Comments stevenearlsalmony has made

Dear amazingdrx...............

......Not to worry.

Hopelessness and collective despair are real.  Thankfully, these feelings are momentary and will pass once people begin to reasonably and sensibly do what they know to be best.

The time is coming, in large part because of the election of Barack Obama, that those who have betrayed America will be held to account.  Let me be crystal clear. The so-called "brightest and best" from Wall Street and their bought-and-paid-for politicians in Washington, DC are the ring leaders of a colossal pyramid scheme that has "cratered", as George Bush has said repeatedly. These greedy 'leaders' have eschewed honesty, accountability and transparency in their duplicitous double-dealings. America has been done in by thieves of the highest order, I believe.

Even as the global economy was cratering late last year, the greediest of these self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe were passing out billions of dollars in unearned bonuses to themselves and their cronies, while binding one another to secrecy with regard to their illegitimate business activities. Rather than allowing avarice and arrogance to be institutionalized and richly rewarded as if they were virtues, the day is coming when the people who elected Barack Obama will insist that the liars, cheats and double dealers be named, shamed, held to account and removed from positions of power.

Sincerely,

Steve    On Inhofe's resident media agitator leaving to start a new climate-skeptic website posted 8 months, 4 weeks ago 9 Responses

Dear Kate, amazingdrx and power shifters....

.........Please do continue with your good works. The implications of your efforts to "shift power" are profound.  Keep going.

Even though many people are following your examples and paths of action, please note that there are people in high places who vigorously object to the acknowledgement of any truth or "cause of action" that does not conform to the standards of economic expediency and political convenience. Gatekeepers of humankind's  political economy and the social status quo are not large in number; nevertheless, these self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe {Bilderberger Group and Trilateral Commission members are excellent examples} are so well-entrenched within the most recently reconstructed Tower of Babel {called the global economy in our time} that it is difficult to imagine how the family of humanity prevails against them. But prevail we shall because we must. Alternatives to our success would be ever so much more catastrophic and destructive than what is wrought in the process of voluntarily making necessary changes in the soon to become patently unsustaiable ways human beings live today.

Perhaps new leadership is in the offing.

Sincerely yours,

Steve

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1 ...
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php On Kids go crazy for the great taste of climate policy! posted 9 months ago 7 Responses

GLOBAL GAG RULE finally rescinded...

Somehow, we have got to keep talking about the colossal, human-induced problems the "Global Gag Rule" was designed and implemented to hide. It is not possible for me even to imagine a way real challenges to human wellbeing and environmental health can be addressed and overcome if people are effectively "gagged" and otherwise dissuaded from speaking openly about such potentially calamitous events as the human overpopulation of Earth in these early years of Century XXI.  It is not a good idea to timidly yield to widely shared and consensually validated appeals from the promulgators of gag rules and other devices designed to silence people, deny what could somehow be real, and conceal the truth.

The socially agreeable inclination of many too many leaders in our time to discuss only those selected issues that meet standards of political correctness, economic expediency and religious dogma is behavior I would go so far as to label pernicious.

Silence has to be replaced by speech; scientific evidence needs to replace ideological factoids; moral courage needs to show itself more powerfully than cowardly conformity; and intellectual honesty needs to be substituted for selfish thought, judgment and action.

Always,

Steve  

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001 On Video of Obama's press conference on environmental directives posted 10 months, 1 week ago 2 Responses

With thanks to Al Gore for exemplary ..........

......leadership by speaking out loudly, clearly and often in support of virtual 'mountains' of good scientific evidence that indicate with such clarity what could somehow be true about the human-driven destabilization of Earth's environs in our time.

After all the spreading of uncertainty, obstructionism, ideological idiocy, willful blindness, hysterical deafness, elective mutism and infidelity to science that we have seen from many too many economic powerbrokers, their bought-and-paid-for politicians,  the absurdly enriched "talking heads" in the mass media, and those sheepish minions of  'benefactors' who will say and do anything to promote their selfish interests, it is truly refreshing to anticipate that Al Gore will speak out; that change is in the offing; that cooperation with the respected nations of the world is on the horizon; that a new day is finally dawning.

Let us hope that the perpetration of evil-doings during the earliest years of Century XXI have not produced insurmountable damages to the global economy, to respect for moral authority, to the environment  and to Earth's body as a fit place for habitation by our children and coming generations.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1 ...
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php
http://www.panearth.orgOn Gore to bring climate message to Senate next Wednesday posted 10 months, 1 week ago 3 Responses

Is there no end to the brazen duplicity......

...... the vanquishing of moral authority, the infidelity to science, the institutionalization of greed and hoarding as virtues, the sanctimonious idolatry of the economy, the degradation of the environment, the dissipation of natural resources, the destruction of Earth as fit place for habitation by our children?

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on the Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1 ...
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php
www.panearth.orgOn The four global warming impact studies Bush tried to bury in his final days posted 10 months, 1 week ago 16 Responses

A jeremiad, I suppose...............

My not-so-great generation of elders will likely be remembered as the perpetrators of the most perverse, self-serving silence in human history. No other generation has taken so much from this good Earth, threatened the very future of its own children and given so little of themselves to preserve life for coming generations. Photographs of us will disclose both our corpulence and hollowness.

Although the disclosure of truth is unsettling, hiding the truth from the human community could be a monstrous example of human-driven foolery, one that could soon lead to a colossal ecological wreckage.

To suppress the truth by conscientiously substituting whatsoever could somehow be true with willful silence is tantamount to the commission of a pernicious lie.

A widely shared and consensually validated determination among people with knowledge to maintain their silence, when remaining silent betrays intellectual honesty, conceals the truth and thwarts courageous action, is the most dangerous of all global threats to the family of humanity, life as we know it and the preservation of Earth as a fit place for human habitation.

From this perspective, perhaps we can begin to apprehend the actual, most formidable enemy of future human wellbeing and environmental health.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on the Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1 ...
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php
www.panearth.orgOn Better isn't enough posted 10 months, 2 weeks ago 2 Responses

A splendid human being possessed of.......

......integrity, honesty and courage of the highest order.

Thanks, Jim, for all you have been doing for the human community over many years by speaking out loudly, clearly and often for the sake of protecting biodiversity from extinction, the environment from degradation, the Earth from wanton dissipation and the children from reckless endangerment.

Please note that not only does humanity face a challenge from human-forced climate destabilization, good scientific evidence of human population dynamics is also being all but universally ignored.

It seems somehow not quite right for the human family not to be actively encouraged to examine -- and not to deny -- the potentially profound implications of extant scientific evidence regarding the population dynamics of absolute global human population numbers. The research appears to indicate with remarkable clarity and utter simplicity that human population dynamics is essentially similar to the population dynamics of other species; that increases and decreases in absolute global human population numbers can be better understood as a function of food supply; and that human carrying capacity is primarily determined by food availability. The failure of able people with widely accepted knowledge of biology, population dynamics and the biophysical world to communicate openly, in an intellectually honest and morally courageous way, regarding the predicament presented to humanity by distinctly human-induced and -driven threats to human wellbeing, life as we know it, environmental health and Earth's body from the unbridled growth of the human species now overspreading the surface of Earth is as unacceptable as it is unforgivable. The elective mutism of leading experts inside and outside the scientific community has to be replaced, I suppose, with more adequate, more reasonable, more sensible and readily available evidence of what could be real about the way the world in which we live actually works as well as about the "placement" of human beings within the order of living things. By so doing, the family of humanity can get about the necessary work of responding ably to the recognizably daunting global challenges which are looming ominously before us on the horizon.

Somehow, the human family will most assuredly find its way forward from "here and now" to a good enough and sustainable future for the children, coming generations and life as we know it in this wondrous planetary home we inhabit and call Earth.

Godspeed,

Steve Salmony

Steven Earl Salmony, Ph.D., M.P.A.
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1 ...
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.phpOn American Meteorological Society gives James Hansen its top honor posted 10 months, 2 weeks ago 1 Response

A haiku..............

........   Truth was his doormat.

   The 'liberated' threw dirty soles

              at his head.On Bush on Kyoto, on his way out the door posted 10 months, 3 weeks ago 5 Responses

How about Einstein for a hero?

..........Perhaps you would agree that there are leaders in the world today with too much power for one man. If one person can have too much power, then I am inclined to vote for leaders like Albert Einstein to have it. He possessed clear vision, a coherent, truthful mind, intellectual honesty, a dedication to science and moral courage, among other splendid attributes other people saw in this great and good man.

On the other hand, it appears that we do have leaders today who evidently have too much power and can be easily identified for having demonstrated their woeful inadequacies when it comes deploying that power for what is great and good. To the contrary, current leadership is striking for its absence of a vision of our children's future; for its intellectual dishonesty and infidelity to science; for waging an unnecessary war and vanquishing nothing more than moral authority in the process; for extolling the virtues of its own unbridled greed.

Perhaps new leadership will bring change, the kinds of benevolent change Einstein would have loudly, clearly and regularly promoted.  

Sincerely,

Steve

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.phpOn Last chance to pick your top hero/villain of 2008 posted 10 months, 3 weeks ago 3 Responses

My question to the Obama Team...........

............ "If a minority of humanity over-consumes Earth's limited resources and a majority of us overpopulate the planet, how can the human family protect biodiversity from extinction, Earth's resources from dissipation and its environment from being degraded?"

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.phpOn The real cost is the cost of doing nothing posted 10 months, 3 weeks ago 16 Responses

Perhaps business-as-usual is all.......

....... that really matters to the confederacy of self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe who have chosen the idolatry of business activities and ignored the the relentless dissipation of Earth's resources and the rampant degradation of Earth's environment, come what may for our children and coming generations?
Many too many leaders of the family of humanity today live arrogantly and greedily in our planetary home. They appear to take pride in their unsustainable behavior. Certainly, we will "have our cake and eat it too," they say. They own fleets of cars, fly around in thousands of private jets, live in McMansions, exchange secret handshakes, frequent exclusive clubs and distant hideouts, and risk nothing of value. They will live long, large and free, so they say. Please do not bother them with the problems of the world. They choose not to hear, see or speak of them. They hold much of the world's wealth as well as the extraordinary political/military power great wealth purchases. If left to their own devices, they will continue to self-righteously exercise their 'inalienable rights' to conspicuously consume whatever they desire; to recklessly dissipate Earth's resources and expand economic globalization unto every corner of our natural world and, guess what, beyond; to carelessly consent to the unbridled global growth of human numbers so that where there are now 6.7 billion people, by 2050 we will have 9+ billion members of the human family and, guess what, even more people, perhaps billions more beyond 2050, if that is what they wish. Like the Bilderbergers, they identify  themselves as Masters of the Universe. They enjoy freedom and living without regard to human limits and Earth's limitations. They adamantly eschew any talk of the personal responsibilities that come with the exercise of personal freedoms or any discussion of the existence of biophysical boundaries. They deny good science or consider it junk. Climate change is a hoax to them.

Many too many of our leaders and all of the self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe among us choose to deny the existence of "limits to growth", even though abundant scientific evidence of the existence of such boundaries is available. Please understand that these 'Masters' do not want anyone presenting them with scientific evidence that they could be living unsustainably in an artificially designed, temporary world....a manmade world filling up with gigantic enterprises, virtual mountains of material possessions, ill-gotten gains, phony profits and filthy lucre.

Scientists appear not to have found adequate ways of communicating to the family of humanity what people somehow need to hear, see and understand: the rapacious dissipation of Earth's limited resources, the relentless degradation of the planet's frangible environment, and the increasing risk of destroying Earth as a fit place for human habitation in our time, when taken together, appear to be proceeding at breakneck speed now, moving toward the precipitation of a catastrophic ecological wreckage of some sort.... unless, as a matter of course, the world's colossal, artificially designed, soon to become patently unsustainable global economy continues to speed headlong toward the monolithic 'wall' called "unsustainability" at which point the unbridled expansion of the runaway global economy crashes before Earth's ecology is collapsed.

Who knows, perhaps we can still realistically and hopefully hold onto the expectation that behavioral changes by many members of the human community will encourage others, even the Masters of the Universe, to go forward from this time and place toward the achievement of new goals: restricted and "right-sized" rather than unbridled and ever larger-scale production, restrained rather than outrageous per human over-consumption and the regulation of human population growth..... changes that save both the human economy and God's Creation for the children and future generations.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php
On The real cost is the cost of doing nothing posted 10 months, 3 weeks ago 16 Responses

Dear Gar..............

.......Barack, Michelle, James and Anniek,

There is good work to be done and you can provide the "voices" and the leadership to do it.  Please go forward and then keep going.......with all deliberate speed.

Thanks,

Steve

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on the Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1 ...On An open reply to James Hansen's open letter posted 10 months, 3 weeks ago 32 Responses

Resolution for 2009: SPEAK OUT.......

........Dear Friends,

In calling for change in our time, great scientists are speaking about what could somehow be true to wealthy and powerful people who prefer that the "business as usual" status quo be maintained. Industrial/big business powerbrokers and their bought-and-paid-for politicians want to keep things going along just as they are going now, come what may for the children and coming generations, for life as we know it, for the integrity of Earth and its environs.

Many voices are needed to support "voices in the wilderness" like those of Jim Hansen and John Holdren, exemplary scientists who have been willing to speak truth to those with the power to make the kinds of necessary change that make belief in a good enough future at least a possibility. Assuring a chance of a good future for the children and for life as we know it is an achievable goal that will lead us to overcome the arrogance and avarice of many too many leaders of my "Not So GREAT GREED GRAB Generation" of elders.

If too many leaders of the family of humanity choose to keep doing precisely the things they are advocating and doing now, and if we in the human community keep getting what we are getting now, then it appears a sustainable world for our children cannot be achieved. By so doing, the limited resources of Earth will be permanently dissipated, its biodiversity massively extirpated, its environment irreversibly degraded and life as we know it recklessly endangered. The current gigantic scale and anticipated growth of per-capita overconsumption of limited resources, global production and distribution capabilities, and absolute human population numbers worldwide are simply, clearly and patently unsustainable, even to the year 2050. Given Earth's limitations as a relatively small, evidently finite and noticeably frangible planet, the projected increases in these currently unbridled consumption, production and propagation activities of the human species could soon lead the human family to come face to face with some sort of colossal ecological wreckage.

Now is the time to speak out loudly, clearly and often about what is true for you. Forget about political correctness and convenience. Let go of economic expediency and greediness. Embrace necessary change rather than waste another day preserving the selfish interests of the small group of rich and powerful people, and their many minions, all of whom are adamantly and relentlessly defending an unsustainable, same old "business as usual" status quo.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1 ... On Au revoir, 2008 posted 11 months ago 2 Responses

Seeing Bernie's pyramid scheme.......

.......as a graphic and instructive example of how a modern Tower of Babel is constructed.

Bernie Madoff is a pyramid scheme "kingpin", the guy at the top of a pyramid scheme. Ordinary people seldom if ever get to see these individuals "fingered" or identified. What is also exceptional is that Bernie has been found out, or outed as it were. Of course, there are other kingpins; but at the moment they are "protected" by billions of dollars, literally hundreds of billions of dollars, that are being used currently to shore-up and build an even larger, more gigantic pyramid schemes than Bernie's 50 billion dollar pyramid.

The thousands of sub prime mortgage swindlers are not at the top of this or any other pyramid scheme.  That is to say, they did not start the game.  The sub prime mortgage swindle is another pyramid scheme, one bigger than Bernie's.  These thousands of swindlers came along at a lower stage of the pyramid scheme's construction. Of course, this pyramid scheme is not only larger than Bernie's scheme but also not nearly as large as the incredible "house of cards" built out and named the global political economy.

We can see that pyramid schemes exist within pyramid schemes.  Pyramids vary in size.  What is important to understand is that the global economy, as it is currently organized and managed, is itself a colossal pyramid scheme, the largest of them all.  

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1 ...On Will carbon cap-and-trade be the next Ponzi scheme? posted 11 months ago 21 Responses

Dear Peter B. Meyer.............

You are kind to reply just as you have.  Thanks for your perspective.

A term of art from economics, "creative destruction", is deployed in your responses. Could you explain the term as it relates to the relentless degradation of the global environment and the reckless dissipation of Earth's resources in our time? From your point of view, could creative destruction soon become destructive of all we are trying to protect and preserve?

