monied interests acting only on their own behalf.
...to further increase their personal stature as they compete with their peers. The Chinese are no different from anyone else in this respect. Note that they are building, in the name of profit, coal fired power plants like there is no tomorrow.
One might better argue that the American cult of individualism is eating the planet.
One might further toss in the idea that people are not hard-wired to act in this way, but are rather taught this from an early age by a social order that sees benefits to having people adopt these beliefs.
As personal wealth in China grows we are seeing a proportional jump in SUV sales and other conspicuous displays of status seeking. How do you explain that?
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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bookerly Posted 8:13 am
02 Feb 2008
Dear BioD,
My wordiness is not an attempt to "beat" you and "win". What is there to win? I thought we were attempting to communicate, explain ourselves and explore our differences. Is this possible outside of the context of competition? I think so.
I should note that I am not a tenured professor, merely an English instructor. Do I have status? Sure. Am I trying to "beat" the other teachers and "win" jobs? Nope. Interestingly, many of my fellow teachers are unhappy because the schools are becoming more competitive, they just want to teach and get paid, not climb higher up the ladder.
Top monkeys always think that everyone wants to be a top monkey. Perhaps they are wrong.
My description of myself as an "aging hippy" was tongue-in-cheek. (One of my weaknesses is forgetting to add the smile to the end of every bit of sarcasm... sigh... (smile)). I am here because I need to be someplace and work because I need to eat. At this point in my life, this place and this work suit me. I am probably temperamentally unfit to work in America. And no I have never been to Tibet.
You attribute to me ideas I don't possess. I am not against technology (I spent almost 30 years working in the field!). But the jet I flew was also the result of the co-operative efforts of many workers and many skillsets coming together for a single purpose.
I see cooperation everywhere in the world, you see competition. Some people would say we are both wearing blinders (smile).
You could bring your family with you to China (smile). A number of people have done so. As far as material possessions, I gave mine up reluctantly, change comes to us not always by our own choice, but discovered to my amazement that I really didn't need quite so many things...
I am not against owning things, but do feel that there are other values possible in life. And no, I don't think that he who dies with the most toys wins.
There is a difference in seeking status by doing good (for instance) and seeking status by needing the biggest house and SUV. They represent different value sets. We need more of the former and less of the latter.
Do you really think that American behavior is creating a better world for our children (I am not speaking of each and every American, but in general)? You merely dismissed my examples as if they were meaningless to you. They seem important to me.
I never said only greedy people seek status.
Since I am not China, nor Chinese, I am not sure why you attack China to strike at me? Why not criticize India or Brazil?
I agree that many wealthy people seek status in every country (this is not the same as "keeping up with the Joneses"). All forms of status seeking are not equal.
In terms of the idea of "human nature", I am never sure really exactly what it is. I know that some folks like to think that biology is destiny, I will go along with CanisCandida (and many others) on this one.
People are more complicated than being merely a set of hard-wired instructions. This seems to me to be a very mechanistic view of humans, which doesn't fit what I see around me every day. To be convincing a good world view should match the view.
But, frankly, it does seem to me that perhaps we are communicating. Did you understand what I meant when I said "you win"?
patrick in Beijing
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Biodiversivist Posted 5:07 am
03 Feb 2008
I've been listening to a book called Bound Together. It is a history of globalization--trade, conquest, expansion, religious indoctrination, immigration, and slavery. It seems to me that history has been driven mostly by our human urge to always want more or better, and not just by a need to stay housed and fed in the face of an ever expanding population. No immigrant farm laborer wishes to see their children follow in their footsteps.
People have been moving from one place to another in search of a better life for a very long time. The book is meant to be upbeat, but that's not easy to do when talking about human history.
Coincidentally, the end of slavery coincided with the invention of better machinery and the discovery of fossil fuels to power it. Suggesting to me that had we not created this technology, or if we did not have reserves of cheap energy in the form of fossil fuels, slavery would still be with us and many of us Gristmillians would be either slaves or slave owners. Until these machines came into existence, slaves were used in place of them to mine minerals, plant and harvest crops, haul heavy loads. Human beings were used as energy reservoirs--living batteries. In short, machines powered by fossil fuels, being cheaper than slaves, were a necessary condition to bringing an end to slavery.
According to the book, Brazil to this day estimates that tens of thousands of people are once again being enslaved to clear the Amazon to plant soybeans and harvest lumber. The old Brazilian slave trade to grow sugarcane dwarfed any other.
This suggests to me that as machines become more expensive to fuel, and they will, we may cross a threshold and see more slavery, particularly if we plan to grow fuel instead of simply remove it from holes in the ground.
My view of human nature is shaped in large part by our almost incomprehensibly brutal history. Our future hinges on finding ways to channel our drives in sustainable directions, while simultaneously avoiding war. Millions were once again enslaved a mere 66 years ago as part of the second world war.
But I digress
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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John former Marine Posted 5:25 am
03 Feb 2008
You make it sound like slavery is some kind of natural phenomenon that occurs when we aren't making high enough profits. No...it happens when you dehumanize other people. Institutionalized racism kept slavery alive as long as it did. And please don't argue that racism is just one of our natural human tendencies. Nor is ignorance.
So when fossil fuels become so expensive that the price of sugar starts going up, we're going to enslave a bunch of our fellow human beings again unless technology comes along to lower the price again? You must be an engineer or something...
John
Shu pas a vende.
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stevenearlsalmony Posted 6:13 am
03 Feb 2008
Without intending to oversimply the matters discussed here, it appears that we now have 6.6 billion (soon to be 9 billion) members of the human community. Every human organism has to eat to survive. Only the prodigious success of the global expansion of agriculture can reasonably and sensibly account for the spectacular increase of absolute human numbers to skyrocket worldwide as they have been for the past few hundred years.
From a species perspective, more food production/distribution equals more human organisms; less food/distribution equals less members of the human species; and in any and all cases, no food equals no humans.
Human consumption, production and propagation activities, that have been adamantly and relentlessly pursued by the predominant AGRI-culture, appear to be occurring synergistically on the surface of Earth. When taken together, each of these global human overgrowth activities is occurring at a current scale and anticipated growth rate that the human species is growing beyond the Earth's capacity to sustain life as we know it, I suppose.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/
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Biodiversivist Posted 6:38 am
03 Feb 2008
Native South Americans also enslaved each other and were in turn, also enslaved by Europeans. According to that book, DNA evidence shows a dearth of South American males, suggesting that the Europeans had selectively murdered them but spared women, which is why they turned to Africa for more slaves.
One thing is for sure, the human propensity for aggression, particularly among males, has created endless warfare that continues to this day.
You moniker suggests to me that in your circle, being a former Marine places you higher in the US military hierarchy, and as such is a badge of honor worthy of display. Or am I misreading that?
Assuming I am reading that right, would that status symbol carry equal status in all social circles? As status symbols go, it is as an example of an environmentally benign one, IMHO.
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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Jon Rynn Posted 7:11 am
03 Feb 2008
1870 has always seemed to me to be the start of the "modern" era, or "long 20th century", to use Eric Hobsbawm's termininology. In the case of the US, the Civil War can be seen as a competition between the slave-based, agricultural, proto-fascist society of the South vs. the industrial liberal North. While fossil fuels were essential to this victory, I think that the development of industrial machinery was the critical co-evolution that was also responsible.
What this means is that, absent any kind of replacement for fossil fuels, a collapse of industrial society would bring about the preconditions for a revival of plantation=type social structures, which have survived much more intact, by the way, in Latin America. But if! if we can develop wind/solar/geothermal, this shouldn't be a problem. Conclusion: it's either renewable energy or slavery! How's that for a slogan?
Biodiversivist -- I don't think that you should imply that people who don't have families are "carefree", or some such. As part of a family of four, I understand the huge demands, but a propos the original post here, "keeping up with the joneses" really applies to families most of all -- more than, say, single apartment dwellers. So much of the "joneses" problem is really a problem of us families, something that is difficult to tackle without then sounding anti-family. For instance, the whole soccer mom, gotta take the kids all over the frickin' place or they'll be behind their competitors (that word again), has probably led to much of the SUV-gasoline rise problem.
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Biodiversivist Posted 8:35 am
03 Feb 2008
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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wiscidea Posted 8:53 am
03 Feb 2008
The importance of finding an alternative source of energy and subtantially improving the efficieny of all of the technology and processes we depend on really takes on a whole new meaning when one contemplates what people might resort to when the fossil fuel finally runs out.
No where to go but foward???
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caniscandida Posted 8:58 am
03 Feb 2008
I always admire what you write (not that I read every word -- sorry!); and this time you have presented pretty much what is in my mind when I express dislike of the now fashionable term "sustainability." There is no such thing as "sustainability." "Prolongability" perhaps; but if we are to be honest, we owe it to the people we are communicating with to explain the difference.
BioD,
I agree with most of your observations. And I certainly agree with something you wrote in passing to Patrick, that none of us wants to seem inadequate.
Yes, right. And whether or not that is part of our primate heritage, it is definitely fundamental to much of our behavior and much of our ethics. I.e., we dread being rejected; we crave being accepted.
But that is if anything more explanatory of the human traits that Patrick and I would emphasize, self-abnegation and cooperation, than those that you have regularly been emphasizing (consistently!, bravo!) for a few years now, status-seeking and prestige-seeking.
By the way, why exactly do you feel pleasure when you notice a strange human female giving you the eye? (And let us leave your wife out of the conversation right now.) (And we may postpone the DR-related question, Is there a point to getting married, if our prospective father-in-law is not disposed to send us a case of Scotch as a sign of his affection?) Is it because:
a. your chances of mating with her are apparently greater than you might have thought otherwise?; or
b. her appreciation suggests that her entire tribe acknowledges you as hunky, which is an end in itself?; or
c. knowing that she selected you means that she did not select some other male present, which in turn gives you the right to mock him as a "loser"?
Regarding the last option, there are those who think that when two men fight over a woman, the woman herself is of minor interest, they are really fighting over themselves and their respective images.
Anyway, I am certainly at least as cynical as you regarding such horrifying social phenomena as imperialism, racism and classism.
Or rather, I at least am truly "cynical," in the sense that I think little of my fellow humans. In your case, I wonder if in fact you discover some manly virtue in those things. Your writing is ambiguous, you know.
John former Marine,
fyi, I am adamantly opposed to capital punishment. For once, the Catholic hierarchy, viz. the late Pope John Paul II, are right about something: if a homicidal convict is not free to commit further violence, there is no justification to execute him (or her).
The thing about the guillotine is, it certainly has caused the quickest and most painless death of any modern contrivance (though Socrates' hemlock-induced death, while he was surrounded by friends, sounds pleasant enough -- if only we knew what "hemlock" was!). But it is not acceptable to the squeamish, hypocritical supporters of the death penalty, who want everyone to believe that killing someone is not necessarily a horrible event. Having a head land in a lady's lap, while the assembled party is splashed in blood, would be just too too awful. So instead they go with "lethal injection," to make capital punishment look like an everyday harmless medical procedure.