At least to me, the family of humanity appears to be approaching a point in human history when the word, creative, in the term, creative destruction, in the process of economic globalization would no longer apply. That is to say, activities of "creative destruction", as the term applies to the global overgrowth activities of the political economy {ie, Global Economic Colossus}, would become primary activities of simply "deplorable destruction".

Peter, I suppose the question I am asking could be put another way.  Do the economic activities of "creative destruction" inevitably lead to the denuding of the surface of Earth and the defilement of its environs?

Sincerely,

Steve

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001

  On Institutions, motivations, and assumptions in economic analysis posted 11 months ago 17 Responses

Before we can "fix reality".......

...... perhaps it would be helpful to agree about what could somehow be real.

Many too many economic powerbrokers have been playing "the only game in town" the way everyone "in the know" has been participating in the construction of a global, leviathan-like "house of cards" called the global political economy.

Can we share an understanding of the many attacks on Earth and climate scientists by saying loudly and clearly that their assailants' activities are venal efforts to spread garbage and junk science, based upon nothing more or less than the duplicitous promulgation of ideological idiocy?

It appears that many arrogant and hostile efforts toward Earth and climate scientists are for the sole purpose of shoring-up and building trust in a con game; to support the most colossal pyramid scheme in human history.....a modern version of the ancient Tower of Babel. Only this modern 'edifice' is an Economic Colossus, one not made of stone but rather built out of filthy lucre as a house of playing cards. The entire game is a patently unsustainable, gigantic ruse perpetrated by a tiny, greedy minority of outrageously conspicuous consumers who are recklessly consolidating and relentlessly hoarding  great wealth and power.

Is this perspective one with which you are in agreement?

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1 ...On Institutions, motivations, and assumptions in economic analysis posted 11 months ago 17 Responses

QUESTION: What is the point of spreading....

.......garbage based upon ideological idiocy?

ANSWER:  Continue to shore-up and build trust in a con game, to support the most colossal pyramid scheme in human history. That is all.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population
established 2001
http://sustainabilitscience.org/content.html?contentid=11 ...On Vote for the worst piece of writing on climate change posted 11 months, 1 week ago 1 Response

Revelations everyone already knows......

Does anyone have the feeling that our communication, here and now, appears to be convoluted and confused because many too many of us do not yet recognize that the family of humanity literally lives within a modern version of an ancient edifice, the Tower of Babel.  But the new leviathan-like, distinctly human construction is not made of stone, but instead built out as a "house of cards".  This colossal, artificially designed structure is noticeably pyramidal in shape, duplicitously organized as a patently unsustainable pyramid scheme, and named the global political economy.

For the people who are the primary beneficiaries of such a scheme, the global economy is effectively an object of idolatry. Nothing else really matters. These people are the self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe among us. They could not care less about the natural world, life as we know it for the children and future generations, the integrity of Earth. You can readily recognize the idolaters as the leading, self-righteous elders of my "Not So GREAT GREED GRAB Generation". Endlessly consuming and hoarding resources as well as power-mongering are regarded as religious rituals.  

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1 ... On An antidote to Kunstler? posted 11 months, 1 week ago 2 Responses

Just say "no way" to geo-engineering....

...... in favor of more sensible, much less dangerous and non-megalomaniacal strategies.

If President-Elect Barack Obama and his splendid team of scientists are not able to bring about good-enough and necessary change, then I do not know where else we are to find such vitally needed leadership.

In some deep sense, President-Elect Obama and his new Administration are carrying the very future of children everywhere on their shoulders. They deserve of complete support now.

If only we could undo the earliest years of Century XXI so that they were not filled with a colossal fool's errand, catastrophic financial failures and ecological nightmares: an unnecessary and unjustifiable war; a collapsing economy; a human-induced, recklessly degraded environment and relentlessly dissipated planetary home.

The challenges before the human community now appear to be daunting, that is easy enough to see; nevertheless, I believe our children will behold an adequate future. Between now and the time our children lead the world come the necessary changes, I suppose.

Godspeed.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001On Desperate enough to contemplate geo-engineering posted 11 months, 1 week ago 22 Responses

Perhaps the time for change is finally at hand....

If President-Elect Barack Obama cannot bring about necessary change, I do not know who else can more adequately provide such vitally needed leadership.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1 ...On Vote for the top eco-hero of 2008 posted 11 months, 1 week ago 22 Responses

We can see that the global economy............

........is the most colossal construction of a patently unsustainable pyramid scheme ever conceived by leaders of the human community. But this modern Tower of Babel is not made of stone.  The global political economy is a nothing more or less than a gigantic "house of cards".

Yes, definitely yes, some of the darkest of dark days are passing into history......finally.

The future is about to begin.......mercifully.

An unnecessary and unjustifiable war at a cost of three trillion dollars; a crashing economy at a cost of trillions more; a degraded environment, a dissipated Earth.......priceless.

And people responsible for these nightmares want their 2008 bonuses......predictable.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1 ...On The 'invisible hand' is blind to climate externalities and the value of natural resources posted 11 months, 2 weeks ago 15 Responses

Why following these recommendations.......

.......could take us a long way down the path to a good enough future for children.

With human population projections indicating that the human community will have 9+ billion members by 2050, perhaps it is time to open discussions here and elsewhere about the profound implications of a 40% increase in the human population in the coming four decades. After all, the frangible biological systems and finite resources of our planetary home make clear to a sensible observer that a planet with the size, composition, and ecology of Earth cannot indefinitely sustain the unbridled increase of human overproduction, overconsumption and overpopulation activities.

Now for a question: Is it reasonable to conclude that the unbridled increase of the clearly visible and distinctly human global overgrowth activities we see overspreading Earth in our time cannot be sustained much longer, much less indefinitely, secondary both to Earth's limitations and humankind's "feet of clay"?

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001

http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1 ...On Kunstler's tips to prepare for a post-oil society posted 11 months, 2 weeks ago 83 Responses

Dear John Schneider and Lester Brown.......

Do you think we have reached a point when we can say, however tentatively, that the global manmade economic colossus {a veritable and proverbial, modern Tower of Babel in all its glory} could crash before the overproduction, over-consumption and overpopulation activities of the human species worldwide collapse the frangible biological systems and finite physical resources of the planetary home God has blessed us to inhabit and not to ravage, I suppose?

Steven Earl Salmony

AWAREness Campaign on the Human Population,

established 2001On The 'invisible hand' is blind to climate externalities and the value of natural resources posted 11 months, 2 weeks ago 15 Responses

More climate change obstructionism.......

So predictable, so duplicitous, so pathetic, so immoral, so dunderheaded.

I suppose these and other like-minded leaders will also say that this environmental 'strategy' of disinformation, delay and denial is as necessary and justifiable today as the trumped-up deception was prior to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Only a tale told by an idiot could match the one we are seeing played out on the world's stage in this first decade of Century XXI.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1 ...On Hadley Center and WMO say 2000s comprise hottest decade in recorded history posted 11 months, 2 weeks ago 1 Response

For Thomas Wolfe, Serena and Friends......

............of the Gristmill community.

Anything and everything seems to be getting in the way of meaningfully discussing in an adequately reality-oriented manner the predicament that appears before humanity. This primarily and distinctly human-driven predicament is already visible, even now, on the far horizon.

If you please, your assistance is requested.

Seven days ago the "AWAREness Campaign on the Human Population" submitted an idea for how we think the Obama Administration could change America. It's called "Ideas for Change in America."

I've submitted an idea and wanted to see if you could vote for AND COMMENT on it. The title is: "Accepting human limits and Earth's limitations". You can read, vote  for and comment on the idea by clicking on the following link:

http://www.change.org/ideas/view/accepting_human_limits_a ...

Fourteen votes are been received so far. That is about 2 votes per day. If you agree, then vote.  If you disagree, please comment.  Of course, should you wish to vote AND COMMENT, please feel free to do so.

The top 10 ideas are going to be presented to the Obama Administration on Inauguration Day and will be supported by a national lobbying campaign run by Change.org, MySpace, and more than a dozen leading nonprofits after the Inauguration.

Thanks for any assistance you choose to provide.

Sincerely yours,

Steve

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1 ...On Serena's cautionary tale posted 11 months, 2 weeks ago 2 Responses

Too many leaders celebrate 'success' ........

........ by extolling the virtue of unadulterated arrogance and unbridled avarice.

And all of us have elected a tiny confederacy of intelligent hoarders and super consumers, who have proclaimed themselves Masters of the Universe, to undeserved positions of power and privilege.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on the Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html/contentid=1 ...On It's 'premature' to declare the death of an agreement in Copenhagen posted 11 months, 3 weeks ago 4 Responses

Assistance , if you please.....

On the need for scientific education regarding the human overpopulation of Earth in these early years of Century XXI...........

Dear Friends,

I want to at least try to gain your quick help. I'm not sure if you've heard, but yesterday the "AWAREness Campaign on the Human Population" submitted an idea for how we think the Obama Administration could change America. It's called "Ideas for Change in America."

I've submitted an idea and wanted to see if you could vote for it. The title is: Accepting human limits and Earth's limitations. You can read and vote for the idea by clicking on the following link:

http://www.change.org/ideas/view/accepting_human_limits_a ...

The top 10 ideas are going to be presented to the Obama Administration on Inauguration Day and will be supported by a national lobbying campaign run by Change.org, MySpace, and more than a dozen leading nonprofits after the Inauguration. So each idea has a real chance at becoming policy.

Thanks.

Sincerely yours,

Steve

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on the Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1 ...
On The moral voice on climate can become policy brokers or enviro activists posted 11 months, 3 weeks ago 5 Responses

Perhaps necessary change is in the offing

On the need for scientific education regarding the human overpopulation of Earth in these early years of Century XXI...........

Dear UNFCCC Friends in Poznan,

I want to at least try to gain your quick help. I'm not sure if you've heard, but yesterday the "AWAREness Campaign on the Human Population" submitted an idea for how we think the Obama Administration could change America. It's called "Ideas for Change in America."

I've submitted an idea and wanted to see if you could vote for it. The title is: Accepting human limits and Earth's limitations. You can read and vote for the idea by clicking on the following link:

http://www.change.org/ideas/view/accepting_human_limits_a ...

The top 10 ideas are going to be presented to the Obama Administration on Inauguration Day and will be supported by a national lobbying campaign run by Change.org, MySpace, and more than a dozen leading nonprofits after the Inauguration. So each idea has a real chance at becoming policy.

Thanks.

Sincerely yours,

Steve

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on the Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1 ...
On Forest policy is a hot topic at international climate negotiations posted 11 months, 3 weeks ago 7 Responses

Dr. NOAA.................

.........................Michael "Mickey" Glantz.On Who will Obama tap to guide our oceans and atmosphere policy? posted 11 months, 3 weeks ago 1 Response

What is equitable about..........

.... condoning the grotesquely greedy behavior of those who are hoarding most of the world's wealth?

Of necessity, the elders among us are going to have to accept whatsoever could somehow be real about the world we inhabit as well as about how our children offer hope of a good enough future for life as we know it, but only if we elders choose now to help the children by openly acknowledging the global challenges already visible on the far horizon.

Silence of the super-rich, their bought-and-paid-for politicians and their many minions in the mainstream media for sake of maintaining their wealth, power and privileges to extoll the virtues of unbridled greedy behavior could duplicitously end up leading the family of humanity to inadvertently destroy that in God's Creation which we claim an interest in preserving.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on the Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1 ... On Youth advocate for equitable international response to climate change in Poznan posted 11 months, 4 weeks ago 2 Responses

Dear Friends of the Grist Community.......

Regardless of whether or not other human beings choose to accept the "answers" to one question, I believe we must ask ourselves, "Can we teach one another to live within limits?"

It is necessary, I suppose, for human beings to recognize and affirm human limits
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid ...

and Earth's limitations

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0CYP/is_/ai_n15690 ...

To do otherwise and, by so doing, choose willfully and foolishly to ignore the practical requirements of biophysical reality runs the risk of putting life as we know it and our planetary home as a fit place for human habitation in peril, even in these early years of Century XXI.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1 ...On Note to progressives: Your guy won! posted 12 months ago 14 Responses

Dear James Hansen and Danny Bloom.....

Even though both of you are being blasted with vituperative comments and caustic babbling, please recognize that you have the backing of people who value science, intellectual honesty and moral courage... a rare combination of qualities exemplified by you and deserving of praise.  Please know that you have my complete support.

Something in all this hate speech is worrisome.  It leads me to think that something unexpected and unwelcome is occurring.

At least to me, there appear to be people for whom the economy, in and of itself, is the primary object of their idolatry. This behavior is observable, obvious and flagrant. In many instances, these apparent worshippers make what they evidently believe are rational arguments that suggest manmade financial and economic systems are somehow essential to, and an integral part of, God's Creation; that indicate the growth of the global economy will occur from now on, even after the Creation is ravaged and its frangible climate destabilized by unbridled overproduction, unchecked overconsumption and unregulated overpopulation activities of the human species.

It seems to me that the financial system of the economic powerbrokers is collapsing like a "house of cards" and the real economy of the family of humanity is threatened. Experts in political economy are saying internally inconsistent and contradictory things. Communications about financials and the economy are generally confused and in disarray. Confidence and trust in the operating systems of finance and the global economy have been undermined by the invention of dodgy financial instruments and unsustainable business models as well as by the promulgation of con games and Ponzi schemes. Transparency, accountability and honesty in business activities have been largely vanquished. A great economic system is being undone by con artists, gamblers and cheats. In such circumstances, does the manmade colossus we call the global political economy remind you in some ways of a modern Tower of Babel?  

Is the use of hate speech the only way to defend the "Economic Colossus"? The babblings of some people lead me to think so.

Sincerely,

Steve

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1 ...   On Hansen and Danny Bloom inspire vicious hate speech on web posted 12 months ago 7 Responses

Perhaps necessary leadership changes.....

........ are long overdue.

Perhaps it is time for the same ol' business-as-usual, pin-stripe-suited leaders, the ones who adamantly espouse and religiously exemplify an apostate's creed of greed, to be replaced by new leadership.

Too many leaders of this patently unsustainable culture of avarice evidently define the culture's efficacy by the endless accumulation of material possessions; by the unbounded acquisition of more money, money, money, money; by recklessly overconsuming and relentlessly hoarding limited resources. They demonstrably declare to all the world that greed is good.

Are we not members of a culture that worships consumerism? Are the products of greed nothing more or less than the objects of our idolatry?

Are the pin-striped suits, fleet of cars, chauffeur, private jets, McMansions, distant hideaways, secret handshakes and exclusive clubs nothing more or less than "signatures" of success in a culture promoted by the 'goodness' of greed?

Consider for a moment what perversity greed has wrought.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1 ...
On Maddow eviscerates Bush posted 1 year ago 3 Responses

The dots really do need to be connected....

.........soon. Life as we know it and a good enough future for the children could depend upon it.

Please speak loudly and clearly because many too many leading opinion-makers in the human family are refusing to connect the dots and turning away from what come somehow be real.

If a culture treats the unbridled accumulation of possessions and filthy lucre as virtuous behaviors, not as vices, then the "paint horse and its pin-stripe-suited rider, GREED," are free to run wild, just as occurred in Valley Stream, New York on Black Friday.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
hppt://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php On For stronger cities, build better connections posted 1 year ago 22 Responses

Wal Mart "blitz" in Valley Stream, NY...

.....See the "Horsemen of the Apocalypse" ride.

"Blitz" lines are a sign of the times. These 'lines' are designed to evince rampaging greed. How many other ploys can you think of that surreptitiously exploit human avarice?

Here and now we behold the chimera, the "paint horse and its pin-striped-suited rider, named GREED" being followed closely by a pale horse ridden by Death.On For stronger cities, build better connections posted 1 year ago 22 Responses

Behold a paint horse...........

On the far horizon there appears a chimera, a paint horse upon which imperious and ignoble GREED rides. This horse and its pin-striped rider are an unexpected front runner, a Fifth Horseman of the Acopalypse.  The "Four Horsemen" in tandem are following close behind.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on the Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1 ...On Google invests in solar thermal company eSolar posted 1 year ago 17 Responses

Dear Jabailo...........

Seldom have I seen such a silly "rear guard" defense of an untenable position.

As ever,

SteveOn A taxonomy of denial posted 1 year ago 11 Responses

However we choose to look at denial.........