Does the executioner give them balloons on the way out?
Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.
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Jon Rynn Posted 9:19 am
03 Feb 2008
In fact, a propos Steve's concerns, over hundreds of millions of years, nature has devised a gazillion tricks to push organic beings to want to reproduce, since it is patently absurd from a self-preserving point of view to spend so much time and energy on reproduction. Again, those that wanted to reproduce were the ones that did, etc.
Certainly humans, like all other organic beings, are made up of the particular jumbles of DNA that happened to be around when the species took form; and in our case that happened to be whatever was appropriate, apparently, for the African savanna.
However, we are obviously not genetic zombies, and it is extraordinary, to my mind, that perhaps the best way to save a rainforest, at least according to rainforest action network, is to give the indigenous peoples control over them, amazing because if you did the same with loggers the forest would disappear, meaning that human culture is capable of forming sustainable ethics.
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caniscandida Posted 9:51 am
03 Feb 2008
Curious, too, how those of us who have no particular interest in competing for females keep popping up, generation after generation. How hard to explain, Darwinianly! An argument for "Intelligent Design"? Well, maybe; but then, isn't the Intelligent Designer supposed to be the very God of Moses who enjoins death to all fags?
Maybe Ann Coulter can explain it all to me ...
Also: right, we have no reason to entrust indigenous peoples with control of rainforests. In their pre-modern, pre-industrial situation, there was only so much damage they could inflict. But put chain-saws into their hands, and the keys to bulldozers, and who knows how enlightened they will be.
Similarly, cf. the Inuit, with their motorboats, rifles and snowmobiles.
As for "sustainable ethics": Whoa!, you are playing with my mind, aren't you?!
Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.
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Jon Rynn Posted 10:15 am
03 Feb 2008
As far as indigenous peoples are concerned, my understanding from reading Paul Hawken's "Blessed Unrest" was that indigenous peoples are fighting for the survival of ecosystems. I have also seen several examples of hunters or fisherman being an important part of the constituency for ecosystem survival, even, allegedly, big-game hunters in Africa, as horrible as it sounds to me.
One of the great challenges of our times, I think, is to understand how and why people come to value ecosystems. It would be nice if ownership did the trick, but apparently that only happens when people own and live on the land.
hopefully, some future conception of "economic democracy" will include 1) ownership and operation of economic firms by those who work there, and 2) ownership and control of the land by those that live there, and hopefully, those two factors will lead to a real "stewardship" ethic...capiche?
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Biodiversivist Posted 10:56 am
03 Feb 2008
Intellectually, this person may realize that initial sexual attraction always wanes given time and that people who dump their spouses for a year or so of endorphin highs and great sex will find themselves locked into an endless cycle of divorces.
On the other hand, they may tend to have more children as a result of having multiple, serial partners, which may explain our serially monogamous nature, statistically speaking. Given the opportunity, human males also lean toward multiple parallel partners (polygamy) and I have a theory that serial monogamy is an artifact of polygamy when restrained by cultural laws and taboos. I just hope none of my wives read this.
Of course, I'm just sticking to the general case. Human culture, and history as well as the rest of nature is filled with sexual activity that deviates from the general rule, with lots of room for exceptions not so easily explained in evolutionary terms.
Evolution does not select for happiness per se. You only have to be happy enough to make babies that go on to make more babies. In fact, people who tend to be too happy may be at an evolutionary disadvantage, being less likely to be dissatisfied with a relationship that isn't making babies or maybe a little too optimistic about the intentions of that the lion walking in their general direction.
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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bookerly Posted 12:21 pm
03 Feb 2008
It should be noted that fighting over females is only one reproductive strategy. The guy who snuck into the tent while the dominant males were out fighting seems to have done okay (smile).
Western versions of history seem to focus on the dominant male figures. This is clearly inaccurate, since there are lots more of the rest of us than of the "top guns". (I have stories!! (smile)). But then it is maybe a good thing, since one survival strategy is to "lose" then go on with your life unnoticed in the background!!!
One of the reasons I suggested the movie "Mongol" (which I have just been told is premiering in NYC, but may not have an American distribution deal has to do with just this concept. In the film, Khan's wife is stolen from him by a rival, when he rescues her, she is pregnant. My Son! He announces to the world. Later he is sold into slavery. In the process of rescuing him, she becomes pregnant again. My Daughter!! He announces to the world, with no irony.
The simple genetic competition model makes for a compelling story that is attractive from an individualistic perspective, but is entirely too complicated for how human societies actually function.
If evolution does not select for happiness, then why is it so important to us?? I think there is much about evolution we don't understand. (And about psychology, which I am still not sure i regard as a science!)
There is slavery and there is slavery. Not all kinds were the same, historically. Brazilian and that occurring in the United States were some of the nastiest.
Evolution doesn't seem to select for intelligence. Nor does it favor the wealthy. One could make a good argument that evolution favors peasants. Or maybe that's just Gaia.
patrick in Beijing
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bookerly Posted 12:23 pm
03 Feb 2008
There are responsibilities that people have and feel (and take very seriously) beyond their blood families. Life and relationships are much more complicated than that.
patrick in Beijing
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bookerly Posted 12:26 pm
03 Feb 2008
Dear Steve,
There is no connection in human populations between food and population growth. (I know that Mr. Quinn promotes the idea, but it is silly, really).
If human populations increased to match food supply, then the wealthiest populations (with pretty much unlimited food access) would be increasing the most rapidly. They are not.
So, clearly this idea fails the reality test.
patrick in Beijing
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wiscidea Posted 12:53 pm
03 Feb 2008
Are there no cognitive functions that can override short-circuited destructive behavior that once conveyed an evolutionary advantage, but is not adaptive in our current environment?
Come on! Humans moved from the African savanna to virtually every region on Earth, creating new behaviors and social structures faster than new hard wiring could ever evolve. We are hard wired to conciously change our wiring!
Are there other interesting or attractive Joneses out there?
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Colin Wright Posted 1:23 pm
03 Feb 2008
But one aspect that I find missing in the discussions concerning status and human nature is the role of the Agricultural Revolution. What I'm getting at is that for millions of years we evolved in small groups with fluid hierarchy. To be sure, we may never unravel the role of sexual competition in forming our brains, but we all know something very unusual happened about 10,000 years ago when hunter-gatherers started being displaced by settler cultures. (Jared Diamond is perhaps the authority on this subject.)
The conventional story goes that agricultural surpluses led to the emergence of a much different hierachy, rigid and often enforced by violence. Civilization is the patina that overlies a much older "human nature". So here we are in the body of hunter-gatherers staring up at all those skyscrapers.
To get to my point here, as far as I know the bands of hunter-gatherers were fairly egalitarian and leadership was fluid, arising as necessary to temporarily motivate the band. (Not that sort of "band".) Sometimes I even fool myself that the people around me are really just a part of my tribe and that if I squint I can imagine my ancestors way back to the African plains. The whole "big man" phenomenon I think of as an artifact of our recent hierarchical mode of existence. Can we educate him out of existence?
A simple picture, to be sure. I await my guillotine.
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Jon Rynn Posted 1:51 pm
03 Feb 2008
Now, agriculture certainly led to hierarchical society, although it is unclear, to me at least, whether the first cities were so brutally hierarchical. This leads me to another point, which might not have much relevance here, but Thom Hartmann wrote several books on ADD, in which he speculated that ADD is what almost everybody had before agriculture, that is, you needed to be very aware of your environment and constantly ready to move when you hunted, but with the shift to agriculture they needed morons who could sit in the fields for hours taking insects off of grain (sort of like what happens in a modern day classroom). Which led to a dumbing-down, really.
So, to continue my free association here, it is interesting to note that the Basque people seem to have been in the Basque region for at least 5,000 years, that is, pre-agriculture, and maybe even back to cro-magnon times (think lascaux caves), so it is interesting that they have formed the most sophisticated worker coop system in the world in Mondragon.
What this all means, I'm not sure, but it may mean that the shift from agriculture to small-scale, technologically advanced forms of organic farming such as permaculture or Biointensive, combined with workplace democracy and decentralized energy and manufacturing production, could ease up on all the stinkin' macho/joneses/greed-related obsessions of the modern world. Ecotopia now, man!
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wiscidea Posted 2:13 pm
03 Feb 2008
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Jon Rynn Posted 2:42 pm
03 Feb 2008
I have a couple of articles on Mondragon and workplace democracy here and here;
then there's good ol' wikipedia on Mondragon, and google, of course
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Biodiversivist Posted 3:19 pm
03 Feb 2008
Same sex attractions have yet to be satisfactorily explained in evolutionary terms. That does not mean the theory of evolution is flawed, although I have trouble understanding what unholy union could have possibly spawned Ann Coulter.
Patrick,
"If evolution does not select for happiness, then why is it so important to us??"
The seeking of good feelings (happiness) is the carrot held out in front of us that we chase but never catch for long which keeps our genes moving into the future.
"Evolution doesn't seem to select for intelligence. Nor does it favor the wealthy. One could make a good argument that evolution favors peasants."
I think you hit three nails in a row. Evolution may no longer be selecting for certain aspects of intelligence. Wealthier people definitely no longer have more children. Individuals who successfully raise the most progeny will propel their genes into the future, be they peasants or Genghis Khan. It's simple math. It has been hypothesized that humanity has been domesticating itself for some time. We may be less aggressive and less intelligent than our recent wilder ancestors. Sounds like a move in the right direction to me. The present gene pool is destroying the planet.
What we see today are genes that evolved in a different environment but over time those genes are being changed by our new environment, human culture. Evolution never ends. We are not racing toward some pinnacle of perfection. Our genes simply change with their environment.
Jon,
I like that theory on ADD. Modern classrooms are a one size fits all environment. They are horrible places for kids wired to go and do. Makes me wonder if classrooms are not selecting against hands on, physically energetic, personalities.
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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Jon Rynn Posted 3:28 pm
03 Feb 2008
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Colin Wright Posted 4:57 pm
03 Feb 2008
In any case, Jared Diamond calls agriculture, the greatest mistake that humans ever made.
recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism,that curse our existence
Of course, that's all water under the bridge by now. I would in no way suggest that we can go back to the Pleisticene, as the Earth First! slogan went. I'm with you on the Ecotopia!
My only point was that to understand hierarchy and status today, one must realize that what we observe around us is a very forced circumstance where people have to compete for their bread and butter. Keeping up with the Jones, I claim, is an understandable survival mechanism, not an engrained biological trait.
In fact, I was just reading a book on Japan (by Patrick Smith) which illustrates the extent to which modern societies are still embedded in the feudal past. Did you know that most Japanese were not allowed surnames til after 1868? Here the author meets an unusual family:The Meboso's are as proud of their uncommon name as they are of their craft, which cannot be separated. In the sixteenth century their skill was such that the local daimyo, the feudal lord, let them take a surname and carry swords."An unusual honor. Almost no one of our status could have a name or a sword", said Tadayoshi Meboso...
To me, the quote makes the existential point that the roots of civilization lie in violence. Whether we can go beyond that is an open question.
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caniscandida Posted 8:03 pm
03 Feb 2008
Actually, whatever else we may think of elementary education in the US -- and I am not sure that heroizing and martyrizing the ADD kids is altogether helpful -- , we land ourselves straight back into gender stereotypes with the recent popular hypothesis, that traditional school very much favors the way girls learn, but is abusive and cruel to boys.
Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.
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stevenearlsalmony Posted 11:14 pm
03 Feb 2008
Ok. Here we go.
---Beginning thought experiment.
Imagine for a moment that you and I standing side by side, looking at a huge ocean wave, watching it move toward the shore. Think of a tsunami. The wave is moving toward us; however, at the same time, there are many molecules in the wave that are moving in the opposite direction, against the tide. If we observe that the propagation of the global human population is like the wave, and the reproduction numbers of individuals are like the molecules in the wave, it may be inaccurate for the latter to be looked at as if it tells us something meaningful about the former.
Abundant research indicates that countries like Australia, Italy, and Tunisia, among many others, have recently shown a decline in human population growth. These geographically localized data of what individuals are doing need not blind us to overwhelming facts that the absolute global population is still growing and may reach 12 billion by the end of this century. Earth Policy Institute data from February 2005 indicate that global numbers will be above 9 billion by 2050. Think of the world's total human population as a wave and individual reproduction numbers as molecules.
Put another way, data of human species propagation and evidence of reproduction numbers among individuals, even in many places, may be pointing in different directions.
Choosing the scope of observation is like deciding to look at either the forest or the individual trees, at either the wave or its molecules. Try to recognize that the global challenge before us is a species propagation problem, in a way unrelated to individual or "molecular" numbers.
For too long a time, human population growth has been viewed as being somehow outside the course of nature. The possible reasons behind our population's growth rate and skyrocketing numbers have seemed complex, obscure, numerous, or even unknowable, so that a strategy to address what could be a clear and present danger has been thought to be all but impossible to develop, let alone implement. To have suggested, as many scientists have done, that understanding the dynamics of human population does not matter, that the human population problem is not about numbers, or that human population dynamics have so dizzying an array of variables as not to be suitable for scientific investigation, in a way seems not quite right. New and apparently unforeseen scientific evidence has made it possible for us to grasp human population dynamics as a natural phenomenon and to liberate vital understanding of skyrocketing global population growth from the realm of the preternatural.
Today, we have empirical research regarding a non-recursive biological problem that is independent of ethical, social, legal, religious, and cultural considerations. This means human population dynamics are essentially similar to, not different from, the population dynamics of other species. It also means that world human population growth is a rapidly cycling positive feedback loop, a relationship between food and population in which food availability drives global population growth, and population growth fuels the misperception, the mistaken impression, that food production needs to be increased even more. The data indicate that as we increase food production and food improve food distribution capabilities every year, the number of people goes up, too.
With every passing year, as food production is increased, leading to a population increase, millions go hungry. Why are those hungry millions not getting fed year after year after year... and future generations of poor people may not ever be fed? Every year the human population grows. All segments of it grow. Every year there are more people growing up well fed and more people growing up hungry. The hungry segment of the global population goes up just like all the other segments of the population. We are not bringing hunger, much less starvation, to an end by increasing food production; the scientific evidence unexpectedly indicates that we are 'producing' more and more hungry people.
Is there any doubt in your mind that there are more human beings on Earth going hungry today than, let us say, 200 years ago or in the 1950, if you like?
Good scientific evidence indicates that there are more people existing in our time on resources valued at less than two dollars per day than were alive on Earth in 1950.
Perhaps a new biological understanding is emerging with research of Russell P. Hopfenberg, Ph.D., and David I. Pimentel, Ph.D., regarding the human overpopulation of Earth in Century XXI. It is simply this: human population numbers, as is the case with other species, are primarily a function of food availability. More available food equals more people; less available food equals less people; and no food equals no people. Although the human population "explosion" appears to be a huge problem, we can take the measure of it and find a remedy that is consonant with universally shared values.
---Ending thought experiment.
Sincerely,
Steve
Steven Earl Salmony, Ph.D., M.P.A.
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/
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amazingdrx Posted 1:10 am
04 Feb 2008
It mainly consists of constant correction of offspring with very little actual happiness. Let your guard down parents and give in to joy and you are headed down the slippery slope to chaos.
Unless you mainly enjoy duty, responsibility, and obligation, don't go there. Let the over population of the planet guide you.
If you still feel the need to get involved, try to pitch in and help the many troubled offspring of those who didn't take their responsibility seriously. Maybe 80% of children are raised without the constant correction needed.
That leaves them without the self control necessary for success. Teachers, coaches, drill instructors, mean bosses,and finally parole officers try to fill in, but it takes more.
To paraphrase Hillary, it takes a village..to raise a village idiot. Look how the ivy league village did it with duuuhbya.
Bribed through school, never left behind, then adopted by Saudis. How is that working out? Hehey.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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Jon Rynn Posted 1:48 am
04 Feb 2008
Jane Jacobs wrote "The economy of cities" in 1969, soon after the pioneering work of James Melaart (sp?) concerning the ancient city of Catal Huyuk, which at the time, I believe, was the oldest known city. I don't know whether the outlines have changed since then; but this is the basic sequence of the invention of agriculture, according to my interpretation of what she said:
The first towns/cities were trading centers, in her example, for obsidian, so that obsidian miners had someplace to bring the obsidian, hunters would come to trade for it -- trading meat and other edibles, and the city merchants would take a cut in the form, literally, of a cut of meat or plants. Craftsmen would also benefit from this, making leather bags, spears perhaps, etc.
The proto-city would also be a place that people might bring their live animals (easier to transport than dead ones), and their plants, etc., and so it was a fertile place to have this cornucopia of goods and animals, interbreeding in the case of plants, under observation by people in the cities, the whole big mess leading to innovations, such as breeding animals and planting cross-breeds. Once those things were figured out, then the ag tech was transferred back out of the city (a process that is constantly happening for manufacturing and other things), and thus agriculture in the mass sense was born.
cc -- As far as I can tell from listening to Thom Hartmann, he would be very sensitive to gender issues, but I think the bigger issue with education is the pathetic level of funding -- specifically, if private schools have about 15 students per classroom because that works best, public schools should too, and if that costs more, then take it out of the Pentagon budget. And pay teachers more, have more science/art/music classes, etc., eliminate national testing, etc.
It seems to me that theories about boys needing a different environment than girls is another in a long series of attempts to divert attention from the inadequate funding of the public schools (and by the way, someone made a mint on a series called "boxcar children", NYC dialects might come in handy for fiction, no?)
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caniscandida Posted 5:06 am
04 Feb 2008
But that is not at all to suggest that Peter Mellaart and Jane Jacobs were wrong. Probably there was always some planting and animal husbandry in most early urban or urbanizing settlements. But there is no necessity to found urbanization exclusively upon agriculture. Certainly it makes more sense to identify a city's function primarily as an emporium. And as a ceremonial center too, if I may grind my axe a bit: don't forget Art and Religion!; don't forget the impressive paintings and reliefs of the shrine at Catal Huyuk!
The Ancestral and Modern Puebloans seem to have tried to be self-sufficient on planting, hunting and gathering. But clearly long-distance trading, and travel for cultic purposes, were important too. Chaco Canyon in NW NM was the center of a vast network of roads; Hohokam settlements in south-central AZ have sunken ball-courts and pyramidal mounds, indicating cultural connexions with Mesoamerica; similarly the great Late Mogollon center at Paquime' (Casas Grandes) in Chihuahua, Mexico, shows similar Mesoamerican influences, as well as such trade items as macaws.
An archeologist at Paquime' told me of two remarkable features of that site: first, it has the most sophisticated system of aqueducts and sewers in the Americas; but second, there is no sign of a trash dump, which is inevitably found at any permanent settlement. So was that city used only intermittently, by people who arrived from much smaller distant settlements?
On the other hand, a common pattern among many of the nomadic Plains Indians is to make the rounds among a few camp sites, at at least one of which though they would spend enough time to do some planting.
In the Old World, a very interesting site near the Mediterranean is Petra, in Jordan, a Roman-period desert-edge city of the Nabataeans, Hellenized Arabs who spoke Aramaic and Greek in the course of trading around the Fertile Crescent. The site has some typical elements of a Greek city: a paved and colonnaded boulevard, temples, a theatre. Also there are the famous royal tombs cut into cliffs, with monolithic carved facades, one of the most celebrated of which was used as a set during the climactic scene of "Indiana Jones and the Holy Grail." A great curiosity of the place is that there are no signs of residential architecture. That rather suggests that the people who passed through there were Bedouins, who pitched elaborate tents during their visits, but did not build houses. Clearly that was a place where agriculture was neither possible on a large scale, nor required.
Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.
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Jon Rynn Posted 5:31 am
04 Feb 2008
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bookerly Posted 10:00 am
04 Feb 2008
Dear Steve,
You write so eloquently!! But, somehow, never address the point! If increased food production leads to increased population in humans, then why doesn't it?
Too zen a question? (Smile)
According to this logic, the countries with food surpluses should all have growing populations, but they don't!!
Usually, that indicates a need to sit down and see where we went wrong.... (smile). Unless it is a matter of some sort of religious belief (those who follow the cult of Quinn, for example), in that case, ummm, well... have a nice day!
patrick in Beijing
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bookerly Posted 10:06 am
04 Feb 2008
I am not a terribly traditional school teacher (in some ways, I am often criticized because my classes are too loud and rowdy, the kids too active).
Fix the schools, yes!!! But be careful not to wander down the path of modern schooling is all wrong if you don't have a clear cut alternative!!
(The demiecrats in californiyay joined up with the great cummincater ronnie raygun to agree that the mental health hospitals were horrible, they should be shut down and then later we would replace them with community based programs, YAY!!! Shut them down!!! ummm, say whatever happened to those community based programs we were gonna get ... oh, the money went to tax cuts for the rich??? WHA HAPPENED!!).
I bring this up, because there are a number of people running around attacking the very notion of public schooling as being part of some brainwashing system (if you never went to school, please raise your hand!), and it seems to me to be a dangerous trend...
patrick in Beijing
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bookerly Posted 10:12 am
04 Feb 2008
My ancestors ate yours. Hopefully my descendants won't be doing the same thing....
(LOL)
I would love to hear more about the cities and agriculture argument, it is a nice break from thinking about global warming!
But do we really have clear answers as to what happened? And don't we need to look at Indian and Chinese (and other!) models and examples?