.......we can easily see that many too many leaders are collusively engaged in its practice. Even though it is perverse, denial is consensually validated behavior. If enough elite people remain in denial, something more attractive...ie, something illusory...can be put in place of what is more real and somehow likely to be more truthful.

Doing good work along the path toward a good enough future for children will not be an easy task for anybody.  Evidently, everybody wants to be a somebody, but nobody in a position of power willingly assumes the requisite responsibilities and performs the duties of office.  Such so-called 'leadership' is both ubiquitous and woefully inadequate.

Occasionally a great person can be found who goes against the tide of people with power who uniformly favor whatsoever is politically convenient, economically expedient, socially agreeable and religiously tolerated.

Certainly I share the view that everyone-in-power's silence with regard to what is happening in any "here and now" moment of space-time is the most formidable foe.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1 ...
On A taxonomy of denial posted 1 year ago 11 Responses

Joe Romm is willing to remember what...........

.......many people want to forget. Joe is willing to speak out about what others wish to deny.

Please consider an allegory: that a titanic struggle between human beings and the natural world is in the offing.  It seems this struggle is fulminating now precisely because too many leaders of the 6.7 billion {soon to be 9+ billion} members of the human family generally do not share the perspective of many within the Orion community. Many too many of our brothers and sisters, especially those with great wealth and power, evidently see human organisms as separate from, and somehow superior to, life as we know it on Earth.

At least to me, it appears that an epochal contest is taking shape on the far horizon between the `team' of "mother culture and father profit" on one side and `Team' Mother Nature on the other.  

This could be the greatest show on Earth in 10,000 years.  

The team of "mother culture and father profit" appears adamant in its willful intentionality to stay the same old business-as-usual course of recklessly overconsuming limited natural resources; relentlessly expanding large-scale production and distribution capabilities without regard to physical limitations of the natural world; and overpopulating our planetary home, come what may for children and coming generations, biodiversity, the environment and the Earth's body.

Team Mother Nature simply is.

Which team will likely be seen by reasonable and sensible observers as winning the contest for success in 2012, 2020 and 2050, if the human community continues its idolatry of distinctly human overconsumption, overproduction and overpopulation activities by choosing evermore unbridled growth just as we are doing now?

If the leaders of the family of humanity do not choose change, do you have any ideas about which team will prevail and when will the outcome of the colossal contest no longer be in doubt?

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1 ...On NOAA: Second warmest October on record posted 1 year ago 4 Responses

If we can identify..............

.........those who are responsible for the economic mess in which we find ourselves, please, pray tell me, why are we paying them billions of dollars now?On Bush: all the bailout, none of the social benefits posted 1 year ago 13 Responses

Billions in bailouts and year-end bonuses....

.... for the "wonder boys" on Wall Street.

These self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe have turned a great capitalist system into a paltry gambling casino. They can no longer be called by any name other than theives of the highest order.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php

 On The intellectual bankruptcy of conservatism: Heritage even opposes energy efficiency posted 1 year ago 9 Responses

$ 6+ Billion in bonuses for Goldman Sachs.........

.... and $6+ Billion in bonuses for Morgan Stanley.

$66 Billion in bonuses are being set aside for the 'engineers' of the financial system and economic globalization.

These monstrously greedy people in dark, pin striped suits who have pillaged the capitalist system and ruined humanity's political economy by turning it into a gambling casino and stealing its wealth for themselves and their minions are the same people who are now warning honorable people not to dismantle the global economy.

What is wrong with this picture?

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1 ...On Tom Friedman on The Daily Show posted 1 year ago 7 Responses

Dear David Roberts............

This thread is a wonderfully timely and perspicacious idea.  Thanks for all you are doing to protect biodiversity from mass extinction, to preserve Earth's body from wanton dissipation, to halt relentless degradation of the environment and, with a bit of luck and a great deal of work, to save the family of humanity from reckless endangerment as well as to spare the human species from an even worse threat.

Make no mistake, the blogging world is making a positive difference. Even though the 'talking heads' in the mainstream media, the ones who are owned by economic powerbrokers and their bought-and-paid-for politicians, wish all of us would go away, we need to keep going.

Sincerely yours,

Steve

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1 ...On It's getting out there posted 1 year ago 4 Responses

Finally, we see democracy in action...........

With the election of Barack Obama, a new day is surely dawning for the family of humanity. We have good reasons to be hopeful. The agonizing throes of the severe and colossal storm we have endured in the past several years have produced an unexpected outcome. The air is being cleansed and the dark clouds that had been gathering on the horizon are being blown away.

Al Gore has reminded all of us that now is the time for intellectual honesty and moral courage as necessary attributes for responding ably to the human-driven global challenges which are looming ominously before humankind. As the horrendous, once in a century storm is being swept away by benevolent winds of change, perhaps we will see that honest and courageous activities of many people will begin to replace cascading, self-interested behavior of a few misguided, greedy people who have been willing to do whatsoever is politically convenient, economically expedient and socially fashionable... come what may for our children.

Perhaps sufficiently reality-oriented changes in policymaking and action planning, changes that protect biodiversity from mass extinction, prevent more wanton environmental degradation and preserve Earth's body from relentless dissipation as well as the children from endangerment, are in the offing.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1 ...
On A roundup of possible Cabinet picks for environment-related positions posted 1 year ago 6 Responses

Clearing the air.......

Lee Iacocca Says:

Am I the only guy in this country who's fed up with what's happening? Where the hell is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder. We've got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we've got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can't even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, `Stay the course'

Stay the course? You've got to be kidding. This is America, not the damned `Titanic'.

You might think I'm getting senile, that I've gone off my rocker, and maybe I have. But someone has to speak up.

These are times that cry out for leadership. But when you look around, you've got to ask: `Where have all the leaders gone?' Where are the curious, creative communicators? Where are the people of character, courage.......... and common sense?

Name me one leader who emerged from the crisis of Hurricane Katrina. Congress has yet to spend a single day evaluating the response to the hurricane, or demanding accountability for the decisions that were made in the crucial hours after the storm. Everyone's hunkering down, fingers crossed, hoping it doesn't happen again. Now, that's just crazy. Storms happen. Deal with it. Make a plan. Figure out what you're going to do the next time.

Name me a government leader who can articulate a plan for paying down the debt, or solving the energy crisis, or managing the health care problem. The silence is deafening.

Hey, I'm not trying to be the voice of gloom and doom here. I'm trying to light a fire. I'm speaking out because I have hope...................If I've learned one thing, it's this:

You don't get anywhere by standing on the sidelines waiting for somebody else to take action..... It's not too late, but it's getting pretty close.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAReness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.phpOn The next president should use the Clean Air Act to control greenhouse gas emissions posted 1 year ago 3 Responses

Channeling Steve Forbes............

Dear Steve,

Does it make sense to suggest that the current "financial tsunami" has literally grown out of unconscionable greed and unbridled thievery of the highest order by a tiny minority of super-rich people who wear dark pin-stripe suits; own fleets of cars, yachts and a private jet; exchange secret handshakes; frequent exclusive clubs and distant hideaways; live in McMansions; and risk nothing of value to themselves and their minions?

Apparently, twenty-first century bankstas hold the much of the world's wealth and the extraordinary political/military power great wealth purchases. If left to their own devices, they will continue in the exercise of their self-proclaimed `inalienable rights' to outrageously consume Earth's limited resources; to recklessly expand economic globalization unto every corner of our natural world and, guess what, beyond; and to carelessly consent to the unbridled global growth of human numbers so that where there are now 6+ billion people, by 2050 we will have 9+ billion members of the human community and, guess what, even more people, perhaps billions more in the distant future, if that is what their endlessly growing global economy requires. They do not lie but also never tell the truth as they see it. They relish freedom and living without limits. Of course, they adamantly eschew any talk of the individual responsibilities that come with the exercise of personal freedoms and reject any discussion of the existence of biophysical limitations a finite planet with the size and composition of Earth naturally imposes upon human overconsumption, overproduction and overpopulation activities.

They deny the existence of human limits and Earth's limitations. Please understand that they do not want their bought-and-paid-for politicians and "talking heads" in the mainstream media presenting the public with scientific evidence that they could be living unsustainably in a manmade world filling up with gigantic business enterprises, virtual mountains of material possessions, and boundless amounts of filthy lucre.

What do you think, Mr. Forbes?

Steve SalmonyOn McCain adviser repeats myths about climate change posted 1 year ago 4 Responses

Taxing "fruits" from a poisonous tree

...... For a moment, imagine a situation in which unbridled greed is extolled as a virtue. Imagine circumstances in which pathological gambling activities, the conscious promulgation of fraudulent financial instruments and the consensual validation of patently unsustainable business practices have been surreptitiously insinuated into the global economy. Do you think it would make sense to place a tax on individuals and corporations holding obscene amounts {ie, more than one million dollars for individuals and one-hundred million dollars for corporations} of toxic, ill-gotten gains?

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.phpOn What would you do with $700 billion? posted 1 year, 1 month ago 12 Responses

Dear John Rynn....................

Thanks to you and everyone else for what is being communicated in the Grist Mill Blog. At least to me, this work is vital.

John, you are an honorable fellow. You neither hide nor are you willing to hide from empirical evidence. We need your example displayed in the actions of many other leaders who presently seem to be unwilling to communicate openly certain understandings about what is real and true to them. The science of human population dynamics and the human overpopulation of Earth is a case in point.

So far as I can tell, your work is helping people to see more clearly as it is the wondrous world we inhabit and to more deeply appreciate the miraculous beings that humans are.

Of course, your reporting is occasionally off-putting precisely because the message from science that you bring us is apparently unforeseen, distinctly discomforting and most unwelcome.

Reports of good science, when that science is new, is routinely difficult to acknowledge, much less address. But that is what we are called upon to do. Grasping good science and adjusting to whatsoever could be real is required of us, I suppose. If today's leaders intend to provide a good enough future for our children, then nothing other than productive adaptation to the requirements of reality will do. It appears that the human community could soon have genuine, human-driven, global challenges to overcome.

Despite all the efforts of denialists and naysayers, leadership has responsibilities to assume and duties to perform, just as you are doing, by urging the family of humanity to open our eyes and see what looms ominously before us on the far horizon. By willfully avoiding scientific evidence, we are losing the exquisite value found in one of God's gifts to humanity as well as threatening the wellbeing of our children, life as we know it and Earth.

Remaining electively mute in the face of good science related to the human overpopulation of Earth, the reckless dissipation of natural resources and the wanton degradation of the environment cannot be allowed to prevail. Even though reasonable and sensible scientific evidence comes into conflict with what our culture validates as real and true, still the evidence has to be carefully examined.... and not ignored. Is it possible that the standard for determining what is real and true in our culture is too often this: whatsoever is widely shared, consensually validated and judged to be economically expedient, politically convenient, socially agreeable is true and real? In that case, much of the scientific evidence found in the Grist Mill Blog presents many too many leaders and opinion makers in our culture with evidence of inconvenient truths.

Each culture presents its membership with much that is real and also much less that is illusory. From the standpoint of a psychologist, because humans are shaped early and pervasively by cultural transmissions in our perception of reality, it looks like an evolutionary challenge for humankind to see the world as it is.

It appears that cultural transmissions or memes generated within a culture may at times mesmerize human beings in that widely shared and closely held memes occasionally "produce" illusions of the world as it is. Some research seems to disturb us in basic ways because this scientific evidence comes into conflict with certain ideologically/culturally derived notions that are adamantly held by leaders about what it means to be human and about the "placement" of humankind within the natural order of living things. Unexpected scientific evidence of this particular kind is uniformly difficult for people to see, I suppose, because such evidence undercuts the `pedestal' from which human beings prefer to hubristically look upon other living creatures and nature. We humans may introject biased and empiricially unsupportable cultural transmissions that confuse human reasoning and promote a certain cortical conceitedness which is not helpful when trying to see what is real. For a long time certain illusory memes appear to have been passed from generation to generation, distorting human perceptions and making it difficult for the human family to see scientific evidence for what is real about it.

John, with your leadership and assistance, perhaps we will come to more fully appreciate the difference between specious illusions borne of ideological/cultural bias and evidence derived from the careful, skillful and rigorous deployment of science.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid-1 ...
http://sustainablitysoutheast.org/index.php
On New Mother Jones piece flaunts climate starpower, but lacks practical suggestions posted 1 year, 1 month ago 1 Response

No bail-out from global warming...........

http://www.oregonlive.com/commentary/oregonian/index.ssf? ...

There's no bailout for the next crisis

Monday, October 20, 2008 The Oregonian

The recent haggling over how to solve the nation's economic crisis seems to have done little to ease the anxieties of either Wall Street or Main Street. And with good reason: Intuitively, we know we haven't seen the worst of it yet.

Watching a lifetime of stock options head south? Worried about where you'll find the money to pay for college or about the spiraling costs of health care? Certainly nothing could hurt worse than a foreclosure, could it? Well, maybe it could. If $700 billion sounds like a lot, try fathoming $9 trillion -- roughly 13 times the cost of today's hotly debated bailout. That's the projected cost of letting global climate change go unaddressed within this decade.

The thorough shakeup of today's economic climate foreshadows an even more disastrous global crisis heading our way. The same belief in unlimited, unchecked growth (some would say outright greed) that fattened our economy on a diet of junk bonds and hollow lending is also strip-mining our planet's environment of the currency that nature safely invested for us over millions of years, and upon which all life -- including our own -- depends.

The concept of peak oil is not just some naysayers' delusion. According to the U.S. Energy Department's own findings, commonly called the Hirsch report and issued in 2005, it's an unavoidable reality, one that is hurtling toward us faster than we know what to do about.

But like the blind eye that was turned on the proliferation of high-risk, foolhardy mortgages in the midst of a slowing economy, we've bolstered our bravado in the face of such warnings while enthusing about drilling offshore and in the arctic.

While we've been busy digging our fossil-fuel foundations out from under us with the same kind of naive bluster and faith in infinite growth that gutted the economy, we've also been busy ruining things at the top as our upper atmosphere becomes choked with carbon dioxide, leaving us in an environmental demise of our own doing.

When it comes to the economy, a few sleights of hand and a heavy toll on taxpayers, all partisan bickering aside, can be called upon to help us avert disaster and restore faith in the unlimited expansion model. But when it comes to nature's bank, cashing out is forever. No amount of midnight meetings, government-ordered buyouts or credit freezes can save a habitat laid fallow by years of unregulated dumping of chemical waste, nor can they lower our thermostats to an inhabitable temperature in the face of global warming.

Sound policy and the pursuit of new technologies might ameliorate some of our excesses, helping to slow down the rate of climate change and postponing the date of disaster. But like the banking and credit crisis that arrived to the surprise of so many experts -- despite the many warnings sounded years earlier -- environmental failure is going to rear its ugly head someday.

And when mother earth forecloses on us, there will be nowhere else to go.

Lisa Weasel is an associate professor of biology at Portland State University and a board member of The Greenhouse Network.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1 ...
On 'Global warming comes from within'--Is heat at the Earth's core the real cause of global warming? posted 1 year, 1 month ago 10 Responses

Questions...................................

Why, and more precisely how, is a huge thirty percent (30%) of annual corporate profits funnelled into the hands of those running the financial system, come what may for those people who function in "the real economy"?

Is the world's financial system organized and operated as a colossal, soon to become, patently unsustainable pyramid scheme?

Given its artificially design and structure, is there even so much as a chance that the manmade economy is approaching a point in history when the global economy's colossal scale and relentless rate of growth could produce some sort of unimaginable ecological calamity unless, of course, the unbridled global growth of the leviathan-like economy hits the 'wall' named "unsustainability" where it crashes before Earth's ecology is collapsed?

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on the Human Population, established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1 ...
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.phpOn Deregulation and inequality are bad for both the economy and the environment posted 1 year, 1 month ago 15 Responses

Dear Joe Romm............

Two questions for Joe Romm and the Grist Mill community, if you please.

1.  Is there even a reasonable chance the adamant determination of the current leaders of the world's unbridled political economy to grow ourselves out of the current calamity in the financial markets and the real global economy could soon threaten human wellbeing, environmental health and the integrity of Earth?

2.  If the present leadership of the human family keeps relentlessly expanding the leviathan-like global economy in patently unsustainable ways as it is doing now, and the family of humanity keeps getting what we are getting now, what kind of future can be sensibly expected for our children?

SteveOn Will we see $3 gasoline before $5? posted 1 year, 1 month ago 11 Responses

The economy is saved, now..........