After all humanity is not just that which devolved in Europe (grin).
Anyone who thinks agriculture and cities is a big mistake is welcome to head for the jungles and try to live using only their hands. Such a life was often disease ridden, women died very young after repeated child births, and well, a broken bone probably meant the end of you...
Not my fantasies...
patrick in Beijing
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Jon Rynn Posted 11:59 am
04 Feb 2008
Anyway, why not look at what private schools do? they have low class size. You obviously can't do a good job of teaching kids with 25, much less 35 kids in one class - make a 15-student class mandatory, not tests. so, forget about the national testing, the private schools don't do it, nobody ever seems to notice this. Put lots of funding into older kids tutoring younger kids. And increase teachers' pay by 50%, for starters.
This is pretty critical, because one of the main reasons for sprawl is that parents want their kids to go to "good" suburban schools (mine wasn't so hot, but anyway), and the city public schools need to be able to attract families back into the cities.
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Colin Wright Posted 4:35 pm
04 Feb 2008
I take it you didn't read the Diamond article or at least buy his arguments about the precariousness of our situation?
Hunter-gatherers practiced the most successful and longest lasting lifestyle in human history. In contrast, we're still struggling with the mess into which agriculture has tumbled us, and it's unclear whether we can solve it. Suppose that an archaeologist who had visited us from outer space where trying to explain human history to his fellow spacelings. He might illustrate the results of his digs by a twenty-four hour clock on which one hour represents 100,000 years of real past time. It the history of the human race began at midnight, then we would now be almost at the end of our first day. We lived as hunter-gatherers for nearly the whole of that day, from midnight through dawn, noon, and sunset. Finally, at 11:54 p.m., we adopted agriculture. As our second midnight approaches, will the plight of famine-stricken peasants gradually spread to engulf us all? Or will we somehow achieve those seductive blessings that we imagine behind agriculture's glittering facade and that have so far eluded us?
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spaceshaper Posted 9:24 pm
04 Feb 2008
Our current challenge is to combine our proven durability as a species with a much higher quality of life as individuals. It remains to be seen whether we will be successful: as you point out, we're still in the first few minutes of evaluation.
The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.
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stevenearlsalmony Posted 5:02 am
05 Feb 2008
If human beings evolved on this planet (i.e., did not descend from heaven or come here from another galaxy) and emerging human population data are somehow on the right track, then human population dynamics are common to the population dynamics of other species inhabiting Earth with us. Give us food and we will go forth and multiply. Producing and distributing ever larger quantities of food and then multiplying our numbers are two things we have been doing with spectacular success, especially for the past several hundred years. Humans have been so incredibly successful at developing food production and distribution capabilities that enough food has been made available worldwide to support a rising tide of humanity on Earth, now numbering between 6.6 and 6.7 billion people. Evidence of human numbers shows us that the world's human population is skyrocketing; recent data indicate that absolute human numbers increase by approximately 76 to 80 million people annually in recent years.
It may be that hubris and greed confuse human reasoning about the placement of humanity in the natural order of living things and about the way the world in which we live actually works. Perhaps, there is the rub. We have learned from good science that Earth is not the center of the Universe(Copernicus); that humanity is set upon a mere tiny orb in that Universe, among a sea of stars (Galileo); that such aspects of reality as the "Law" of Gravity the "Laws" of Thermodynamics affect all creatures of Earth, including human ones, equally (Newton, et als); that humans are an integral part of the natural evolutionary process (Darwin); and that we are partially unconscious of ourselves, occasionally mistake the illusory for what is real and, therefore, regularly have difficulty explaining both the way the world we inhabit works and the motivations for our own behavior. (Freud).
Now comes new and unexpected scientific evidence that appears to indicate simply that we are not controlling the population numbers of our own species as we believe we are. Moreover, the widely shared and consensually validated preternatural thinking is specious that indicates the rapid growth of absolute global numbers is going to end soon by somehow magically levelling off in 2050. Such an idea is borne of nothing more than wishful (in the sense of being insufficient 'scientific') thinking. The scientific evidence from Russell P. Hopfenberg, Ph.D., and David I. Pimentel, Ph.D., on human population dynamics and the human overpopulation of Earth calls out to us for careful consideration, rigorous examination, skillful interpretation and much open discussion. The implications of their unforeseen work appear to be profound.
How about taking another, more precise and thorough look at the scientific evidence from Hopfenberg and Pimentel, Patrick?
Comments are invited.
Sincerely
Steve
Steven Earl Salmony, Ph.D., M.P.A.
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/
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bookerly Posted 7:28 am
05 Feb 2008
Dear Steve,
You never address the issue, so this is my last try with you. I know who Pimentel is, he is a scientist respected for his bug work, but also has aligned himself with the nativist xenophobic anti-immigration movement.
Since I have no respect for any of them, I don't really care what illogic concerning human population they put out.
I spent a number of years working on population issues, and frankly, there are a number of organizations that claim to be about population, but who really talk about immigration, and aren't population people.
We don't seem to be having a discussion. Merely cross-asserting, which is okay, but becomes pointless.
If you want to "discuss", please show me where my logic is wrong.
In any case, happy year of the rat!
patrick in Beijing
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caniscandida Posted 7:35 am
05 Feb 2008
<<
Colin, if sustainability of the species is your only goal then pre-agricultural homo sapiens was indeed a durable model.
...
Our current challenge is to combine our proven durability as a species with a much higher quality of life as individuals.
>>
Yes. But, there is no such thing as "sustainability." It is a business term, not an ecological term, and environmentalists should drop it from their vocabulary.
"Durability" is much much better, in many places where "sustainability" is now short-sightedly used.
Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.
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bookerly Posted 7:38 am
05 Feb 2008
Dear Jon,
We are mostly in agreement on this issue. But we should be clear, that one of the critical connections between sprawl and schools was the desire of white parents to not have their children go to schools with black children.
More elephants in the room!!!
Will white families move back into cities if the schools contain black children in fairly large numbers? Evidence suggests that this is unlikely.
But certainly more money for schools, all schools everywhere is a good idea!!
In the South, a lot of white families have pulled their children out of schools, either for home schooling or to private academies. As they do so, their interest in funding and supporting public schools wanes.
Class size?? I volunteer at a school for the children of migrant workers, we have 50 kids in a class (many of the public schools in China do, it's one of the dynamics of developing countries!). It is too many.
The conservatives attack public education because in their hearts, many of them don't believe in it.
patrick in Beijing
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bookerly Posted 7:48 am
05 Feb 2008
Dear Colin,
Diamond never really impressed me.
The creatures with the longest and most successful lifestyle are bacteria. There are more of them, and they are hardier. So what? Do I want to be a bacteria? Do I envy them?
The hunter-gatherer lifestyle seems to have been eagerly abandoned by most people on the planet. There must be a reason. It took them a long time to find a way out, but by golly, they did!!
Diamond (and others) always seem to me to be romanticizing a past that I am not sure existed (in the way in which they describe it). It is an interesting intellectual exercise. My personal feeling is that it is much like the medieval fairs people participate in, great fun!! If I was a hunter-gatherer, I would probably be dead (too old). I prefer the alternatives (grin).
But I am not sure what the connection to issues like global warming and other modern environmental issues is. What would we do based on this information (if we believed it)? Is it in any way practical? How would it help us address our issues?
patrick in Beijing
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Jon Rynn Posted 9:22 am
05 Feb 2008
Patrick --
Well, I guess I didn't dive totally into it, but yes, race certainly seems to be an issue -- although people keep saying that the young are better on this, in the context of Obama discussions. As the husband of an African-American (I'm a nice jewish boy, in case you hadn't figured that out), and with two mixed sons, I certainly don't want to live in the kind of all white suburbs I grew up in (I wouldn't even if my family was all European-American). So, I really need to live in a place that is really diverse.
On the other side of the problem, it can even be the case that, as in Harlem, the rich (generally, although certainly not exclusively, white) are driving out the poorer African-Americans. So, I guess I would have to then tie the issue to full employment -- it seems that racism and sexism and homophobia come down when employers need people and are less able to discriminate, leading to better economic times for all, which seems to help. But certainly, living out in all-white suburbs does not help.
Steve -- Ultimately, ecologically-speaking, although this might sound picky, but what brings down an ecosystem is not necessarily overpopulation, but overuse of resources. Thus, the carrying capacity of an ecosystem is a necessary part of understanding how much of different species it can support. the problem in doing this is, we know how much deers need, or algae in a pond, or whatever, but we don't really know how much humans need in order to live comfortable lives, and so we don't know the sustainable -- oops, durable, or resilient -- number of people that could live on the planet. What we do know, however, from books like "Limits to Growth" or footprint research (Wackernagel, etc), is that if we continue to use the per capita resources we are using, the entire biosphere will collapse, even if global warming was not a problem.
So I tend to think of the problem not as a population problem, but as a problem of the destruction of ecosystems, or their maintenance.
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spaceshaper Posted 10:40 am
05 Feb 2008
I chose the word durable to describe our species' track record to date because we are not a system or enterprise in that sense. Our bodies may be described as a physiological system, but it is not one which we designed or can control: it is our institutions that may be described as sustainable (or not), rather than ourselves. As a species, we have proved ourselves, so far, both durable and robust. We are inventive omnivores, capable of turning an amazing variety of organic materials into foodstuffs by exercising the external processing skills with which we are uniquely gifted (we are "the ape that cooks". We have shown ourselves capable of adapting almost any physical environment found on the face of our home planet to support our physiological needs.
Our fatal flaw, the ultimate chink in our durable armor, may actually prove to be that very adaptive genius. Our adaptive mechanical skills seem to be in danger of surpassing our ability to devise, yes, sustainable systems with which to harness and manage them. This is something on which environmentalists should have plenty to say.
The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.
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Colin Wright Posted 4:03 pm
05 Feb 2008
But Diamond is a peer-reviewed and respected anthropologist who refutes the notions you put forth:
As population densities of hunter-gatherers slowly rose at the end of the ice ages, bands had to choose between feeding more mouths by taking the first steps toward agriculture, or else finding ways to limit growth. Some bands chose the former solution, unable to anticipate the evils of farming, and seduced by the transient abundance they enjoyed until population growth caught up with increased food production. Such bands outbred and then drove off or killed the bands that chose to remain hunter-gatherers, because a hundred malnourished farmers can still outfight one healthy hunter. It's not that hunter-gatherers abandoned their life style, but that those sensible enough not to abandon it were forced out of all areas except the ones farmer didn't want.
The point is not to romanticise hunter-gatherers, but to use science to the best of our ability to learn lessons from the past. (And science could eventually prove Diamond wrong).
For instance, according to many, including some of Jon's references above, we are in ecological overshoot. The idea that we may be putting the lives of millions of people in jeopardy because we do recognize this is an idea that has trouble getting traction in modern society. As well as delving into the roots of racism, Diamond here offers us a cautionary tale -- that we are caught in a viscious cycle of increasing agricultural yields to feed growing populations. In an era of depleting fertilizer sources, I, for one, am extremely worried. It's not that I think we can "play make-believe in the past" that I think history and anthrology is important.