......how about turning attention and financial resources to saving the Earth from a meltdown?

It looks as if the Wonder Boys on Wall Street, who caused the current disaster in the world's  financial system, are going to rescue the family of humanity from a meltdown of the global economy.  

Is it too much to ask some of these multi-billionaires to provide wealth to save the world from the global "meltdown" of Earth's ice pack that is occurring in Greenland, Antarctica, the high mountain ranges from the Arctic Cordillera, to the Andes to the Himalayas?

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.phpOn What would you do with $700 billion? posted 1 year, 1 month ago 12 Responses

Leviathan-like, ever-expanding economy crashes

..........into the biophysical limitations imposed by a finite planet with the size and make-up of Earth?

It appears the predominant culture in the world today and its unbridled global economy are precipitating pernicious impacts on biodiversity, the environment and Earth's body. If the leaders of this culture choose to keep relentlessly growing the gigantic world economy as they are doing now, and the family of humanity keeps getting what it is getting now, then life as we know it and the integrity of Earth could eventually become jeopardized.

The current organization of the predominant culture and its worldwide big-business expansion, one that results from the rampant economic globalization we see today, also appears to give rise to something else that is potentially ruinous.

If you will, please consider how conspicuous consumption of resources and hoarding of wealth by millions of people leave billions of people in the family of humanity hungry and in extreme poverty.

For a tiny minority of people with a lion's share of the world's riches to ravenously consume limited resources while millions of less fortunate people go without adequate food to eat, is an economic system in need of modification with all deliberate speed. Perhaps a time will come when such grotesque inequity will not be tolerated.

If the predominant culture modifies the soon to become unsustainable way the global economy grows as well as the careless way that economy distributes resources, then perhaps we will choose more reasonable and sensible ways to distribute wealth and super-abundant food harvests.

I am assuming that we can agree that the endlessly expanding scale of the world's manmade economy in a finite planetary home with the make-up and size of Earth will eventually reach a point in space-time when this artificially designed, colossal economic leviathan becomes patently unsustainable.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php
On Economic downturn and falling oil push green off the priority list, yet again posted 1 year, 1 month ago 8 Responses

Even worse than the financial meltdown.....

...........is the "fool's errand" in Iraq.

"The most extravagant idea that can be born in the head of a political thinker is to believe that it suffices for people to enter, weapons in hand, among a foreign people, and expect to have its laws and constitution embraced. It is in the nature of things that the progress of reason is slow and no one loves armed missionaries; the first lesson of nature and prudence is to repulse them as enemies. One can encourage freedom, never create it by an invading force."
  ~ Maximilien Robespierre, 1792

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.phpOn The bailout, the war, and renewable energy posted 1 year, 1 month ago 2 Responses

Missing the point.............?

Somehow, it appears that we have to focus more attention upon the emerging and converging scientific evidence of ominously looming global threats to the family of humanity that are posed by the overpopulation, overproduction and overpopulation activities of the human species rampantly overspreading Earth in our time.

The ecological challenges presented to the human community in these early years of Century XXI are vital matters for discussion; however, our failure to acknowledge in open discussion "the human population factor" as a primary, driving force, one that is precipitating the ecological challenges visible on the far horizon, is making our best, necessary efforts insufficient.

Always,

Steve

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php
On Must-read NYT Magazine: 'Capitalism to the Rescue' posted 1 year, 1 month ago 7 Responses

Real issues and straight talk.........

........about a $700 billion dollar bail-out as well as abject failures of one generation to accept responsibility for its own patently unsustainable behavior.

Have the self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe among us adopted a behavioral repertoire characterized by unconscionable super-human greediness, the likes of which this world we are blessed to inhabit has never before endured and cannot much longer sustain?

What is to become of our children, whose future is being mortgaged once again this week and threatened more seriously with every passing day?  

When is my not-so-great generation of rapaciously consuming and relentless hoarding elders going to stop its disturbing behavior of dropping problems of our own making into the laps of our children?

The financial engineers who manufactured the spurious business models and Ponzi-like schemes that are undermining the functioning of the global economy today need to take some responsibility for their greedy behavior rather than pass along the colossal debt derived from their subterfuge for our children to repay.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.phpOn The financial crisis, the bailout, and green investment posted 1 year, 2 months ago 10 Responses

Limits to greed................

A remarkable amount of mental energy has been exerted by many `experts' (and wealth distributed to them by their benefactors) over much of my lifetime in a concerted effort to widely share and consensually validate the specious idea that there is no such thing, of all things, as the most obvious of things......limits to growth in a finite world. Most recently, Schellnhuber in Germany, Rapley in England, Rees in Canada, Hansen in the USA, McMichael and Butler in Australia......the list goes on and on...... good scientists all, have been noting over and over again that the human species is approaching ecological limits evidently, obviously imposed by the biophysical reality of the planetary home we are blessed to inhabit. To put it another way, rampant overproduction, rapacious overconsumption and unregulated overpopulation activities by the human species now overspreading the surface of Earth will lead to an ecological "tipping point" of some, perhaps unimaginable sort.

The question seems to have been, Which biophysical limit will be exceeded first? Precisely what will it mean for the human species to overreach and by so doing "give rise to" or "produce" some sort of ecological tipping point? What will happen then? What kind of global wreckage might ensue? What will that moment in space-time look like? Many scientists seem to have been thinking that the unbridled overgrowth activities of the human species would literally and eventually overwhelm the Earth and its environs because the family of humanity has chosen to recklessly ignore the reality of human species limits and Earth's biophysical limitations. For example, recall the ruthless derision of the great work of the Club of Rome regarding ecological limitations to the growth of absolute global human population numbers.

Even so, despite all the attention, the warnings and the good scientific evidence, an ecological tipping point may not be the source of the greatest, most imminent challenge to human wellbeing in these early years of Century XXI. The most pressing, most forbidding threat to human wellbeing may not be ecological in its nature.

For a long time, I have been haunted by the words of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) that are emblazoned in a sonnet about Ozymandias.

" I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away. " --Schelley

What was the "colossal wreck" this "king of kings" observed and how had it happened? What caused the destruction of the world?

The calamity Ozymandias witnessed may not have been more or less than the incredible consequences of human greed having exceeded limits to its growth. That is to say, the adamant and relentless greediness of kings and self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe precipitated the gigantic, distinctly human-driven catastrophe to which The King of kings makes reference.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.phpOn Could reducing homeowner costs through efficiency help meliorate the housing crisis? posted 1 year, 2 months ago 14 Responses

What are we doing? What is to become........

.......of our children?

Our children's future is being mortgaged and put at risk by leaders in my not-so-great generation of elders. Is there no end to arrogance and adamant avarice of the greedy kings of wealth concentration, their bought-and-paid-for politicians, their many minions in the mass media?

Somehow the children have got to find effective ways of communicating about threats to human wellbeing that are being perpetrated before our eyes by self-proclaimed "Masters of the Universe" among us.

Good and able young people are not saying loudly, clearly and often enough what they know to be true........not speaking truth to power.

Many too many politicians are posing for the public and pandering to those with great wealth; too many investment brokers are devising economic bubbles and pyramid schemes, skimming millions for themselves........"breaking" the financial system and threatening the real economy; and the mass media has been turning a blind eye to the entire mess.

Such woefully inadequate leadership needs to be named, shamed and replaced.

Perhaps young people will stand up, remain standing, and speak out loudly, clearly and often about what they see and know to be happening.

Our children could soon be confronted with an economic and/or ecological wreckage of an unimaginable kind; but, because so many people are not reasonably, sensibly and responsibly communicating with one another now, the chances for taking the measure of certain ominously looming economic and ecological challenges and finding adequate solutions to them appear to be diminishing day by day.

Perhaps there are at least three questions worthy of consideration by young people and their elders today.

Is it possible that the wondrous planetary home we inhabit was given unto the stewardship of humankind simply for the purpose of allowing the greediest people on the planet to fulfill their unending wishes and insatiable desires, come what may for a good enough future for their own children, coming generations, billions of less fortunate people in the family of humanity, global biodiversity, Earth's body and environment? Are the greedy kings of wealth concentration and power politics, who consume, possess and hoard a lion's share of the world's wealth, the only people who matter?  Are the selfish among us, the ones who are being "bailed out" this week despite their unbridled avarice and obscene behavior, supposed to be source of our primary concern?

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001,
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.phpOn Galbraith argues against the bailout and in favor of public investement posted 1 year, 2 months ago 2 Responses

A question for climate bloggers to consider?

CAN WE EXAMINE THE NEED TO SAVE EARTH'S ECOLOGY AS WELL AS THE MANMADE ECONOMY?

In light of the increasing number of emergent and convergent, human-driven challenges that appear before the family of humanity on the far horizon, I believe it is vital for the climate blogging community  to come together and, if only for a few moments, "get real" about what our species is doing, here and now, in these early years of Century XXI, to extirpate biodiversity, degrade the environment, dissipate Earth's resources and threaten the very existence of life as we know it.  

Once the economy has been bailed out, I would like the self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe among us, the ones with hundred of millions of dollars in their priviate bank accounts, who are so adamant and urgent in their appeals to save the economy, to turn their attention, energy and vast wealth to the task of saving Earth and its environs from ruination.  

After all, what is the point of choosing to save the economy now if that choice means we could inadvertently ravage the Earth, upon which any manmade construction, even the colossal global economy, depends for its existence?

What kind of economy can function without adequate resources and ecosystem services only the Earth provides?  

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.phpOn This year's top 10 climate blogs posted 1 year, 2 months ago 3 Responses

Is there no end to arrogance and avarice.........

.......the greedy little kings of wealth concentration, their bought-and-paid-for politicians, their many minions in the mass media?

Somehow the family of humanity has got to find more effective ways of communicating about global threats to environmental health and impending dangers to human wellbeing that are being perpetrated before our eyes by the self-proclaimed "Masters of the Universe" among us. Good people are not saying loudly, clearly and often enough what they know to be true....not speaking truth to power.

Politicians are posing for the public and pandering to those with great wealth; investment brokers are devising pyramid schemes, skimming millions for themselves and "breaking" the central banking system; and the mass media is turning a blind eye to the entire mess.

Such woefully inadequate leadership needs to be named, shamed and replaced.

The family of humanity could soon, very soon, be confronted with an economic and/or ecological wreckage of an unimaginable kind; but, because good people are not reasonably and sensibly communicating with one another, the chances for taking the measure of certain ominously looming global challenges and finding adequate solutions to them are diminishing day by day.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php
On One trillion for billionares and pennies for solar? posted 1 year, 2 months ago 26 Responses

Dear John Rynn................

Yes, definitely yes, to everything you are reporting.  Spread the word!

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001On A weak economy brings a diminished appetite for curbs on carbon emissions posted 1 year, 2 months ago 7 Responses

What are the primary causes.......

..... of the financial meltdown and the looming threat of an global economic calamity?

First, the leaders in my generation of elders wish to live without having to accept limits to growth of seemingly endless economic globalization, of increasing per capita consumption and skyrocketing human population numbers; our desires are evidently insatiable. We choose to believe anything that is politically convenient, economically expedient and socially agreeable; our way of life is not negotiable. We dare anyone to question our values or behaviors.
We religiously promote our widely shared and consensually-validated fantasies of `real' endless economic growth and soon to be unsustainable overconsumption, overproduction and overpopulation activities, and in so doing deny that Earth has limited resources and frangible ecosystems upon which the survival of life as we know it depends.

Second, my not-so-great generation appears to be doing a disservice to everything and everyone but ourselves. We are the "what's in it for me generation." We demonstrate precious little regard for the maintenance of the integrity of Earth; shallow willingness to actually protect the environment from crippling degradation; lack of serious consideration for the preservation of biodiversity, wilderness, and a good enough future for our children and coming generations; and no appreciation of the vital understanding that humans are no more or less than magnificent living beings with "feet of clay."

Perhaps we live in unsustainable ways in our planetary home; but we are proud of it nonetheless. Certainly, we will "have our cake and eat it, too." We will own fleets of cars, fly around in thousands of private jets, live in McMansions, exchange secret handshakes, frequent exclusive clubs and distant hideouts, and risk nothing of value to us. We will live long, large and free. Please do not bother us with the problems of the world. We choose not to hear, see or speak of them. We are the economic powerbrokers, their bought-and-paid-for politicians and the many minions in the mass media. We hold the much of the world's wealth and the extraordinary power great wealth purchases. If left to our own devices, we will continue in the exercise of our `inalienable rights' to outrageously consume Earth's limited resources; to recklessly expand economic globalization unto every corner of our natural world and, guess what, beyond; and to carelessly consent to the unbridled global growth of human numbers so that where there are now 6+ billion people, by 2050 we will have 9+ billion members of the human community and, guess what, even more people, perhaps billions more in the distant future, if that is what we desire.

We are the reigning, self-proclaimed masters of the universe. We enjoy freedom and living without limits; of course, we adamantly eschew any talk of the personal responsibilities that come with the exercise of personal freedoms or any discussion of the existence of biophysical limitations of any kind.

We deny the existence of human limits and Earth's limitations.

Please understand that we do not want anyone presenting us with scientific evidence that we could be living unsustainably in an artificially designed, temporary world of our own making....a manmade world filling up with gigantic enterprises, virtual mountains of material possessions, and boundless amounts of filthy lucre.

Third, most of our top rank experts appear not to have found adequate ways of communicating to the family of humanity what people somehow need to hear, see and understand: the rapacious dissipation of Earth's limited resources, the relentless degradation of the planet's environment, and the approaching destruction of the Earth as a fit place for human habitation by the human species, when taken together, appear to be proceeding at breakneck speed toward the precipitation of a catastrophic ecological wreckage of some sort unless, of course, the world's colossal, ever expanding, artificially designed, manmade global political economy continues to speed headlong toward the monolithic `wall' called "unsustainability" at which point the runaway economy crashes before Earth's ecology is collapsed.

Who knows, perhaps we can realistically and hopefully hold onto the expectation that behavioral changes in the direction of sustainable production, per human consumption, and propagation are in the offing.....changes that save both the economy and the Creation.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.phpOn A weak economy brings a diminished appetite for curbs on carbon emissions posted 1 year, 2 months ago 7 Responses

Dear Kate and Bloggers.......

.......any thoughts on what's happening with the global economy?

It appears to me that the family of humanity is learning this week that a government can print money infinitely, without any "revenge" effects. At least that is what we are told by many mavens in the business of managing the global economy. Unfortunately, these mavens appear unwilling to acknowledge the profound implications associated with the understanding that the resource base provided by our planetary home is finite. That is to say, Earth's limited resources cannot support endless economic growth. No possible way.

The unbridled growth of the global economy could soon reach a point in space-time when the limited resources of the relatively small, evidently finite and noticeably frangible planet we inhabit simply can no longer sustain the colossal scale and expected growth of already rampant economic globalization now overspreading the surface of Earth and posing a threat to life as we know it as well as to the integrity of Earth and its environs.

Comments from one and all are welcome.

Sincerely,

Steve

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.phpOn I'll be on Meet the Bloggers tomorrow posted 1 year, 2 months ago 1 Response

If science is marginalized and denigrated.........

... by leadership as it is in these days, and if many too many leaders in the family of humanity keep doing as they are doing now and the human community keeps getting what we are getting now, all of us could end up inadvertently precipitating some kind of colossal economic and/or ecologic wreckage, the likes of which only Ozymandias has witnessed.

If the gigantic scale and growth of unbridled over-consumption, overproduction and overpopulation activities of the human species now overspreading the surface of Earth were to lead to some unimaginable kind of catastrophe, AND WE, THE PEOPLE, FAIL TO UNDERSTAND HOW HUMAN BEINGS PERPETRATED THE CALAMITOUS EVENT, are those who survive the devastation and "pick up the pieces" of a broken civilization and a ravaged Earth not DESTINED TO DO AGAIN THE VERY SAME THINGS WE ARE DOING NOW........with the likelihood of causing another incomprehensible catastrophe in the distant future?