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caniscandida Posted 4:37 pm
05 Feb 2008
If you were paying attention (ha ha!, I know it is impossible to read everything, no matter how wonderful; ha ha!), in the thread following the latest "This Week in Ocean News," I said as much in a comment on a promising-looking pisciculture project in North Carolina.
But as soon as we start looking at larger and more complex interrelated and conjoined activities, which might give the appearance of being "systems" but are in fact unpredictable and unmanageable, a` la Jurassic Park, e.g. "sustainable ag," to which Tom Philpott referred in a recent post, we deceive ourselves when we suggest that they are "sustainable."
And so it broke my heart, not long ago, when my very favorite Gristmill contributor, Sarah van Schagen, quondam Pirate Queen, referred to something or other, of no great interest or value, as being "sustainable," as easy as forcing a scalliwag to walk the plank. Aargh!!!
Or, better, consider this: A distinguished, learned, highly literate commenter to Gristmill writes in the same paragraph four engaging clauses beginning with "we":
"we are not a system ... ";
"we have proved ourselves ... ";
"We are inventive omnivores ... ";
"(we are the ape that cooks. ... [sic]."
We cannot help but notice that in the fourth instance, which begins with an "open" parenthesis, the same distinguished writer does not close the clause with a required, balancing, "closing" parenthesis.
That would generally not be a problem. But when we are asked to place confidence in the concept of "sustainability," it is a huge problem. by such minor, easily neglectable problems with openings and closings as that, we end up with a state of affairs such as this:
a. the bugs have got in;
b. the bugs are reproducing;
c. the bugs are ruining the experiment;
d. the bugs are eating the experiment;
d. the bugs are eating the walls of the experiment;
...
n. the bugs are eating the experimenters.
So, no thank you, kind sir, I do not trust your "sustainability," no matter how well intentioned.
Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.
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caniscandida Posted 5:07 pm
05 Feb 2008
It is a very good argument, I think, so far as it goes, though it does not go too deep, and anyway I may not present it well: There is no such thing as sustainability, because nothing can be sustained, because nothing WILL be sustained: "WILL" implying constant, omniscient, omnipotent human effort.
Ha!, human beings! We know what THEY're like, don't we.
The far deeper argument is in fact rather simpler: There is no such thing as sustainability, because nothing CAN be sustained, period. It is in the very nature of things, including systems of things, to perish.
The simple obvious truth that "There is no such thing as sustainability" means that to suggest that there is such a thing as sustainability is a kind of lie. And that is why I am so furiously opposed to the use of the word.
Environmentalists are no different than other human beings, basically. They do not like being lied to, and they do not deserve to be lied to.
My hunch is that most environmentalists rather approve of Neo's decision, to take Morpheus's blue pill, and see things as they are; and dislike the choice of Cypher, to carry on selfishly with the illusion of the Matrix.
And the illusion of "sustainability" as a doable environmentalist goal is about as cruel as you can get: it amounts to another form of the denial of death.
Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.
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bookerly Posted 6:52 pm
05 Feb 2008
Dear Colin,
I have read the essay. Note that the starving band who chose agriculture were people too (and by your own admission, a majority!). Diamonds idea that those who stuck with hunting-gathering were somehow more noble or better, is a value judgment, not what I would call a scientific explanation.
(We have a lot of these in modern science, it seems to me!)
He could have said "The leaders of the modernists looked at the situation and determined that the best way to feed the majority of their people (which responsible leaders should care about) was to adopt these new agricultural ideas. A few stubborn reactionaries insisted that everyone remain hunter-gatherers even if it meant that most people would starve. They were shunned, driven away, or killed. (In any case, they eventually died out.)"
Perspective.
As to the idea that we are increasing agricultural yields to feed our growing population, well, yes we are. What other choices do we have?
patrick in Beijing
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bookerly Posted 7:00 pm
05 Feb 2008
Dear CanisCandida,
Your attack on this word has been very interesting. I hope that it is not reflective on any health problems for you or yours!!!
It is certainly true that ultimately nothing is sustainable. But there is a "relative sustainability, which will buy us some time to figure out other answers" and "absolutely unsustainable even in a very short term, which will cause us to self-destruct in no short order".
Science in our modern era (and perhaps historically, you might know better than I) is often given to grand pronouncements for public relations purposes.
Is this good or bad? Was King Canute right or wrong? I don't know. But, no matter how eloquently your rage against the changing of the language, it seems to me that you are as likely to stop the tides.
Somehow I sense a deeper purpose behind this. What, Dear CanisCandida, are you trying to tell us?
patrick in Beijing
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spaceshaper Posted 8:07 pm
05 Feb 2008
And when fate summons, Monarchs must obey."
I believe I was sixteen or so when I came across these memorable words (John Dryden, opening lines of "Mac Flecknoe"). I have no illusions of permanence in our human systems, simple or complex, and I have to disagree that any use of the word sustainability implies such. If I may quote from my earlier post, here's a reiteration of the working definition as I see it in its relevance to environmentalist thought:
That is, we want [the systems] to be continuable for some reasonable period of time without prematurely depleting the resources on which they depend.
A definition like this of course begs the questions of what is a reasonable period of time and what constitutes premature depletion. Seven human generations has been offered by some as a reasonable timeframe for such decisions, and I would not argue with that.
Thank you for pointing out my failure to close my parenthesis above. If I were as omnipotent on GristMill as our esteemed DR I would go back and fix it. Systems can be correctable, if they are so designed!
The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.
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spaceshaper Posted 8:26 pm
05 Feb 2008
As population densities of hunter-gatherers slowly rose at the end of the ice ages, bands had to choose between feeding more mouths by taking the first steps toward agriculture, or else finding ways to limit growth. Some bands chose the former solution, unable to anticipate the evils of farming, and seduced by the transient abundance they enjoyed until population growth caught up with increased food production. Such bands outbred and then drove off or killed the bands that chose to remain hunter-gatherers, because a hundred malnourished farmers can still outfight one healthy hunter. It's not that hunter-gatherers abandoned their life style, but that those sensible enough not to abandon it were forced out of all areas except the ones farmer didn't want.
Sweeping generalizations aside (was this true of all such cultural adjustments, everywhere?) how could Diamond possibly know all that? Peer-reviewed or not, I'd be suspicious of a text so spattered with words like "chose" "seduced" "sensible enough" describing anthropological assumptions of human thought processes in a period as recent as the nineteenth century, let alone in distant pre-history. A large part of this has got to be conjecture, not science.
Anyone ever read that classic text beloved of archeologists: "The Motel of the Mysteries"?
The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.
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caniscandida Posted 9:15 pm
05 Feb 2008
I am not at all surprised that thoughtful people such as yourself and Patrick should see through the false promises of "sustainability."
But 210 years ("seven generations," counting a generation generously as thirty years) strikes me as goofily artificial. What happens on New Year's Eve of the last year? Everybody parties like it's 1999?
The very concept of "resources" is perilous. Sure, we necessarily "resort" to certain of the contents of the natural world in order to survive. But simply to classify them as controllable, possessable objects, rightly and naturally subject to human dominion, looks a bit questionable.
As I have said before, by the way, I have no objection to applying "sustainable" to narrow, and narrowly understood, economic systems. But the word is no longer appropriate, once the manageability and predictability of a system's elements are out of control. And worse, it is most disgracefully abused, when it is applied to huge chunks of lifestyle, as a sales pitch, targeting people much less thoughtful than you, who have no conception of the meaning of the passage of time.
Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.
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spaceshaper Posted 9:45 pm
05 Feb 2008
I will continue to believe that sustainable and sustainability are useful words and useful constructs with which to describe and examine both small/simple and large/complex human systems.
The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.
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caniscandida Posted 9:55 pm
05 Feb 2008
Patrick,
the reason I dislike the use of "sustainable" and "sustainability," outside of technical unreadable papers passed around amongst economists and businessfolk, is that I dislike being lied to. And I dislike even more that people whom I love are lied to.
Thank you for inquiring after our health. I am no more dyspeptic than usual. My husband has high blood pressure, which worries me; but it seems to have done him good, to cheer last night at the apparent discomfiture of Barack Obama, the shmarmy "cool kids'" favorite.
(Yes: have you noticed how Obama is acquiring an elitist cooler-than-thou air?)
I am glad, and not surprised, that you understand that "sustainability" must be qualified by "relative." Unfortunately, it is not at all clear that many are quite up to your level of thoughtfulness.
I am confident that you at least appreciate the deficiencies of the American (Californian?) fantasy-cult of perpetual life, health, youth, beauty and sex, which needless to say has a great deal to do with American (by no means exclusively Californian!) consumerism.
Since you say you suspect that I have some "deeper purpose," it is not directly a concern about consumerism -- that is the business of all you other Gristmillerists. It is more a concern for what people think, and value, dreading that they be deceived by a false promise that such-and-such an activity is "sustainable," when in fact there is no such thing as sustainability.
It surprises me that you are reluctant to pass judgment on "grand pronouncements for public relations purposes." I might have thought you would be captain of the guard!
Of course I know that I have no influence whatsoever on anything so huge as linguistic usage. King Canute is a hero of mine, actually. Nevertheless, so long as I can protest an injustice and decry a danger, God give me strength that I may.
By contrast, Xerxes had the Hellespont flogged, for daring to break his pontoon bridge to Europe. I do not think I am quite that bad, not yet anyway. : )
Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.
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caniscandida Posted 10:10 pm
05 Feb 2008
And the simple truth is, sustainability does not and cannot exist. Therefore your comparison to beauty, truth and religion makes little sense to me, because those things most certainly exist.
Mind you, ASPIRING to sustainability is a great and good thing, and highly to be encouraged, asymptotic as it might be. That is why I like such words as aspirationality, durability and prolongability, in preference to the false and deceptive sustainability.
Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.
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LegumeSam Posted 10:38 pm
05 Feb 2008
I have no objection to applying "sustainable" to narrow, and narrowly understood, economic systems. But the word is no longer appropriate, once the manageability and predictability of a system's elements are out of control.
With all due respect --
The word sustainability is often meant to mean that a practice is "sustainable" until we can no longer "sustain" it -- thus "clean coal" is ostensibly "sustainable" because its promoters think they will be able to run "clean coal" power plants for longer than power plants burning coal of the dirty kind. It is indeed a service to truth to be skeptical of such claims of "sustainability."
Yet the whole matter of "sustainability" does not gain its real focus from economic systems. Most economic systems, in this day and age, are capitalist systems, and will therefore run into the contradiction between an infinitely hungry desire for accumulation that we call "capital," and which runs capitalist systems, and a limited planetary carrying capacity, a limited planetary ability to satisfy capital as "natural resources." Going into outer space for more resources will do the capitalists no good, as 100% of the working class can be found only on one planet, and as capital needs the working class to perform its labor and to buy the products it appropriates from that labor. Marx's Capital had it right in this respect -- capital subsists upon the appropriation of a surplus from wage labor.