Sincerely,

Steve

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.phpOn New Scientist assesses McCain and Obama on science issues posted 1 year, 2 months ago 27 Responses

Letter to the Editor, Chapel Hill (NC) Newspaper

September 9, 2008

Tapestry beautiful but resources finite

My father was in the business of manufacturing textiles. A tapestry is the centerpiece of our family's living room. Jane Ballard's Sampler hangs on the far wall. From an early age I learned to behold the beauty found in woven, ornamental fabrics and knitted cloth. But of all the tapestries and "samplers" I have ever seen there is nothing so beautiful, good or true as the tapestry of life to which Brian Lawe refers in his Aug. 3 letter. Each new life adds to tapestry. Mr. Lawe is due thanks.

Perhaps my perspective of the biophysical world we inhabit as relatively small, evidently finite and noticeably frangible is mistaken. That may be so. It would please me so if it turns out that my observations are shown to be fatally flawed and Brian's perceptions of what is somehow real are altogether proven to be the correct ones. That will be just fine.

Because something is happening that continues to worry me and occasionally to awaken me in the middle of the night, I find myself sending dozens of letters to editors, hundreds of missives into the blogosphere and thousands of e-mails into cyberspace. Always the theme is the same. It is simply this: Earth's body is finite, its resources are limited, and its ecosystem services capable of irreversible degradation by the huge scale and anticipated growth of human over-consumption, overproduction and overpopulation activities, the ones we see rampantly overspreading the surface of our planetary home in our time. Earth does not resemble a mother's teat at which the human species may forever suckle. Despite the assurances of many economists and politicians, Earth is not a cornucopia. No possible way.

The unbridled growth of the human species presents a colossal challenge to the family of humanity. The Earth as a constant, seemingly endless provider of whatsoever human beings desire is a fantasy ... a widely shared, consensually validated, distinctly human product of wishful and magical thinking.

-- Steven Earl Salmony, Chapel Hill
On It's time to break the American addiction to oil posted 1 year, 2 months ago 12 Responses

Political will, political won't

Political Will, Political Won't

---------------------------------
The accepted wisdom of today's environmental reform movement is founded on two core assumptions. The first is that most of the technical solutions we need to address the world's various crises are available, or at least could be swiftly developed by sufficiently intelligent, hard-working people. The second assumption is that all that's lacking for a successful outcome is the political will to put these technical solutions into effect.

Whether the discussion turns to replacing coal-fired power plants with wind turbines and using electric cars instead of gas-driven SUVs, converting industrial agricultural practices to organic permaculture, or reversing the decline of ocean life though international regulations, it is an article of faith in the reform movement that we know what we need to do and all that's lacking is a sufficiently visionary leader to put more planet-friendly solutions in place.

Both those assumptions ignore significant aspects of the situation - aspects that must be addressed for the envisioned reforms to be successful. This article examines those two assumptions with an eye to uncovering the confounding issues.

The array of problems
As the following laundry list of negative trends clearly illustrates, the scale and diversity of the problems we face are significant.

The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is approaching 400 parts per million.
We are emitting carbon dioxide 10 times faster than one of the world's largest known volcanic eruptions (the Deccan Traps) that was implicated in the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event 65 million years ago.
Ice caps and glaciers are disintegrating.
World oil production is on a 4 year plateau despite prices that have quadrupled during that time.
In our oceans the coral reefs are dying, dead zones are expanding, and predatory fish species (the ones we eat) have declined by 90% in the last 50 years.
The biomass of prey fish in the Great Lakes has fallen by 92% since 2000.
The estimated extinction rate for plants and animals is at least 75 species per day.
The Great Pacific Garbage Dump is full of plastic.
Over 75,000 square miles of arable land is lost each year to urbanization and desertification.
A billion people in over 110 countries are seriously affected by desertification.
Nearly a third of the world's cropland has been abandoned since WW II because of damage by intensive agriculture and erosion.
On the American Great Plains, half the topsoil has been lost in the last hundred years.
The Ogallala aquifer in the western United States is being drained up to 100 times faster than it is being refilled.
Indian farmers have drilled over 21 million water wells using oil-well technology. They take 200 billion cubic tonnes of water out of the earth each year for irrigation.
We have eaten more grain than we have grown in 7 of the last 8 years.
World carry-over grain stocks were 130 days of consumption in 1986 - today, it's only 53 days.
The global per capita grain supply has fallen from 340 kg in 1984 to 300 kg today.
The world price of fertilizer is rising exponentially.
The IPCC predicts that climate change will cut African food production in half by 2020.
The cost of food is skyrocketing world-wide. Some countries have responded by banning exports of wheat or rice.
We are in the beginning stages of a global financial crisis that could result in either a deflationary or hyper-inflationary depression lasting for a decade or more.
These sorts of problems are known as wicked problems. That means they are messy, circular, aggressive and interlinked, so that trying to solve one may worsen others. Each problem shows a trend, and all the trends appear to be worsening inexorably. In some cases the trends have been visible for centuries (for example the loss of arable land and desertification), sometimes for decades (as with the loss of aquatic biomass), and some like Peak Oil for a scant few years. In all cases the global trends show no signs of reversing, however much effort has been expended to alter their local or regional trajectories . As their effects become more pronounced, it becomes easier to see their potential to hit our globalized industrial civilization like a planet-sized version of Hurricane Katrina.

As daunting as the individual problems are, the key to understanding the importance of this list is recognizing the degree of the linkages between them. In many cases, trying to solve one problem can inadvertently make others worse. One prominent example is the attempt to address global warming through the use of ethanol as a vehicle fuel. While there may have been some merit to that primary intention, the secondary effects - increasing dead zones in the oceans due to fertilizer runoff, and rising food prices due to the use of food crops as fuel - eliminated the overall benefit of the effort, and even created a net negative outcome.

Similar knock-on effects have occurred in in other areas. The attempt to raise food production through irrigation and the use of petroleum-based fertilizers has depleted water tables and reinforced a style of agriculture based on a finite resource. The attempt to increase global living standards (and thereby reduce population growth) by exporting production facilities to regions with lower wage and environmental standards has backfired by increasing levels of water, air and soil pollution - increases that have been felt well beyond the boundaries of those regions. One dark quip that addresses this sort of backfire is, "Around every silver lining there is a cloud."

When viewed from this perspective it becomes obvious that dealing with the panoply of problems besetting our world involves considerably more than just knocking them down one at a time. If we don't apply holistic, system-level thinking to the converging crisis, our well-meaning efforts stand an excellent chance of making the overall situation worse.

I have concluded that it is a mistake to think of "solving" these problems in any global or final sense. Some of them may be improved regionally, especially if they are not in local conflict with other competing problems. The logical corollary is that there will be other regions where those same problems cannot be solved, due different local circumstances.

The big question, however, concerns those problems that are not contained, that do not respect national or regional boundaries. Global warming and the death of ocean biomes affect us all, and failures to address these problems in any region can make the situation worse for everyone. In these cases, it's obvious that a collective global response is called for - a response that brings together the political, economic, industrial and opinion-making institutions of our world. If these institutions acted together they might have a chance of implementing the deep and wide-ranging changes the situation calls for.

Unfortunately, until now we have seen precious little evidence of such a collective response. For example, we have repeatedly seen climate change conferences break down or issue watered-down statements that fail to address the scale of the accelerating crisis. While individuals, citizens' groups and even some governments are obviously aware of the urgency, collective action repeatedly fails to gain the required global traction.

This state of affairs is no accident. This is not because of some dark and sinister cabal or conspiracy to hold back change in the name of personal profit, though there probably are some instances of that. The real reasons are at once more banal and more worrisome than the Bilderberg watchers assume. In the next section I will examine the structural reasons for this sorry situation.

Politics, the high art of civilization

In order to understand the role that politics plays in our collective failure to address the predicament described above, we need to examine the nature of modern civilization.

Now, when I use the term "modern civilization" I'm not just talking about the growth of industrialism over the last two hundred years. I'm not even talking about the growth of Western culture over the last two thousand years. What we usually think of as "modern civilization" is the development, refinement and culmination of cultural changes that began ten thousand years ago.

In turn, in order to understand modern civilization, we need to look even farther back, at how humans lived before we became "modern and civilized" and what happened to push our species across that threshold.

Human beings have been around in one form or another for two and a half million years, first as homo habilis, then as homo erectus, and finally as homo sapiens. For virtually all of those 2.5 million years, we lived in harmony with our environment. While it may not always have been a comfortable life (how could it have been, without color cable television or cars?), we were nonetheless perfectly adapted to our habitat. This statement is supported by two facts: over most of that period our presence caused little or no damage to the planetary biosphere; and during that time the human population was essentially stable, growing to only 5 million or so in two and a half million years, for a net addition of a scant two people per year.

Recently there have been some remarkable discoveries about the quality of life in the times before modern civilization. We have always known that society back then consisted of hunter-gatherers, organized as tribes. The classical impression was that the lives of these savages were, in the words of Thomas Hobbes, "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short". Recent investigations have shown that in fact hunter-gatherer societies enjoyed a remarkable quality of life characterized by low levels of effort, plenty of leisure time, good nutrition, low levels of disease, egalitarianism, very low levels of suicide, homicide and warfare, a high degree of personal autonomy and close-knit communities. In the words of Marshall Sahlins, hunter-gatherers were "the original affluent society." In one of our more damaging semantic restatements we have defined "subsistence" living as bad and "sustainable" living as good - even though in the context of a hunter-gatherer society, they mean exactly the same thing.

So here we have a species that was exquisitely adapted to its environment, living an affluent yet sustainable life, treading lightly on the earth, never outgrowing or overrunning its habitat, at least in terms of the species as a whole. We lived in this harmony with our world for two and a half million years, or 99.6% of the time we have been on the planet. Then suddenly, in the last ten thousand years - a mere 0.4% eye blink of time - our population increased over 1000 times, we decimated the earth's stocks of non-renewable resources, we cut down over 90% of the planet's forests, we fished her oceans to the edge of extinction, and we live in a near-constant state of conflict with each other. In this grievously short time we have brought about all the wicked problems listed above. Pardon my French, but what the hell happened?

In a word, it was agriculture.

About 10,000 years ago humanity developed organized, settled agriculture. Over the next couple of thousand years our predominant social model changed from hunter-gatherers to cultivators. We settled down (as one has to, to raise crops), and started to form larger social structures - villages, towns and cities. Nobody is precisely sure why we developed agriculture, when our previous ways of life had been perfectly satisfactory for millions of years. It may have been precipitated by climate changes, or growing populations in some areas, or it may have been just one of those things. There is no doubt that the threshold of radical human change is clearly demarcated by fields of grain.

Hierarchy
The shift to settled cultivation entrained a host of other changes. Our diet was dramatically impoverished. Levels of chronic disease and malnutrition increased. Levels of social violence escalated. However, the most significant change was the introduction of hierarchies that had not previously existed in our social systems.

Why the development of agriculture resulted in the simultaneous appearance of social hierarchies is still a matter of debate. My opinion is that it happened because the risk to farming communities from crop failures was very high. If the crops failed, these communities contained too many people to survive on local foraging or hunting - both because population densities were so high and because the habitat destruction caused by farming had reduced the amount of local wild food. There was also no way to bring in food from some other unaffected region. Therefore the risk of crop failures had to be mitigated. This mitigation involved many activities. For example, local hunting kept larger crop-eating pests at bay, irrigation helped in times of drought, and shamanic intercession took care of storms and blights.

Each of these activities of hunter, irrigation engineer and shaman was highly specialized in comparison to the more generic farming skills required for planting and harvesting. Such specialization conferred power on the holders of those skills. This was especially true in the case of shamans, whose power could not be entirely learned, but was said to emanate come from a mysterious connection with the supernatural. Their attempt to exercise control over nature gave the shamans the real ability to exercise control over other people however ("Obey me or the gods will frown on us, and the crop failure will be your fault!"), and the first systematic hierarchies were born.

Surplus
The other significant change introduced by organized agriculture was the psychological effect of reliable surpluses of food. While the previous two and a half million years of our existence had been shaped by sustainable subsistence, agriculture introduced the possibility of producing more food than we needed, letting us distribute the required amount to the members of the community and store the excess.

Centralizing the production of food and managing its distribution reinforced the development of hierarchies. Since some of the food was needed by people who had no direct hand in producing it (such as weavers, shamans and granary guards), some means had to be found of giving them equitable access to it. This meant coming up with a way of defining relative values for different kinds of work, and establishing a medium of exchange. In one stroke the concepts of money and wages appeared, resulting in a further transfer of power to those who established the value of work and controlled the money supply (and indirectly the access to food).

As important as that development was, there was yet another fundamental cultural change brought about by the simple existence of a food surplus. For the previous two and a half million years, human wants had been satisfied by the concept of "enough". People worked until they had enough, then they stopped. Now there was almost always "more than enough". The perception that there was more than enough food caused a radical change in how we looked at the world.

Food surpluses and the development of a medium of exchange made trade for non-food goods possible. The continued trade of ongoing food surpluses enabled a continuous growth in the material comfort of peoples' lives. It did not take long for people to become accustomed to this new state of affairs. As memories of the past faded over just a few generations, the new conditions of growing abundance were rapidly accepted as the "natural" order of things.

Modern Civilization
We now have the two critical preconditions for "modern civilization". The first is the belief that a continuous growth in material prosperity is the natural order of the human universe. The second is the belief that a power hierarchy is essential for the smooth functioning of the system.

As always happens with hierarchies, power flows uphill. Along with it go the perquisites of power, the most important being the right to higher levels of material abundance than those lower in the pecking order. In order to ensure that this comfortable situation is maintained, part of the accumulated social power is used to protect the situation. This is done by strongly defending the two fundamental preconditions: the idea that both material growth and the need for hierarchy are natural, essential and unquestionable. Indeed, the status quo is best served if the rest of the community sees this situation as simply part of the matrix of the universe, the only possible way life could work, and that any suggestions to the contrary are the result of either some nefarious agenda or outright insanity.

Guardian Institutions
Over the centuries an interlocking system of guardian institutions has grown up to protect and defend the two key ideas of growth and hierarchy.

Our economic and financial institutions cooperate with business and industry to set the value of work and control the money supply (thereby controlling access to food). In this role it doesn't make any difference whether an economy is capitalist, socialist or communist. The core belief it guards is always the same one.

Our educational institutions teach successive generations how the system works, giving them the tools to integrate into it and manipulate it at the same time as training them to see this as the only possible way the world could work.
Our communications media reinforce this message by enlisting people in the growth paradigm. They do this both though overt messages like advertising and covert messages embedded in the story lines of entertainment.
Our religious institutions (as distinct from the religions they purport to enshrine) are primarily normative social structures. Many incorporate an overt message that one should be content with things as they are. There are often injunctions against questioning authority, as all authority is seen to devolve from the supernatural - just as it did for the shamans of the early agricultural era.
Our legal institutions enforce the norms of hierarchy in ways too numerous to count. These range from the protection of privilege (one law for the rich, one for the poor) to the preferential defense of property rights over human rights.
Our political institutions sit at the tip of the pyramid. Political institutions encode, enshrine and manage the application of social power. Politics is the institution that legitimizes all the others. Because of its unique ability to make laws and its access to the legalized violence that defends those laws, politics is the fullest expression of the power hierarchy of modern civilization.
At the base of the hierarchy, supporting it all, are an ever-diminishing number of farmers who apply ever-increasing amounts of knowledge, technology and petroleum to ensure an ever-expanding supply of food. Because at the core it is their food that makes the whole edifice possible.

So where does that put us in relation to the array of wicked problems we listed at the beginning? Simply put, every one of these problems is the result of unbridled growth. They are the logical results of the continual exercise of the first precondition of modern civilization, the drummer we have been marching to for ten thousand years since the invention of agriculture.

Why politics is the problem, not the solution
In light of this analysis it should be obvious why we are repeatedly failing to address any of these wicked problems. The only permanent "solution" to any of them is the secession of growth. That idea is anathema to our guardian institutions. And as the occupants of the pinnacle of power, our politicians have every reason to derail efforts in that direction, no matter how small.

Politics, regardless of party or ideology, is part of the problem and can never be part of the solution. While it may be easier for the average person to live under the rule of a more humane parcel of rogues, at its heart politics is the primary guardian institution of modern civilization. The role of all politics is to ensure that power is managed, and power is always managed for the benefit of the holders of power. It doesn't matter whether the power managers are Democrats, Republicans, Tories, Grits, Social Democrats, Communists or a military junta. They all fulfill the same role in service of the same beneficiaries.

In order to fulfill that role they unite with the other guardian institutions - the economic, industrial, legal. religious, educational and communications organizations. Together these institutions create, maintain and guard a noetic milieu (a globalized intuitive, non-rational consciousness) in which any values that challenge the two fundamental preconditions to modern civilization are seen as incomprehensible, self-evidently absurd, dangerous or even insane. Since the primary value system these guardians protect is the paradigm of continuous material growth, the most dangerous of all radical ideas are any proposals to limit, halt or reverse that growth.

Conclusion
The influences of our guardian institutions are firmly embedded in our global culture. They have such power and such general support at all levels of society that it is ultimately fruitless to try and remove them from power by either direct or indirect confrontation. The penalties for trying this are severe and ruthlessly applied.

In light of this, is there any hope for a return to a sustainable, egalitarian, interconnected, considerate and just civilization? I strongly believe that there is, but getting there will be neither sure nor easy.

The institutions that stand between us and such a future are trapped by their dependence on the very paradigm they are sworn to protect. They defend the belief that permanent material growth is natural, possible and inevitable. While they defend that belief with laws, guns and television, ultimately their power comes from people who accept that premise. If people stop believing that such growth is possible the institutions' power declines, no matter how many defense mechanisms they engage. If growth falters, the people lose faith and the institutions crack and crumble.

Look back at the list of problems that led off the article. Every single one of them is the result of our growth encountering limits. While we may be able to figure out ways to temporarily circumvent some of these limits, the pattern is now clear. The growth of modern civilization is slowing down, and is even showing evidence of coming to a halt. For a guardian institution that depends on growth for its very survival, this is like a diagnosis of terminal cancer.

What that means is that these institutions will inevitably start losing their monolithic top-down power. This dis-integration will leave "cracks in the sidewalk of civilization". And just as grass grows through cracks in real concrete, small communities and individuals will start to appear through the metaphorical concrete of our industrial civilization.

No one can predict when, where or how the dis-integration will appear. It will take different forms in different places. The response of the guardians will probably be violently draconian in most cases. But there are places where communities have already formed in anticipation of such an opportunity. Like "Gaia's antibodies" they will work to heal the wounds, widen the cracks, and let the sunshine and fresh air revitalize the hidden earth. As the seed stock of the next phase of civilization they will spread their values on the wind.

The next cycle of human experience on this planet will be very different from any that has gone before. We will have fewer resources, but more knowledge. We will have to deal with toxic landscapes, a warming climate, shifting rainfall patterns and the emergence of new diseases. To balance that we will have better communications and longer memories than any civilization that has gone before us. We will not fall back into the stone age, but neither will we motor off happily into the sunset in our electric cars. There will be hardship and misery, but there will also be joy - the joy that comes from looking forward, from participating in our communities, from the love of those around us. Above all, there will be the future.

----------------------------------
Acknowledgments
I'm indebted to the writing of Daniel Quinn and John Zerzan, as well as to Riane Eisler for her book "The Chalice and the Blade". I'd also like to acknowledge the philosophy of Anarcho-Primitivism for its critique of civilization (though perhaps not for its suggested solutions).

September 3, 2008

© Copyright 2008, Paul Chefurka

This article may be reproduced in whole or in part for the purpose of research, education or other fair use, provided the nature and character of the work is maintained and credit is given to the author by the inclusion in the reproduction of his name and/or an electronic link to the article
On In her big speech, Palin repeats the GOP's big energy lie -- plus three other energy lies posted 1 year, 2 months ago 11 Responses

Dear qzuckier............

You report,

" don't want to disrupt the global economy

yeah, don't want to rock the boat now that the world is nice and peaceful and stable and we've eliminated poverty and starvation for everyone...  ^_^ "

Thanks for saying what is so obvious and so real.  You are correct.  Just as you suggest, people with wealth and the power it purchases like things just the way they are and, as you put it, do not want to "rock the boat."  Everyone can see the point you are making; however, you have likely noticed that not everyone is saying what you are saying. Perhaps wealthy people and their bought-and-paid-for politicians "preach" silence in the face of what is real about the world we inhabit and eschew the words of open, honest and courageous people regarding what is real about the human condition: armed conflicts in many places {but not in enclaves of the wealthy and powerful}; economic bubbles, Ponzi games and pyramid schemes underwriting soon to become unsustainable global economic growth; rampant political destabilization; poverty affecting billions of people and massive starvation of millions of children; diseases and pestilence........

Thanks for speaking truth to power so succinctly, loudly and clearly.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.phpOn Republican platform acknowledges climate change but spurns 'no-growth' radicalism posted 1 year, 2 months ago 25 Responses

Given the global challenges looming.......

.......so ominously before the family of humanity, I can certainly agree with you, MAD MAC, that "it's just not that easy."  The challenges we can see in the offing are daunting.  Of that there is virtually no doubt.  But keeping one's head in the sand as visible threats to human and environmental health become larger and more difficult to address, much less overcome, is anathema to me.

Once again, MAD MAC and Sindark deserve our thanks for speaking out loudly, clearly and often. On Republican platform acknowledges climate change but spurns 'no-growth' radicalism posted 1 year, 2 months ago 25 Responses

Shedding light on a need for economic changes now

...... with the hope assuring a substainable global economy and a good enough future for our children.

How is adequate, sustained attention to be drawn to the greedy kings and self-proclaimed masters of the universe who are responsible for the perpetration of such a colossal, fraudulent and patently unsustainable scheme as we see in the rampant process of seemingly endless economic globalization?

At least to me, it appears that the huge scale of unbridled global economic growth is a canker threatening to overspread and eventually ruin Earth as a fit place for human habitation.  

Changing from an unsustainable world economy to a sustainable one has got to be made the goal, does it not?  

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.phpOn Republican platform acknowledges climate change but spurns 'no-growth' radicalism posted 1 year, 2 months ago 25 Responses

It's the ecology (not the economy), stupid!

The time is coming when many people will follow the exemplary behavior of Gristmill Bloggers by speaking out loudly and clearly for something, for anything at all to do with the preservation of life as know it and Earth, even though it is not politically convenient and economically expedient to do so, even though thousands of greedy kings and self-proclaimed masters of the universe eschew such open expressions as well as maintain that "silence is golden."

Soon people will be heard speaking out often in many places for something, for anything at all that does not have to do with the unbridled and soon to become unsustainable growth of the global political economy.

The mass media's silence regarding the threat of rampant economic globalization is deafening. How much longer will it continue?

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php
On Homemade garbage barge about to make landfall in Hawaii posted 1 year, 3 months ago 6 Responses

Dear Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and .......

........David Roberts,

Could at least one of the causes of life and the Earth, as we know them, "going to hell in a handbasket" be that the all-too-human global political economy is constructed as a perpetual motion machine and operated as a colossal pyramid scheme?

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.phpOn Gates, Buffet to invest in massive climate change? posted 1 year, 3 months ago 8 Responses

Dear Wolverine....

Thanks for your comments.  

Could you or perhaps others in the Gristmill community direct me to threads and blogs where I might expect to find "sustainable" discussions on the topic of the human overpopulation of Earth and the potentially profound implications of unrestrained overconsumption, unbridled overproduction and unregulated propagation activities by the human species on the surface of our planetary home?

Sincerely,

SteveOn The New York Times' absurd energy editorial posted 1 year, 3 months ago 9 Responses

Standing up with Dr. James Hansen......

When I was a boy, we were taught that each generation had responsibilities to assume and duties to perform with regard to the acknowledgement and acceptance of the challenges that are present at that time, so that the next generation can have a chance at a better life. Under no circumstances, would it be correct to pose as willfully blind, hysterically deaf or electively mute in the face of any challenge, as my not-so-great is doing in these days.

What has happened to the misguided leaders of my generation? So many in the elder generation have determined to let the looming challenges in our time fall into the laps of our children. At least to me, today's leaders show an astonishing unwillingness to examine the prospects of a good life for those who directly follow us, let alone coming generations.

After my single, not-so-great generation finishes the `missions' (ie, fools' errands) the leading, self-proclaimed "masters of the universe" among us have set before the human community, what resources will be left for our children to consume; how many more people will have to share what remains of the dissipated and degraded resources; where will they find clean air to breathe, clean water to drink? I shudder when thinking about what our children might say about what we have done so poorly and failed to do so spectacularly, all for sake of selfishly fulfilling our insatiable desires for endless material possessions and freedom without responsibility.......come what may for the children, coming generations, global biodiversity, the environment and Earth's body.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.phpOn Jim Hansen on Charlie Rose posted 1 year, 3 months ago 5 Responses

Advocate for the most sustainable........

......POLITICAL ECONOMY, not just for "the most sustainable political convention in modern American history"!  Is sustainability of the global political economy not at least one thing that is necessary for the establishment of a sustainable future world order on a planet fit for human habitation? What we are likely to see regarding sustainability at the political conventions is likely to be little more or less than temporary window dressing.

PRESS RELEASE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
August 8, 2008
Contact:
Kelly Boatman, Chair, City of Bloomington Environmental Commission
(812) 287-0031

ENVIRONMENTAL COMMISSION ADDRESSES GROWTH

The City of Bloomington Environmental Commission has adopted a position statement and completed a report to increase awareness of growth and sustainable development. The statement, "Position of the City of Bloomington Environmental Commission on Economic Growth in the United States" is modeled on similar statements issued by the United States Society for Ecological Economics and over 40 other groups inspired by the work of the Center for the Advancement of a Steady State Economy (CASSE). The statement advocates a steady state economy in which resource consumption and waste production are maintained within the environment's capacity to regenerate resources and assimilate waste, emphasizing development as a qualitative, rather than quantitative, process.

"This position statement acknowledges that the human economy is contained within, and dependent on, a finite and depletable natural environment," said Environmental Commission member Heather Reynolds. "Ever-increasing economic growth ultimately leads to resource consumption and waste production at rates greater than can be sustained by nature." A steady state economy for the U.S. will depend in no small part on the efforts made by communities across the nation to achieve sustainable local economies. The first step is awareness and acceptance of the concepts, both of which it is hoped that the position statement will foster.

The report, "An Examination of the Costs Associated with Residential Growth in Bloomington" is modeled after similar studies in other communities. Such studies have shown that infrastructure costs to support growth often outpace the benefits of that growth to the city. A sustainable approach to development would mean ensuring long-term benefits outweigh costs.

The Commission's report focuses on the City of Bloomington's capital expenditures and how these expenditures are impacted by residential growth. The report is not intended to define the full costs of growth in Bloomington, but rather to illustrate that there are substantial costs incurred by the City to provide necessary infrastructure to residences. To fully examine costs, further analysis of not only facilities and infrastructure, but also social and environmental impacts is needed.

"The Commission's report illustrates that the City incurs real costs that are associated with residential growth," said Environmental Commission member Mike Litwin. "The Commission would like to see the costs of growth balanced against the benefits and incorporated into the decision-making process in order to promote sustainable development in Bloomington." The report and position statement are available on the Environmental Commission website at http://bloomington.in.gov/environmental-commission.

Position of the City of Bloomington Environmental Commission on Economic Growth in the United States

(Adapted from the Position of the United States Society for Ecological Economics on Economic Growth in the United States and adopted on May 22, 2008 in a 4-2-0 vote following two years of discussion.)

Whereas:

1. Economic growth, as understood by most professional economists, policy officials and private citizens, is an increase in the production and consumption of goods and services, and;

2. Economic growth occurs when there is an increase in the multiplied product of population and per capita consumption, and;

3. Economic growth has long been a primary policy goal of U.S. society and government because of the belief that it leads to an enhanced quality of life, and;

4. Economic growth is usually measured by increasing gross domestic product (GDP), although this is an incomplete indicator of quality of life that excludes the equity of income distribution, other social factors such as physical health and level of crime, and ecological health, and;

5. The U.S. economy grows as an integrated whole consisting of agricultural, extractive, manufacturing, and services sectors (and the supporting infrastructure) that requires physical inputs of non-renewable resources, land and water, and that produces wastes, and;

6. Economic growth occurs in a finite and depletable biophysical context, and;

7. Continuing non-renewable resource-intensive economic growth is having unintended damaging consequences for ecosystems and human societies...

1. There is a fundamental conflict between economic growth and ecosystem health (in such areas as biodiversity conservation, clean air and water, and atmospheric stability) and the ecosystem services deriving from healthy ecosystems that underpin the human economy (for example, regeneration of renewable resources, decomposition and recycling of wastes, pollination of crops and other vegetation, and climate regulation), and;

2. Although technological progress and unregulated markets have had many positive effects they cannot be depended upon to fully reconcile the conflict between economic growth and the long-term ecological and social welfare of the U.S. and the world, and;

3. A sustainable economy (that is, an economy with a relatively stable, mildly fluctuating product of population and per capita consumption) is a viable alternative to a growing economy and has become a more appropriate goal for the U.S. and other large, wealthy economies, and;

4. A long-run sustainable economy requires its establishment at a size small enough to avoid the breaching of ecological and economic capacity (especially during supply shocks such as droughts and energy shortages) to promote the efficient use of energy, materials and water, and enable an accelerated shift toward the use of renewable energy sources, and;

5. A sustainable economy supports economic development, an increase in human welfare through strategic changes in the relative prominence of economic sectors and techniques (e.g. renewable vs. non-renewable energy) that maintains the human economy within the regenerative and assimilative capacity of the larger earth system, and;

6. While establishing a sustainable economy, it would be advisable for the U.S. to assist other nations in moving from the goal of economic growth to the goal of a sustainable economy, beginning with those nations currently enjoying adequate per capita consumption, and;

7. For many nations with widespread poverty, increasing per capita consumption through economic growth and often via more equitable distributions of wealth remains an appropriate goal.

WE have a very serious problem.........

.......but people evidently become hysterically blind, willfully deaf and electively mute in the face of it.

Denial of emergent and convergent global threats by informed leaders and delaying tactics by their many minions are threatening life as we know it and the integrity of Earth today.

We are not seeing colleagues speak out loudly, clearly and often to report that The Human Species' Population Bomb is Exploding NOW, as I did in 2005.

http://www.fragilecologies.com/mar22_05.html

The deafening silence of too many reputable scientists and the shrill voices of many too many political hacks and ideologues are symptomatic of deeply distressing problems. Top rank scientists in many places are either being subjected to venal pressures and, in some cases, driven out of "politically incorrect" areas of research or else their positions and programs are cut out of the government's budget. Low rank scientists, willing to subscribe to whatsoever is politically convenient and economically expedient, remain in place.

By recklessly funding such entities like the Department of Defense and related `defense' activities for the sake of winning military battles in distant lands, we are losing "the war" against environmental degradation, biodiversity extirpation, and the preservation of Earth as a fit place for human habitation by our children and coming generations.

How could my single, admittedly not-so-great generation of wrong-headed leading elders have become so terribly misdirected? These self-proclaimed "masters of the universe" have vanquished moral authority, but not the designated enemies. Perhaps wanton greed, acquisition of too much power, and idolatry of endless wealth accumulation and economic growth-mania of many too many leaders have something to do with my `religious' generation's adamant pursuit of so many unfortunate errands perpetrated by a confederacy of fools.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php
On Outline for a move to a sustainable agriculture system posted 1 year, 3 months ago 108 Responses

Dear Ken Ward.............

Thanks for your comments.

Countries in Western Europe provide examples in which increasing wealth results in decreasing population. On the other hand, countries in the Middle East give us examples in which increasing wealth gives rise to increasing human population numbers.

You ask,

"Is it not the case that, generally speaking, nations that are secure, provide a comfortable - not necessarily rich - way of life, have personal and political freedom, and are dynamic (not necessarily in terms of economic growth), experience significant population decline?"

Speaking only generally, we can likely agree that millions of human beings worldwide are living in countries which fit the parameters you have mentioned. Yes, the population numbers in many of these countries are declining.  On the other hand, please note that several billion unfortunate people are living in countries which do not fit the parameters you have put forward. In these countries people are mostly not as "secure, provide a comfortable - not necessarily rich - way of life, have personal and political freedom, and are dynamic (not necessarily in terms of economic growth)", as you put it.

Ken, can you see that the millions of fortunate people in the family of humanity are a relatively small segment of the whole human population? If individual members of the human species keep doing what we are doing now by recklessly consuming limited resources; relentlessly expanding large-scale production capabilities of the global economy in a small, frangible, finite world; and reflexively populating our planetary home, then what the human community is doing now could lead us, I suppose, to some sort of colossal ecological and/or economic wreckage. That is to say, if we keep over-consuming, overproducing and overpopulating as we are doing now and keep getting what we are getting now, then such an catastrophic outcome could become unavoidable at some point in the future, could it not?