"Sustainability," rather, is a term appropriately used to describe biological systems, or, more precisely, ecosystems. The idea that nothing is sustainable because death is in the order of things is, from the perspective of ecology, too simplistic. Within an ecosystem, individuals may die, but the species lives on; and even if species die, the ecosystem itself adapts to the death of species and other changes in conditions. From this ecological perspective, ecosystems, being adaptable, can be regarded as "sustainable" over the long run (i.e. millions of years; the eventual destruction of all life on Earth by a warming sun about a billion years from now need not have any meaning for us in the context of this discussion).
What brings "sustainability" into question, from the ecological perspective, is the behavior of human beings in endangering ecosystem resilience around the world. Ecosystem resilience, perhaps a more accurate term than "sustainability" at this point in history, can be defined as the ability of whole ecosystems to adapt to changes in condition. When we humans chop down forests, foul the atmosphere with our oil- and coal-burning, fish the oceans empty, and so on, we make Earth's ecosystems more fragile, thus making ecosystem collapse (and thus mass death) more likely.
Now, to complement the sustainability of ecosystems, human beings will at some point have to develop a global society that is itself sustainable. What would that mean? Well, the term "sustainability" would have to apply to the whole society, and not any particular person, place, or thing within that society in itself. To have a sustainable society, then, means having a society which can provide for the subsistence of its members without significantly altering the resilience of the ecosystems upon which it depends. This is something our global society needs to do which it isn't doing, and in light of that, the term "sustainability" still has some meaning.
Now, when our society uses "sustainability" in the ecological sense, it is often meant to apply to things which are merely prefigurative of sustainability. Prefiguration, however, is a mere promotion of the possibility of a future, global, ecologically sustainable society. So, for instance, solar power is not itself a "sustainable" energy source, as the panels will eventually fail to work given enough time, but solar power panels themselves serve as "prefigurations," as promotions of the idea of a future, global, ecologically sustainable society.
Does that clear things up about "sustainability" any?
http://www.dailykos.com/User/Cassiodorus
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caniscandida Posted 11:51 pm
05 Feb 2008
Of course I was never thinking exclusively of the mortality of the individual, though that is the most important level of discussion, especially when we are exhorted all the time to "live sustainably," whatever that means -- to say nothing of "making sustainability sexy." I have no real problem with your application of the term to ecology, and specifically to the description of ecosystems. But it seems odd to refer to the same ecosystem "sustaining" itself after radical evolutionary changes in, say, geology, climate and species. Anyway, all life on Earth, and the parts of the Earth in which organisms exist, can surely be called a "system," which has "sustained" itself for over three billion years now -- but obviously that does not make it "sustainable," "world without end."
That is indeed an interesting image, though, of the old-fashioned concept of sustainability of the extraction industries -- suck out all the "resource" and "product" from one place, then pick up and move to another: lather, rinse, repeat -- moving into outer space, and beginning to exploit the Moon and the asteroids (for starters!). Science fiction writers have already thought of some implications of creating a robotic slave-class. So has the US military, for that matter.
Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.
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spaceshaper Posted 8:05 am
06 Feb 2008
The alternatives offered by Caniscandida, aspirationality, durability and prolongability, I find deeply unsatisfactory as substitutes. The first describes what we might hope for without addressing the cost: the second, durability, is another quality altogether (a Humvee is extremely durable, especially if it sits unused in the garage as rising oil prices and growing awareness of pollution problems makes its use unsustainable as a quotidien means of personal transportation), prolongability simply describes how long something may be made to continue, again without addressing the cost. Coal-fired electricity may prove to be extremely prolongable if industry lobbyists manage to make it so, at the same time as it destroys our climate.
Sustainability is without question temporal, not eternal, and I agree that very often in these discussions the timeframe is elided or assumed. An old farmer's saying in the sturdily nonconformist region where I grew up ran "Live as if you would die tomorrow, farm as if you would farm forever". None actually expected to farm forever, or die tomorrow, the "as if" speaks to the attitude of mind, and "forever" stands service for "beyond the next harvest or two". So also the native american "seven generations" to which I referred earlier is not any literal period of time but speaks to a horizon beyond the present and our preoccupation with our immediate needs. In present environmental discussions that sustainability timeframe might be fifty years for a PV cell or a thousand or more for nuclear, depending on context. It certainly needs to run well beyond a corporation's annual report to shareholders, and beyond the CEO's golden handshake and stock option expiration date. These are things we need to fix, and sustainability is the analytical construct we can use to consider the cost and duration of cost, the benefit and the duration of benefit, to bring those needed perspectives into focus.
The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.
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bookerly Posted 12:38 pm
06 Feb 2008
Would be a good name for an Indie rock band, one that records one hit then disappears.
Okay, I pretty much agree with what everyone is saying about the word, it's uses, misuses, and position as a quasi-religious icon. And while I usually am willing to go after bad language (the 2008 presidential campaign speeches are able to make me feel ill), in this case, I fear confusing a public that is already not paying attention.
The problem lies not in ourselves, but in the general publics perception. They (and I am imagining here) see it as a word that means "solution", "problem solved". While this is certainly not true, we run into the hair shirt vs. hope dilemma.
If we spend too much time trying to explain the problems with the word sustainable, we end up both confusing and disheartening folks.
(Of course, we could just hit them over the head with our clubs and drag them kicking and screaming into reality!)
It has become a word, that is a slogan, a mantra for "a better future", and we all want that, don't we? (grin)
As usual, English changes right before our very eyes!! (grin)
I support Spaceshapers ideas about the alternatives. We are having a hard enough time trying to convince people that something needs to be done without changing our language usage mid-campaign!!
I suspect that by November we will have all three (or four) presidential campaigns claiming that their ideas are the most sustainable, meanwhile President Idiot will sign the "Sustainable Coal And Nuclear Power Boondoggle" of 2008.
patrick in Beijing
PS. While I did enjoy the movie "Mongol", I was watching a version with only partial subtitles. I have since discovered that many Mongolians feel that it distorts both Mongolian culture and history, and that most of the actors and actresses were non-Mongolian. This is new information to me...
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LegumeSam Posted 2:17 pm
06 Feb 2008
Does this bring "sustainability" into clearer focus? One of the main points of using the jargon of "sustainability," despite routine denunciations of vagueness and excessive terminological plasticity, is to create "indexes of unsustainability" for cities. Cities are not sustainable, and the way they aren't sustainable is interesting in terms of ecosystem resilience. The unsustainability of present-day urban life is a large part of, for instance, the world-society's 85 million bbl./day crude oil consumption habit. Various depletion phenomena have been predicted to come of this habit; for instance, "Peak Oil," a stage in which the world-civilization's ability to operate a civic society dominated by multinational corporations (and surrounded by rapidly growing slums) is dogged by high energy prices and lowering energy supplies, or "abrupt climate change," in which drastic changes in weather pattern kill off Planet Earth as an amplification of the various efforts to bulldoze Planet Earth into "civilization."
We need the word "sustainability," then, because we need to measure "unsustainability," to minimize the risk of bad environmental outcomes. Don't you think?
http://www.dailykos.com/User/Cassiodorus
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caniscandida Posted 5:06 pm
06 Feb 2008
Thanks also for "ecosystem resilience," another valuable concept.
Cf. the famous "river logion" of the Ionian philosopher Heraclitus, of the early 5th century BCE: "You cannot step into the same river twice, because more and more new water keeps flowing."
Also, the paradox of the Ship of Theseus, as set forth in the Penguin Dictionary of Philosophy, s.v. "ship repairs":
<<
The ship by which Theseus, the semi-mythical [sic!] hero of ancient Athens, accomplished his rescue mission was put on public display in Athens, and as the need arose, new planks, boards, sails, ropes, etc. replaced the old, until one day none of the original parts of the ship remained. Is this repaired ship still the same ship?
The story occurs in Plutarch's Lives (Life of Theseus 22-3). In Hobbes's De corpore (2,2) a further question is raised: suppose that all the old planks, boards, etc. were preserved and eventually combined into a ship, like the original one. Is this restored ship still the same ship?
>>
So why not raise yet another question: Is the Ship of Theseus "sustainable"?
Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.
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caniscandida Posted 5:09 pm
06 Feb 2008
Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.
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caniscandida Posted 5:15 pm
06 Feb 2008
I would like very much to see "Mongol." My guess is it is no less accurate -- not that accuracy is the only relevant virtue! -- than Kevin Costner's "Dances With Wolves." In that movie, all the Native American characters were played by Native American actors; but that was in effect rather like a Pole playing a Spaniard, and saying that a European character was played by a European actor. There is a fascinating special feature on the DVD, about the Lakota woman whose job it was to teach Lakota to the non-Lakota Native American actors.
Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.
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caniscandida Posted 5:30 pm
06 Feb 2008
And, like old King Canute, I am picking up my beach chair, my pail and my shovel, all made, I fear, from "unsustainable" materials, and flip-flopping up the sand to that well-loved pub, Grendel's Dam, where a flagon of akvavit/Campari is awaiting.
Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.
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caniscandida Posted 6:28 pm
06 Feb 2008
"Sostenuto," and "sustained lift" in weight-lifting (a term with which I am unfamiliar, but I think I understand, and have in fact done as much, back in the day), do very well to illustrate how "sustainability," implying constant and unquestioned human will and power, is dangerously misleading, when it refers to the aspirational state of affairs envisioned and promoted by us environmentalists. Human beings can NEVER be relied on, either to will, or to be able. To deny that fact is a gross failure of humility. And we would do well to begin cultivating humility, before we can hope to get very far cultivating asymptotic sustainability.
The abstract nouns "aspirationality," "durability" and "prolongability," I admit, were not carefully thought out to be easily switched for any instance of "sustainability" in any particular document. More important by far are the fine connotations of those words, which I miss when "sustainability" is baldly, publicly, ignorantly, commercially used.
I think I understand well enough your objection with "aspirationality." (But cf. David Roberts's post "Aspirational Green.")
I am not sure I understand your quibble with "durability." (And by the way, "Humvee" I think is the official-issue military vehicle in, e.g., Iraq, while the somewhat smaller, totally inappropriate, utterly disgraceful suburban knock-off is called a "Hummer." But as though to prove that Justice is fleeting in this world of ours, their advertising company makes gloriously beautiful TV ads.)
But I think you are quite wrong in dismissing "prolongability" as you do. Why could we not switch "sustainable" for "prolongable" in your sentence beginning "Coal-fired electricity"?
Anyway, as I said, those words are matters of lesser importance.
Your final paragraph is very beautiful. Thank you for sharing the wisdom of those farmers, your ancestors! Thanks also for pointing out the Native American origin of "seven generations," which I did not know.
And, if I have not thanked you before for your excellent sign-off, about the "true meaning of life," then I have been too long delinquent, too long a thief, for I always am delighted to see it.
But see?, there you are! How many environmentalists are so generous, so self-effacing, even self-sacrificing, regarding what they do, and the centrality of their relationships, both with their contemporaries, and with those who are to come? It is your vocation to teach them something about that. And it is perhaps my vocation to afflict you until you do so! : )
Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.
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stevenearlsalmony Posted 9:14 pm
06 Feb 2008
That is to say, has human thinking, judging and willing become so grievously and perniciously impaired by our idolatry of the artificially designed, manmade global economy that we cannot see or speak about anything else except economic growth and profits without sounding like blithering idiots?
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spaceshaper Posted 11:31 pm
06 Feb 2008
That the initial answers may be self-interestedly mendacious or diversionary is hardly surprising, and it is our job as an alert population to probe, query and discover the truth. Sustainability advocates have been working assiduously for some years now to promote a clear understanding of the disciplined framework for that analysis which includes, I repeat, a full accounting of the financial, social and environmental costs of any particular activity. And that sounds most worthwhile to me.
The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.
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LegumeSam Posted 11:43 pm
06 Feb 2008
Sustainability is only a meaningful quality of systems.
http://www.dailykos.com/User/Cassiodorus
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Jon Rynn Posted 1:14 am
07 Feb 2008
So it is which much modern machinery and artifacts; the important consideration is the structure and material (and humans recycle their protein every 7 years, I believe). The relevance of all this, is that the structure of the civilization that we construct should be "sustainable", that is, it should be able allow its inhabitants to live comfortably for an indefinite period of time without destroying ecosystems.
The word (or phrase?) I had generally been using before engaging mostly in environmental writing was "long-term", because the society is pretty much attuned to short-term consideration. In other words, the problem is the time frame. But when we use the word "sustainable", it really should mean that, keeping our major ecosystems (and climate?) relatively constant, the civilization should be able to continue indefinitely with the same structure. Of course, you could use something a little less abstract, like a sustainable civilization will not create the conditions for the virtual destruction of the biosphere.
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spaceshaper Posted 8:32 am
07 Feb 2008
I think I agree with this, if I understand it correctly. My one caveat would be that in seeking a stable overall structure we must not deceive ourselves that the systems within it will be similarly stable and fixed. Change, after all, is the only reliable and predictable constant, and sustainable human systems have to be adjustable to meet changing needs and conditions. A simple example: breakthroughs in medical technology suddenly make it possible for most humans to live two hundred years. Our previously sustainable social welfare systems are abruptly rendered totally inadequate. It will be the structure which must reliably provide the appropriate controls for the profound systems changes which will be required and the systems which must be open to that change.
The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.
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Jon Rynn Posted 8:41 am
07 Feb 2008
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Colin Wright Posted 1:42 pm
07 Feb 2008
Conversely, strong sustainability, as supported by Herman Daly, holds the view that natural capital and man-made capital are only complementary at best. In order for sustainable development to be achieved, natural capital has to be kept constant independently from man-made capital. This is known as the 'non-substitutability paradigm'. Advocates of weak sustainability thus make a categorical error. So, for instance, and according to Daly, it makes no sense to substitute man-made capital, in the form of fishing boats, for natural capital, in the form of fish stocks, and the attempt to do so usually ends in ecological disaster.
No doubt other distinctions will emerge in the years ahead (until the terminology becomes sufficiently obtuse). But that could be a sign we're beginning to win!
Incidentally, one of my favorite quotes on sustainability comes from Joseph Stiglitz: "that which is not sustainable will not be sustained."
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Jon Rynn Posted 2:39 pm
07 Feb 2008
1. Renewable resources such as fish, soil, and groundwater must be used no faster than the rate at which they regenerate.
2. Nonrenewable resources such as minerals and fossil fuels must be used no faster than renewable substitutes for them can be put into place.
3. Pollution and wastes must be emitted no faster than natural systems can absorb them, recycle them, or render them harmless.
from Herman Daly, the ecological economist.
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ImagesAndAdjectives Posted 1:34 am
08 Feb 2008
I really don't care about keeping up with those Joneses anymore, because their lifestyle bores me. I see the shallowness and emptiness of getting excited over purchasing a new SUV or a HD TV, or buying a bigger house they don't need, or showing off their fancy digs to all their friends and neighbors. These friends seem unhappy and unfulfilled, and the stress of maintaining and keeping up makes them ill all the time.
We can't change people by preaching. The best we can do is lead by example and perhaps answer questions or express the joy we felt when we went hiking or saw a moose, or experienced deep silence in the wilderness.
We can also blog, post messages, and let everyone know there are many, many of us out there who not only don't care about those Joneses, but we are already walking down a different street.
changingourparadigm.blogspot.com
Margaret E.
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Jon Rynn Posted 1:40 am
08 Feb 2008
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wiscidea Posted 2:32 am
08 Feb 2008
Nothing is sustainable. Embrace change.
[Though the thread in question has apparently evolved to the point where it is able to sustain itself. Very robust. Very flexible. I'm impressed.]
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caniscandida Posted 7:55 pm
08 Feb 2008
<<
Nothing is sustainable. Embrace change.
>>
Amen! Or, as BioD would put it, Word!
Which does not at all mean that we should just lie down before the forces of destruction, and that we should not zealously pretend that sustainability, as the environmentalists seem to mean it, is possible.
Thanks to Colin and Jon for highlighting the Wikipedia articles. Given all we know about history, anthropology and psychology, can we really believe that the "Daly Rules" might ever actually be followed?
Nor does at least one of the literal terms of the Rules convince us that it is practical. Treating fish as a "natural resource" is mighty questionable. We do not know enough about ecosystems of which fish are a part to be able to quantify and make predictions so easily. And assuming that human beings will always need to depend on the killing of fish for their existence contributes to the very moral corrosion that has as one of its most visible effects the destruction of the biosphere which all environmentalists in fact lament.
More practically, Jon makes the admirable recommendation of putting such unique areas of diverse living creatures as forests and fish nurseries "off limits," so that ecosystems "can do their thing." Well said!
(And that rather reminds me of the very cute thing that Barack Obama said Tuesday night: He thanked Michelle, and explained that their daughters preferred not to be present at that big event with all those grown-ups, so they were upstairs, "doing what they do." I adopted the expression at once, describing Little Dog, snoozing and curled up under the coffee table, as "doing what she does." I must say, I felt much better about Obama because of that, than I did from watching that ridiculous, bullying DipDive video. Perhaps Jon, the new Chicagoan, with young ones of his own, understands.)
Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.
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caniscandida Posted 8:39 pm
08 Feb 2008
yes, comprendo bien, sustainability is a quality of systems. By "Ship of Theseus," I understood (without making it clear -- sorry!) a system including an observant group of museum curators, with an unvarying will to restore every failing part of the ship, and with unfailing access to both lumber and craftsmen.
And my strong suspicion is that neither will nor resources can be counted on to persist. So, we might say that the Ship of Theseus is in principle sustainable, but practically is not.
Jon,
your explanation of Aristotle's Material Cause is OK so far as it goes, but there are complicating circumstances. The material may have value ascribed to it, because of its associations.
E.g., in another celebrated ship of Greek mythology, the Argo, in which the hero Jason, accompanied by his crew of even more heroic Argonauts, sailed to Colchis to fetch the Golden Fleece and his deadly exotic bride Medea, it is said in one version that the goddess Hera communicated with Jason through a (presumably carved and figured) piece of the stern, in which she made her voice to be heard. Now, if the Argo were preserved in a museum, like the Ship of Theseus, and if its pieces were replaced one by one, no replacement of the piece of stern through which Hera spoke could ever be accepted as the "same thing."
The cult of relics, of various kinds, in many ancient Christian denominations including Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism, is related to that. But I believe Buddhism has similar regard to body parts with a story: Is that not what stupas are all about? And is there not a tooth of the Buddha preserved in Sri Lanka?
More scientifically, visitors to science museums are much more impressed by dinosaur skeletons that are made of real fossil bone, than they are of skeletons made of casts, no matter how authentic-looking they are.
Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.
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stevenearlsalmony Posted 10:34 pm
08 Feb 2008
Let's assume that all of us can agree with the idea of finding a reliable, secure, sensible and sustainable path to a good enough future for our children.
Inasmuch as human beings appear to be members of an adamantine species that appears to be inadvertently threatening to outgrow the planet it inhabits, the idea of at least not over-consuming Earth's dissipating resources could be an idea whose time has come.
Given the relentless plunder and obscene per-capita consumption of Earth's limited resources we are witnessing in our time, choosing not to fecklessly plunder and grotesquely squander these resources might be a bit too much to hope for.
Perhaps a more modest goal will be achieved when human beings agree to do what is humane and necessary by eschewing conspicuous over-consumption and, alternatively, beginning to voluntarily restrain ourselves from literally "eating the family of humanity out of house and home."
By suggesting this alternative, we would be consciously choosing to consume less resources as one reasonable and sensible way of responding ably to the gluttony and morbid obesity rampant in `advanced' societies in our time?
Perhaps our children will soon enough come to understand that the choice to "consume less" is the most efficacious and powerful thing any person in the "overdeveloped" world can do to preserve life as we know it and the integrity of Earth.
If consuming less resources occurred collectively among individuals in the human community who are conspicuously over-consuming, as my generation of notoriously voracious elders is doing now, then a sustainable, "consume less" behavioral repertoire could make a huge difference, one that really makes a difference. It could help the family of humanity save itself from its unhealthy, recklessly increasing and soon to be unsustainable per-capita over-consumption activities.
Just this week a friend of mine said he possesses at least one of everything in the world he wants....and he is only getting started. Life is all about wealth accumulation and consumption, he advises. He is going for all the gusto, he says.
Is this an example of the one `right' way to live or else the dream to which the human community is to aspire?
The Earth can barely sustain several million people behaving like my friend (and me). What can 6.6 billion (soon to be 9 billion) of our brothers and sisters reasonably and sensibly expect "to possess" in the course of their lives?
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/
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Jon Rynn Posted 1:40 am
09 Feb 2008
In the case of fish, I think that we could now probably feed most fish-eaters with farm-raised tilapia and catfish (done in an environmentally friendly and healthy way), in order to give the nurseries time to recover (as they did during WWII when the oceans weren't being fished). It may be that humans evolved partly from eating fish -- it would be nice to continue, but this is a classic case of "sustainability", because fish can recover very easily because of the massive amounts of eggs they lay -- this should a no-brainer.
Steve -- either I detect or have not been sufficiently attentive to notice a shift to a concern on your part about resources and ecosystem health, as opposed to just population growth. I think that that is a much more useful approach, because it gets to the core of the ecological problem, the destruction of ecosystems.