Sincerely,

Steve

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.phpOn Three models for environmental analysis and planning posted 1 year, 3 months ago 25 Responses

Perhaps these great organizations can unite.....

......by directing their and the human family's attention to the new demographic research of the population dynamics of the human species and to the potentially profound implications of the skyrocketing growth of the human population worldwide..... from 6.7 billion in 2008 to 9.2 billion people around 2050.

Declines and increases in population growth are well documented and show us the uneveness in the effect of increasing wealth among countries worldwide. The rate of population growth declines in some countries and regions with growing wealth and not in other countries. These demographic outcomes are plainly inconsistent. People who cannot see the usefulness of Thomas Malthus's seminal observations of divergent supply and demand simply don't see such inconsistencies.

In any event, it is possible for us to discern how time is moving forward to a point of unsustainability: when an inelastic upside for developing new supply and an inelastic downside for controlling new demand becomes patently unsustainable. That is why simply allowing diverging unbridled supply and unrestrained demand to go to their natural endpoint could result in a colossal ecological and/or economic wreckage of some unimaginable kind.

The 'manufacture' of pyramidal schemes, economic bubbles and cornucopian mythology deceives people who are ready to be deluded and willing to accept whatsoever is economically expedient and politically convenient, even something patently unsupportable, to buttress their magical thinking about the way the world we inhabit works as well as about the placement of the human species within the natural order of living things.

From this perspective, the theory of the demographic transition does not apply universally. That is to say, for every country that provides us with an example of declining family size as wealth increases, we can identify other countries in which family size is growing as wealth increases, and verse versa. Look to countries in Western Europe for examples of the former, and to countries in the Middle East for examples of the latter.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1 ...On Three models for environmental analysis and planning posted 1 year, 3 months ago 25 Responses

Which will collapse first....................

.......the Manmade Economy or God's Creation?

Perhaps there is another way, a better way to communicate what I am trying to say here.

It is the Creation that is being overwhelmed by the unrestrained over-consumption, unbridled overproduction and unrestricted overpopulation activities of the human species, which can be seen so clearly overspreading the surface of Earth in these early years of Century XXI.

In our time, sacrificing the Creation on the altar of the seemingly endless, distinctly human-driven expansion of economic globalization is what concerns me.

Please help us understand how the human economy can exist without the Creation. Surely we can agree that the Creation will likely go on long after the last idolaters of the global political economy have somehow determined to end their pursuit of a fool's errand: dominion of the Earth and everything we derive from it.
On Review of climate change impact economics posted 1 year, 3 months ago 9 Responses

The Human Economy versus God's Creation.......

.........which will collapse first?

Never before has so much wealth been concentrated in the hands of so few people.  A small minority of people in the human family have accumulated a large portion of the world's wealth. What is wrong with this picture?

At least to me, a pyramid scheme is not a satisfactory system for organizing the human family's world economy or distributing the world's wealth because such a "trickle down economy" is unfair, grossly inequitable and soon to become patently unsustainable.  The limited resources and frangible ecosystem services of Earth cannot sustain much longer the way the global political economy is currently grown without regard to limits to its growth.

Afterall, the air, land and seas are being relentlessly polluted with human waste products; fresh water, fish stocks, food reserves, fossil fuels, and wetlands are being depleted at an alarming rate; the catastrophic effects of massive over-consumption and unrestrained hoarding of resources cannot be sustained much longer by our small, finite, fragile planetary home.

If the environment is being irreversibly degraded and natural resources are being dissipated recklessly, how can human civilization, life as we know it and the integrity of Earth as a fit for human habitation be maintained much longer?

Something new and different needs to be done.  The wealthy and powerful leaders among us have responsibilities to assume and duties to perform. If these leaders continue to adamantly insist that we keep producing endlessly as we are doing now and if we keep getting what we are likely to keep getting by overproducing as we are now, then the unbridled growth of the global economy in all likelihood will soon precipitate a colossal ecological wreckage worldwide unless, of course, the ever expanding global economy proceeds like a runaway train headlong into the monolithic 'wall' called "unsustainability" where the manmade economy crashes and destructs before rampant economic globalization destroys the Creation.On Review of climate change impact economics posted 1 year, 4 months ago 9 Responses

A question for Richard Cizik.........

Can you explain how so many well-intentioned people are failing so miserably to share a common understanding of what is happening in our planetary home in these early years of Century XXI?

There are moments like this one when it appears to me that we in the family of humanity must be living within some huge manmade construction reminiscent of the ancient Tower of Babel. Whatever the reasons for our spectacular failure to communicate meaningfully and sensibly about what somehow could be real about the workings of the Earth and the placement of the human species within the natural order of living things, these circumstances are incredible and present the human family with a potentially colossal, human-induced threat to life as we know it and the integrity of Earth as a fit place for human habitation.

As an example, let us look at the growth of absolute global human population numbers. In 2008 there are more people literally existing on Earth on resources valued at less than $2 per day than the total human population in the year of my birth. Our population numbers have been skyrocketing in our time and are projected to continue skyrocketing to the middle of this century when our numbers are anticipated to reach 9+/- billion and then somehow, magically I believe, automatically stabilize. The is no unchallenged scientific evidence to indicate how this "demographic transition to population stabilization" can possibly occur. This has not kept many so-called experts from continuing to say that the preternatural 'science' on which they rely is outdated and fatally flawed. A mere 108 years ago, at the beginning of the 20th Century, human numbers worldwide were between 1 and 2 billion. Most people can agree, I believe, on these numbers.

Now let us look at the relatively small, evidently finite, noticeably frangible planet we inhabit. Many experts have asked the question, "How many people can the Earth support?"

No reasonable and sensible person would say that an unlimited number of people can exist in a limited world. That cannot be. It also follows that the size and make-up of Earth naturally limits the growth of human production and per human consumption activities worldwide. The growth of these activities are subject to certain biophysical limitations of Earth. Endless growth cannot occur in a finite world.

What do you expect will happen if human propagation, production and consumption activities continue to grow, given their current scale and expected annual rate of increase? Please know that comments are welcome.

Sincerely,

Steve

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysouhheast.org/index.phpOn Richard Cizik and enviro religious leaders speak to Grist on climate leadership posted 1 year, 4 months ago 2 Responses

Dear Al Gore............

Thanks for your steady and careful contributions to the work of this day, the work being ignored or else censored by most of our not-so-great generation's leaders. These "professional stonewallers" are readily identifiable: the talking heads in the mass media, the economic powerbrokers all of their minions and surrogates, and bought-and-paid-for politicians.

Please do "keep soldiering on." Given the potentially catastrophic circumstances looming before the family of humanity, our 'soldiers' will ultimately have to prevail, I suppose, because if 'our side' ahould somehow fail, then all is lost.  That is to say, a colossal wreckage could occur on the surface of Earth, a unimaginable cataclysm the likes of which only the King of a thousand greedy little kings, Ozymandias, has seen.

Perhaps leadership in our time is doing a disservice to the human community, to life as we know it and to Earth's body by maniacally pursuing a course of unbridled and unrelenting global economic growth. This "biggest business is best" growth madness appears to be a particularly foolish and soon to be destructive form of frenzy that will likely become as serious a threat to the human family in the days ahead as the elective mutism of our leaders is today.

Let's keep going.

All my best,

Steve
On Questions for Gore's energy plan? posted 1 year, 4 months ago 11 Responses

the vital work of our time

Someone had to say what Al Gore is saying; someone has to be intellectually honest and willing to speak out loudly and clearly as Al Gore is doing.

Emergent and convergent global challenges, ominously looming before the family of humanity on the far horizon, threaten the future of human civilizations, life as know it and the efficacy of Earth as a fit place for human habitation:  

the human overpopulation of Earth;

the pending loss of adequate fossil fuel reserves and other vital energy sources due to unrestrained international plundering;

the dissipation of limited resources due to reckless per-capita overconsumption;

the problems of global warming in particular and climate change more generally; and

the insufficiently bridled pollution of air, land and water as well as precipitating irreversible degradation of the planet's frangible ecosystems services due to relentless industrialization and unregulated economic globalization.

Who knows, perhaps necessary change is in the offing.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.phpOn Blogosphere responds reservedly to Gore's call for 100 percent renewable electricity posted 1 year, 4 months ago 14 Responses

but Americans are not yet bought-and-paid-for...

.... the way many too many politicians have been.

Today, I do not see much in the way of new expressions by politicians for meaningful change, the kind of change that perhaps begins with individual action and leads to the incarnation of popular political will. It appears to me the family of humanity is precluded from effectively communicating with one another through the mass media (blogs are new and exceptional) by ubiquitous advertisements of material distractions that are adamantly and relentlessly promoted by people with the great wealth and the power over mass communication riches purchase.

Among the obstacles to the incarnation of popular political will is the mass media which mostly reports what those with wealth and power permit. What does not serve the overly indulgent interests of the prime beneficiaries of the global political economy is marginalized or ignored.

For example, last year a colossal "ice shelf", the size of 11,000 football fields, suddenly broke away from Ellesmere Island, but for 16 months the public learned nothing of the event. The collapse was registered by seismographs in Canada and the US, but there was no public acknowledgement until more than a year later. How are we to account for the delay in communication? Was evidence of global warming suppressed? Are bought-and-paid-for politicians, their benefactors and minions censoring unwelcome science evidence because it is politically inconvenient and economically inexpedient? What kinds of pressures have rich and powerful people exerted on great scientists like James Hansen, Paul Ehrlich and Rachel Carson in my lifetime?

How many examples can we find of huge companies like Enron collapsing just like the gigantic ice shelf and no one hearing about the event for 16 months?

May I ask you to consider how the primary focus of the small minority of the human community who possess most of the world's wealth, and the power it purchases, is on the family of humanity's artificially designed, manmade global economy? The natural world with all its polar bears, chimpanzees and other creatures, is an afterthought. It appears that actual positive regard for the Creation is given when it is politically convenient and economically expedient to do so. Otherwise, the human family is beguiled into forgetting about the blessings of the natural world by having its attention riveted on the endless accumulation of possessions from the material world.

Until something changes, I believe the family of humanity, other creatures, life as we know it and the integrity of Earth could be increasingly put at risk.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php On Yes, Americans are a bunch of whiners ... posted 1 year, 4 months ago 21 Responses

A long day's journey into the darkness....

...wrought by deniers and delayers.

Perhaps we not discussing real issues, but rather tip-toeing around them.

From a historical perspective, it appears that humankind is the only organism on Earth that produces food, amasses more food than is needed for survival and made food into a commodity. Farmers have not been primarily motivate by an altruistic desire to grow food because they have wanted to feed a growing population, nor have they been selling food to increase human population numbers. The more food farmers grew, the more wealth they accumulated. Our (agri-)culture has evidently devised a spectacularly successful economic system that continuously expands the food supply for human human beings worldwide. What I am trying to suggest is simply this: An economic system that requires ever increasing food production, supposedly to feed a rapidly growing human population, appears to be inadvertently and unexpectedly enlarging the size of the human population on Earth.

That is to say, the predominant culture and its global economy appears to produce many wonders as well as potentially deleterious impacts. Would you agree that if our culture chooses to keep growing the global economy as we are doing now, then we will likely keep getting what we are getting now... for better and worse?

For a long time, the leaders of the predominant culture have chosen to continuously expand production capabilities, ones that give rise to the rampant economic globalization we see today. Unfortunately, an ever expanding, leviathan-like global economy appears to give rise to something recognizably unsatisfactory because it could become unsustainable.

If you will, please consider how the relentless hoarding of wealth and the conspicuous  over-consumption of resources by millions of people leave billions of people in the family of humanity hungry.

For fortunate millions of people with riches to recklessly consume limited resources, while billions of less forunate people go without adequate food to eat, seems somehow not quite right.

Inequity is sad enough; grotesque inequity will one day be considered intolerable, I suppose.

If leaders of our predominant culture choose to modify the way the unbridled global economy continuously grows and the way it inequitably distributes resources, then perhaps they and we will find more reasonable, sensible, fair and, equally important, sustainable ways of performing these practices better.

Perhaps it is a mistake for me to do so; but, nevertheless, I am assuming most members of the Grist Mill community can agree that the unbridled expansion of the global economy, given its huge scale and rapid growth, will result in this manmade economic colossus eventually reaching a point in human history when it becomes patently unsustainable in a finite world with make-up and size of Earth.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php
On Bush hits the climate alarm snooze button at G8 posted 1 year, 4 months ago 6 Responses

One proposal for consideration...............

........ the immediate implementation of a voluntary and fair "one child per family" policy worldwide.  

Free and easy access to family planning, health education and safe contraception would be made available to people everywhere who want such assistance.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php On Revisiting Malthus posted 1 year, 4 months ago 21 Responses

Two questions for Jon and Lester........

Dear Jon Rynn and Lester Brown,

Do you believe the time will ever come when opinion-makers on a conference call like this one or a forum of leaders somewhere on the surface of Earth choose to focus attention on what appears to be the proverbial "mother" of all global challenges: the human overpopulation of Earth?

If the family of humanity keeps doing what it is doing now, and keeps getting what it is getting now, population projections indicate that absolute human numbers worldwide can be expected exceed 7 billion in 2012 and reach 9 billion in 2050.

If the tripartite program of action advocated here was successful, what difference would it make if the planet we inhabit -- with its relatively small size, limited resources and frangible make-up -- simply cannot sustain the ongoing explosion of absolute global human population numbers?

Sincerely,

Steve

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.phpOn Lester Brown unveils plan for 80 percent cuts by 2020 posted 1 year, 5 months ago 42 Responses

How do rich and famous people get away with.....

...personally and socially irresponsible behavior?

As everyone knows but few openly discuss, wealth and power buy freedom.  What is all too obvious but often cloaked in silence is this:  People with great wealth and power do not assume the responsibilities that necessarily come with freedom.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.phpOn White House disses Supreme Court, kills $2 trillion savings posted 1 year, 5 months ago 6 Responses

An acknowledgement long overdue.............

.........If it is all right to do so here, I would like to nominate James Hansen to be the Science Laureate of Humanity in 2008.On Revkin interviews Hansen posted 1 year, 5 months ago 4 Responses

Time for leaders with clarity of human perception,

....with intellectual integrity and moral courage.

The evidence of climate change is so abundant and clear but people everywhere are not seeing it and, tberefore, not insisting upon adequate action.  But why?

There are likely other causes for this failure of human perception, intellectual integrity and moral courage, but I would like to ask the Dot Earth community to consider one rather obvious failing.  Many too many of the "talking heads" in the mass media are part of this problem, not the solution.  These commentators seem to be smart and clever but not intellectually honest; they get paid large sums of money to report news, whatever that is.  On the whole, the public appears to think of these opinion-makers as objective commentators and worthy leaders, but they are neither objective nor are they leaders.  Please forgive me for saying that many of them behave as professional prostitutes who are paid by wealthy benefactors to say whatsoever is economically expedient, politically convenient and supportive of the status quo for the conspicuously consuming rich and powerful people among us.

Perhaps we need objective leaders in the mass media as desperately as we require a new kind of leadership in politics.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.phpOn New research correlates mass extinctions with the rise and fall of oceans posted 1 year, 5 months ago 9 Responses

Perhaps politicians and economists need.........

..........to embrace science.

letter to the editor
Chapel Hill (NC) Newspaper
June 11, 2008

Solutions exist if we apply the science.

Humankind is surely experiencing the fulfillment of a Chinese proverb: "We live in interesting times." Many of our brilliant scientists report that God is a delusion. On the other hand, intuitive and gifted believers regularly tell us that these scientists themselves suffer from a form of delusional atheism. No one knows, I suppose, which of these groups is correct.

I am one of those people who believes the family of humanity can use God's gift of science to take the measure of any global challenge and find solutions that are consonant with universal values. But, before we can move forward to reasonably address and sensibly overcome a challenge to human wellbeing and environmental health such as global warming, that challenge needs to be openly acknowledged and widely discussed. I suppose it is a function of my life experience to suggest that we accurately "diagnose" whatever the challenge is before proceeding to implement "treatment" options.