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caniscandida Posted 5:10 am
09 Feb 2008
I wonder if ecologists specializing in fish would be very ready to agree that an important aspect of their discipline is quite so easy as all that.
The latest issue of the National Wildlife Federation's magazine has an interesting story on the remarkably diverse community of living creatures of the Bering Sea, from crustaceans and mollusks to walruses and whales, and the observed effects thus far of global warming on water temperatures and sea ice, all of which is very complicated indeed:
http://www.nwf.org/nationalwildlife/index.cfm?issueID=120 ...=
In the same issue is the report of research on the ecosystem of the shallow inland bays of the Atlantic coast of North Carolina, and how rays and small sharks are abounding, and eating up the bivalves -- presumably because there are too few big sharks to eat the rays and small sharks. But whether that is in fact what is happening, and what it has to do with human shark-fisheries, are not clear just yet.
Anyway, what we know about fish does not always help us much, does it -- to say nothing of not helping the fish. Take salmon on the Pacific coast, the lifecycles of most of whom are pretty well understood. And yet, as Andrew Sharpless's "This Week in Ocean News" of last week reported, there has been an alarming drop in numbers of CA Central Valley salmon; dams and damned-clever sea lions complicate the lives of salmon from the Klamath River northward; and in BC, near Vancouver Island, young wild salmon are being infested by parasites whose numbers are increasing, thanks to the salmon farms located near where the wild salmon swim. So, we seem to know a great deal about what would help us move toward "sustainability" with regard to the salmon fishery along that coast; but it is like pulling teeth to apply any of that knowledge.
More profoundly, and more fittingly for us as moral agents, it seems that instead of just pausing from fishing up the fish until they replenish their numbers, so that then we can return to fishing them up again, we could use that time better by reconsidering the wisdom, and justice, of killing fish in the first place.
In fact, in Andrew's current "This Week in Ocean News," at Oceana.org, there is a link to a fascinating report from England, on research demonstrating the remarkable unexpected memory of a certain fish. That is terrific good news, for those of us who believe that we do far better to study fish as fellow sentient beings, than to study them as "resources."
And so we continue to hope.
Meanwhile, also a sign of hope, I guess, the environmentalist community does indeed seem to be moving toward a consensus, regarding discouraging the consumption of wild ocean fish generally, and encouraging the consumption (by those who absolutely MUST eat fish -- ??? -- ) of cultivated tilapia and catfish, as you say.
On fossil "bones": Yes indeed, most of the time in the fossilization process, minerals leech through the sedimentary matrix in which a bone or other body part has been buried, and replace the original molecules. So it is the Formal Cause, not the Material Cause, which underlies the paleontologists' discipline, for the most part.
But every now and then, very rarely, original material from even very ancient animals is preserved. I believe the VP gang in Bozeman have a T. rex from near Jordan, MT, from the femur of which some marrow, with a bit of DNA, has been extracted.
But I suspect many museum visitors believe they are looking at real bones, when they see a mounted skeleton of a prehistoric animal. Hence, in the classic screwball comedy "Bringing Up Baby," with Katharine Hepburn and Carey Grant, the dog runs off with a dinosaur "bone" and buries it.
Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.
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Jon Rynn Posted 9:13 am
09 Feb 2008
Wilson called the sea otters "keystone species", an important concept for understanding any complex system -- for instance, I think some machinery industries such as machine tools are a "keystone" sector of the economy, without which the economy would collapse.
I do feel the difficulty of advocating the deliberate destruction of animal life, even fish, but I hope that, perhaps, it's better to eat animals lower on the food chain than higher up, if eat meat we must (or some of us must).
Finally, I look forward to the day when environmentalists (or anyone else) are using the phrases "formal cause", "material cause", "efficient cause", and "final cause" as a matter of course. "Efficient cause" is closest to what we now think of as the cause of cause-and-effect, but in my own "meta-engineering" I substituted "energy conversion" for "efficient cause", because I thought that was sort of what Aristotle was getting at, and "information processing" for "final cause" -- close but no cigar, I realize, but similar in that "final cause" can be considered similar to the design of the object, and computers help with the manipulation of the information used to design things.
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stevenearlsalmony Posted 10:29 pm
09 Feb 2008
Unfortunately, playing a game of "grab bag" is not helpful when acknowledging the distinctly human-induced predicament looming ominously before humanity, even now visible on the far horizon. Because human overproduction, over-consumption and overpopulation appear to be occurring synergistically, at least to me it makes sense to see and address them as a whole. Picking the most convenient or most expedient of the three aspects of the human condition could be easier but may not be a good idea. The "big picture" is what we need to see, I suppose. At some point we are going to be forced to gain a "whole system" perspective of what 6.6 billion (soon to be 9 billion) people are doing on Earth. That is to say, the human community needs to widely-share a reasonable and sensible understanding of the colossal impact of unbridled production, unrestained consumption and unregulated propagation activities of the human species on Earth....... and how life utterly depends upon Earth's limited resource base for existence.
If human beings can share an adequate enough grasp of the leviathan-like presence of the human species on Earth, then we can choose individually and collectively to behave differently from the ways we are behaving now, lest my generation could lead everyone to inadvertently precipitate the massive extinction of biodiversity, the irredeemable degradation of environs, the pillage of our planetary home and, perhaps, the endangerment of humanity.
Sincerely,
Steve
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/
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Jon Rynn Posted 9:01 am
10 Feb 2008
Anytime these problems are considered as a whole -- think gestalt? -- I think we start to get to a really innovative way of looking at these problems, which hopefully lead, then, to holistic solutions.
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caniscandida Posted 9:58 am
10 Feb 2008
Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.
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Jon Rynn Posted 1:51 pm
10 Feb 2008
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stevenearlsalmony Posted 6:05 am
11 Feb 2008
Dear Jon Rynn,
Your thoughts, and those of Canis, are always ones I appreciate and respect.
There is something I would like both of you to consider and, if it pleases you, to comment upon.
My impression is that the 'talking heads' in the mass media make many reports about "the world"; but these reports are as mainly organized around the artificially designed, manmade, global political economy. Afterall, "money, money, money, money makes the world go around." Now, of course, there is nothing the matter with organizing things in this way; however, people do need to be reminded from time to time that this way of viewing "the world" fails to recognize the Earth and human beings as integral parts of that world.
The mass media appears to segregate the Earth as well as human beings from economic globalization. By so doing, we are allowed 'to forget' what most of us know: that human beings and the gigantic global political economy are a part of, and utterly dependent upon, the Earth. There can be no human species and no human economy without the natural resources and ecosystem services only Earth can provide, I suppose.
Sometimes, it appears to me as if the human community is once again discovering that too many of us are being mesmerized by a spectacularly successful, modern-day Tower of Babel, one that takes its colossal shape from economic globalization. That is to say, human thinking, judging and willing have become so grievously captivated by our idolatry of the global economy that our leadership will not speak openly and intelligibly about anything which serves to raise questions regarding the long-term viability of the huge scale and anticipated growth of an endlessly expanding global economy for fear of losing their positions as leaders.
Sincerely,
Steve
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/
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Jon Rynn Posted 2:27 pm
11 Feb 2008
There are also a number of observers, not in the "die-off" crowd, who wonder whether humans have more intelligence collectively than, say algae or yeast (e.g., Richard Heinberg, but also many authors on global warming). So in a sense, we are acting like your normal "organic beings", to use Charles Darwin's phrase (it's his birthday, tomorrow, I think). We spread out and use the ecosystem as intensively as possible, increasing our numbers, until some sort of ecological limit is reached, and some fairly stable population develops (with maybe a pattern of ups and downs, like the famous hares and lynxes in Canada). Unfortunately, unless humans limit their ecosystem damage consciously, by the time the ecosystems limit human activities for us, it will be too late.
Anyway, sometimes I think that there has to be something akin to a spiritual awakening -- not religious, although that would certainly help (anything would help), but a feeling that the Earth and its ecosystems, and its peoples, are worth saving, even if we have to change our behavior, and more importantly our social systems, now, when the biggest dangers lurk in the fairly long-term future.
In other words, I don't know why some people feel empathy for the planet and its peoples and some don't. However, I think it's our moral imperative (or responsibility, "duty" sounds sort of yucky) to keep trying, no?
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stevenearlsalmony Posted 1:35 am
12 Feb 2008
Yes, definitely yes, the family of humanity does have to keep trying to do what it knows to be best. Jon, I am one who believes that human beings are capable of taking the measure of all challenges and finding solutions which are consonant with universally shared values.
There is just a couple of things I would like to add now. You report that "the biggest dangers lurk in the fairly long-term future." Perhaps it is because of my advanced age that I have come to believe the dangers of which you and I are already aware may not be as far off in the future as either of us would wish for them to be.
With every passing day in which the human community chooses to follow leadership that adamantly and relentlessly advocates the feckless over-consumption of Earth's limited resources; the reckless degradation of global ecosystems from massive industrialization; and skyrocketing global human population numbers, we bring closer the day when some ecologic catastrophe or economic disaster is presented to us, I suppose.
My hope is for this conversation to encourage others to share their perspectives regarding what looks to me like a formidable, distinctly human-induced predicament, one that could potentiate a clear and present danger to humankind sooner rather than later.
Sincerely,
Steve
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stevenearlsalmony Posted 1:26 am
13 Feb 2008
Leaders refuse to see what's happening
Scientific evidence is springing up everywhere that indicates the massive and pernicious impact of the human species on the limited resources of Earth, its frangible ecosystems and life as we know it.
Guided by mountains of carefully and skillfully developed research regarding climate change, top rank scientists issued a Code Red emergency declaration this month to leaders of governments and to the family of humanity proclaiming the necessity for open discussion and action by politicians and economic powerbrokers.
From my humble perspective, many leaders of the global political economy are turning a blind eye to human over-consumption, overproduction and overpopulation activities that can be seen recklessly dissipating the natural resources and dangerously degrading the environs of our planetary home. The Earth is being ravaged; but it appears many leaders are willfully refusing to acknowledge what is happening.
Because the emerging global challenges that could soon be presented to humanity appear to so many fine scientists as human-induced, leaders have responsibilities to assume and duties to perform, ready or not, like them or not.
Perhaps leadership in our time has too often chosen to ignore whatsoever is somehow real in order to believe whatever is politically convenient, economically expedient, socially agreeable, religiously tolerated and culturally prescribed. When something real directly conflicts with what leaders wish to believe, that reality is denied. It appears that too many leaders are content to hold tightly to widely shared and consensually validated specious thinking when it serves their personal interests.
Is humanity once again finding life as we know it dominated by a modern Tower of Babel called economic globalization? That is, has human thinking, judging and willing become so grievously impaired by our idolatry of the artificially designed, manmade, global political economy that we cannot see or speak intelligibly about anything else except economic growth and profits without sounding like blithering idiots?
-- Steven Earl Salmony, Chapel Hill
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