If great spiritual and scientific leaders are somehow on the right track when realizing, "The Earth has a human-induced fever and could overheat," then at least one available treatment option is to carefully and skillfully examine the extant scientific evidence related to global warming and to make necessary changes in human behavior, both individually and collectively.

All of the above serves to set the stage for our consideration of a question. How can politicians and economic powerbrokers in the human community be empowered to muster the "political will" necessary for addressing human-driven climate change as well as for providing the substantial economic incentives and financial capital necessary to overcome this potential global threat to life as we know it and the integrity of Earth?

-- Steven Earl Salmony, Chapel HillOn Breaking news: Permafrost loss linked to Arctic sea ice loss posted 1 year, 5 months ago 10 Responses

Yes we can think and behave ............

..........courageously, within a framework of intellectual honesty.

Perhaps human beings could more effectively address the emergent and convergent global challenges we see looming ominously before the family of humanity on the far horizon if so many of our leaders did not abuse human intelligence and ingenuity by choosing to adamantly idolatrize the endless growth of the global political economy.

Science, reasoning and common sense are being twisted and subordinated to conform to whatever thinking serves our leadership's intentions to promote the politically convenient and the economically expedient, in the course of its worship of soon to become, unsustainable economic growth.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,  established 2001On Yes we can! (ride bikes) posted 1 year, 6 months ago 7 Responses

Dedicated to the Fantasy of the 'JEWEL'.......

..... (known to all as "the global political economy") and to the Denial of Earth's Limitations, including its frangible ecosystem services.

Virtual mountains of scientific evidence indicate that a contradiction exists between the finite physical reality of the world we inhabit and the cornucopian fantasy widely espoused by so many economists assuring us Earth is a sort of maternal presence, like an ever-expressive teat at which the human species can suckle from now onward.

Perhaps the contradiction between fantasy and reality is better posed in the form of a question about oil deposits.

Is oil a depletable natural resource with limited availability for human consumption in our time or is oil an essentially unlimited product of a planet that indefinitely can produce resources for human benefit without regard to Earth's physical limitations?

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php
On The delayers' paradox posted 1 year, 6 months ago 13 Responses

a climate hero?

Please consider, now, a point of view to which I subscribe from Lee Iacocca that might be helpful here.

Lee Iacocca Says:

Am I the only guy in this country who's fed up with what's happening? Where the hell is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder. We've got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we've got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can't even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, 'Stay the course'

Stay the course? You've got to be kidding. This is America, not the damned 'Titanic'.

You might think I'm getting senile, that I've gone off my rocker, and maybe I have. But someone has to speak up.

These are times that cry out for leadership. But when you look around, you've got to ask: 'Where have all the leaders gone?' Where are the curious, creative communicators? Where are the people of character, courage.......... and common sense?

Name me one leader who emerged from the crisis of Hurricane Katrina. Congress has yet to spend a single day evaluating the response to the hurricane, or demanding accountability for the decisions that were made in the crucial hours after the storm. Everyone's hunkering down, fingers crossed, hoping it doesn't happen again. Now, that's just crazy. Storms happen. Deal with it. Make a plan. Figure out what you're going to do the next time.

Name me a government leader who can articulate a plan for paying down the debt, or solving the energy crisis, or managing the health care problem. The silence is deafening.

Hey, I'm not trying to be the voice of gloom and doom here. I'm trying to light a fire. I'm speaking out because I have hope...................If I've learned one thing, it's this:

You don't get anywhere by standing on the sidelines waiting for somebody else to take action..... It's not too late, but it's getting pretty close.

Sincerely yours,

Steve

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001On The delayers' paradox posted 1 year, 6 months ago 13 Responses

Perhaps change is in the offing.................

..........as a "forced-choice".

Endless economic growth is the shibboleth of the rich and powerful in our time.  But the days of reckless domination of the Earth and its environs may be numbered, it would appear, because the idolatry, the magical thinking, the wishes and the selfish intentions that have driven endlessly expanding large-scale corporate activity and insatiable wealth accumulation could be about to run their course. The plans of the economic powerbrokers and their bought-and-paid-for politicians for 'manufacturing' "bubbles" and big-business boom times could lead the family of  humanity to be threatened by the inadvertent loss of life as we know it and the unintentional destruction of the Earth as a fit place for human habitation by our children and coming generations.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://journals.aol.com/sesalmony/HumanandEnvironmentalHe ...On A last chance for civilization posted 1 year, 6 months ago 26 Responses

Bleak future may await..................

........... our children

http://www.chapelhillnews.com/opinion/letters/story/14447 ...

Humankind inhabits a tiny celestial orb that is miraculously set among of sea of stars. As far as we know, life as we know it exists nowhere else in the universe. Perhaps we of the human family have the responsibility of assuring the security for the future of life in our planetary home.

April 22 was Earth Day. Our many Earth Day celebrations focus attention on the pressing need for human beings to protect and preserve the finite resources of Earth and its frangible ecosystems. If we fail to achieve this goal, then an unimaginably bleak future awaits our children.

If 6-plus billion human beings live on Earth now and 9-plus billion are expected to populate our small planet by 2050, then we simply cannot keep doing what we are doing now because the Earth has limited resources. Without adequate resources and ecosystem system services of Earth, life as we know it and human institutions would collapse.

Some portion of the world's human population conspicuously over-consumes the resources of our planetary home. Other people, in charge of huge multinational conglomerations, are doing business in a way that recklessly dissipates natural resources. Still others in the human family are overpopulating the planet. The leviathan-like scale and rapid growth of global human consumption, production and propagation activities are putting the Earth, life as we know it, and the human community in grave, clear and present danger.

Since Chapel Hillians live in the overdeveloped world, we are among the people who are ravenously over-consuming Earth's resources. We could choose to consume less. People in the developing could choose to limit overproduction of unnecessary things and contain industrial pollution. People in the underdeveloped world could limit their number of offspring. Perhaps these are ways the family of humanity begins to respond ably to the human-induced global challenges that loom so ominously.

-- Steven Earl Salmony, Chapel Hill
On The number of the beast? posted 1 year, 6 months ago 14 Responses

Come on guys................

........... let's have a reasonable and sensible discussion of the world we inhabit and the placement of the human species within the natural order of living things.

Who know what the future holds?

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.phpOn Climate change must be examined over decades, not years posted 1 year, 6 months ago 68 Responses

Please meet John Gray...........

"Progress is their religion.........."

http://player.omroep.nl/?aflID=6951612

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.phpOn Is there no end to it? posted 1 year, 6 months ago 5 Responses

Dear Canis...........

You are correct.  The text should read,

"What a shambles for our children to confront. What a colossal sham. What a shame."

The disservice my not-so-great generation of elders is doing to our children by mortgaging and threatening their very future is as unbelieveable as it is incredible.  In the record of human history I am not able to find so egregious a lapse of intellectual honesty, acceptance of responsibility, performance of duties and moral courage, sad to say.On By caring for God's creatures, we avert a second flood posted 1 year, 7 months ago 20 Responses

Dear Joe Romm And James Hansen.....

Do you think the time will ever come when government officials stop employing every ruse under the sun to protect the selfish interests of over-consumers and hoarders, and start by choosing to do the right thing?

Life and human institutions like national economies are utterly dependent upon the Earth for existence; but too many of our leaders view the Earth as some kind of thing to be manipulated, dissipated, and ravaged secondary to their adamant practice of a religion called Endless Economic Growth. This clear and obvious object of their idolatry is the soon to become unsustainable expansion of the leviathan-like, global political economy. What a colossal sham. What a shame. What a shambles for our children to confront.

Always with thanks,

Steve
On A non-technical piece on climate science posted 1 year, 7 months ago 6 Responses

Dear Lily Tomlin and JMG...........

Thanks for your many wonderful comments, other efforts and for this opportunity to communicate openly about what to me looks like the proverbial "mother" of all global challenges: the human overpopulation of Earth in our time.

It looks like humankind inhabits a tiny celestial orb that is miraculously set among of sea of stars. As far as we know, life as we know it exists nowhere else in the Universe. In the light of these one-of-a-kind circumstances, perhaps we of the human family have the responsibility of assuring the security for the future of life in our planetary home.

I am trying to focus attention on the pressing need for human beings to protect and preserve the finite resources of Earth and its frangible ecosystems. If we fail to achieve this goal, then an unimaginably bleak future could await our children. In all the seriousness of what could be somehow true, I mean the children of my generation.

If 6+ billion human beings live on Earth now and 9+ billion are expected to populate our small planet by 2050, then the human species simply cannot keep engaging in certain unbridled activities that we can see overspreading the Earth because the Earth has limited resources upon which all forms of life and human constructions like national economies utterly depend for existence. Without adequate resources and ecosystem system services of Earth, life as we know it and human institutions could collapse, I suppose.

Now, some portion of the world's human population conspicuously over-consumes the resources of our planetary home. Other people, working in huge multinational conglomerations, are operating businesses in a way that recklessly scours the oceans' floor, decapitates mountains, turns biomass into human mass and, in these and many other ways, end up dissipating natural resources at such an alarming rate that the Earth has insufficient time to restore the resources for human benefit. Still other people in the family of humanity are overpopulating the planet. The leviathan-like scale and rapid growth of global human consumption, production and propagation activities are putting the Earth, life as we know it, and the human community in grave, clear and present danger.

Elder human beings of the overdeveloped world, of whom I am one, are among the people in our planetary home who are ravenously over-consuming Earth's resources. We could choose to consume less. People in the developing could choose to limit overproduction of unnecessary things, to stop ravaging the planet, and to contain industrial pollution. People in the underdeveloped world could limit their number of offspring. Perhaps these are some ways the family of humanity begins to respond ably to the human-induced global challenges that loom so ominously before humanity in our time.

While I certainly agree that action should have been taken by my generation of old folks when we were young in the 60s and 70s, when we became aware of the "population bomb," still we have responsibilities to assume and duties to perform, here and now, for the sake of our children, grandchildren and coming generations.

The idea of making a conscious choice to do nothing in the face of the recognizably daunting global challenges that are visible before humanity on the far horizon is anathema to me.

At a minimum, do we not have a "duty to warn" others of the potential for some kind of ecological catastrophe if the human community adamantly chooses to continue relentlessly down the current "primrose path" marked by soon to become unsustainable consumption, production and propagation activities now overspreading the surface of Earth?

Always with thanks,

Steve

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.phpOn Lily Tomlin was right posted 1 year, 7 months ago 6 Responses

When are we to begin saving the world......

..... by doing what is necessary rather than incessantly talking about what needs to be done?

I have received a question regarding my previous posting on ELECTIVE MUTISM.  If you will bear with me, the question and my response to it follow.

begin-----

Thanks so much for responding to my post.

Absolute global human population numbers are not coming down nearly fast enough. Even with a substantial decrease of the population growth rate in some countries, the total population of the human species has been skyrocketing and is continuing to increase much too rapidly.

Perhaps the widely shared and consensually-validated "demographic transition" that is anticipated in the middle of Century XXI is an example of specious preternatural thinking and theorizing, borne of political convenience and economic expediency.

You have asked a wonderful question,

"Assuming you are right for the moment, do you have any concrete policy proposals which we might consider to enable us to think about what we might do?"

Perhaps we could follow what we already know from good science, reasoning and common sense. We can choose to respond ably and much differently, in a more reality-oriented way, to the global challenges before humanity, challenges we can certainly manage because we have induced them by our spectacular unrestrained overconsumption, overproduction and overpopulation activities, the ones now threatening to engulf the surface of Earth.

Of course, it is fair to ask what the family of humanity could choose to do "ably and differently." Several ideas come to mind.

1. Implement universal, voluntary and humane programs that encourage people to limit the number of offspring to one child per family.

2. Establish an upper limit on the growth of the individual human footprint.

3. Restrict immediately the reckless dissipation of limited natural resources so that the Earth is given time to replenish them for human benefit.

4. Substitute clean, renewable sources of energy, through the use of substantial economic incentives, for the fossil fuels we rely upon now.

5. Recognize that everything human beings do on the surface of our tiny planet utterly depend on the finite resources of Earth. One consequence of this realization is understanding that there can be no such thing as an endlessly expanding global economy, given its current leviathan-like scale and anticipated growth rate, on a relatively small and noticeably frangible planet with the size and make-up of Earth.

As I see it, many leaders understand quite well the precarious status of the natural world we inhabit; nonetheless, they adamantly refuse to acknowledge or speak openly about the distinctly human-induced predicament that looms ominously before the family of humanity in our time.

Billions of human beings-- some overconsuming, others overproducing and still others overpopulating the Earth --are ruining our planetary home as a fit place for human habitation and life as we know it. At least to me, what is incomprehensible and tragic is this: our leaders know what all of us are doing that is destructive of human and environmental health and still they remain resolute in their reckless pursuit of a "primrose path" to the future.

For a moment please consider that our top rank scientists have not found adequate ways of communicating to the family of humanity what people somehow need to hear, see and understand: the unregulated increase of human population numbers, the unbridled growth of per-capita consumption, the reckless dissipation of Earth's limited resources and the relentless degradation of the planet's frangible environment could result in the destruction of our celestial orb as a fit place for habitation by humankind and life as we know it. When taken together, these distinctly human activities appear to be growing at a breakneck pace toward the precipitation of a catastrophic ecological wreckage of some sort unless, of course, the world's colossal, ever expanding, artificially designed, manmade global economy continues to speed headlong toward the monolithic 'wall' called "unsustainability" at which point the runaway economy crashes before Earth's ecology is collapsed.

end-----

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/On Death, disease, and infection, thanks to our friend climate change posted 1 year, 7 months ago 5 Responses

Another clarion call for climate action...........

.......is being ignored by too many experts in the biophysical sciences.

A particularly pernicious disturbance exists in the human community.  ELECTIVE MUTISM is one of the great, clear and present dangers to human and environmental health. It is a worldwide "plague" in our time from which many too many in the vast community of science suffer egregiously. That elective mutism has afflicted so many in the social sciences is one thing.  The family of humanity can understand, I suppose, how social scientists do not possess the most adequate expertise to speak out loudly and clearly regarding the emerging and converging global challenges derived from the human overpopulation of Earth.  

On the other hand, what I find reprehensible and unbelievable is the way scientists with appropriate expertise in the physical and biological sciences, whatever their excuses, are choosing not to fullfil their professional responsibilities and not to discharge duties only they can perform.  Their willful refusal to comment on good scientific evidence of the human species' overpopulation of the planetary home God blesses us to inhabit is as unacceptable as it is perverse.

Sincerely,

Steve

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/On RFK Jr. advocates for cap-and-trade, renewables, smart grids posted 1 year, 7 months ago 11 Responses

The grandiose thinking and unsustainable..........

....... behavior of the pols, wheelers and dealers, pyramid scheme pros and sub prime swindle specialists managing the global political economy.

I am imagining that the following questions are rhetorical ones to many people in the Gristmill community.

"Why are politicians and skeptics so willing to risk their future and everyone else's future on blindly clinging to a course of action that has a high probability of leading to a seriously crippled future? If you even suspect that global warming represents a serious risk to your survival (and we have far more than suspicion these days), why wouldn't you do everything protect and conserve your planet?"

It would please me to hear from others; but from my humble perspective the "answers" to these questions are all-too-obvious.

The leaders in my generation of elders wish to live without having to accept limits to growth of seemingly endless economic globalization, of increasing per capita consumption and skyrocketing human population numbers; our desires are evidently insatiable. We choose to believe anything that is politically convenient, economically expedient and socially agreeable; our way of life is not negotiable. We dare anyone to question our values or behaviors.

We religiously promote our shared fantasies of endless economic growth and soon to be unsustainable overconsumption, overproduction oand overpopulation activities, and in so doing deny that Earth has limited resources upon which the survival of life as we know it depends.

My not-so-great generation appears to be doing a disservice to everything and everyone but ourselves. We are the "what's in it for me?" generation. We demonstrate precious little regard for the maintenance of the integrity of Earth; shallow willingness to actually protect the environment from crippling degradation; lack of serious consideration for the preservation of biodiversity, wilderness, and a good enough future for our children and coming generations; and no appreciation of the understanding that we are no more or less than human beings with "feet of clay."

We live arrogantly in a soon to be unsustainable way in our planetary home and are proud of it, thank you very much. Certainly, we will "have our cake and eat it, too." We will fly around in thousands of private jets, own fleets of cars, live in McMansions, exchange secret handshakes, go to our exclusive clubs and distant hideouts, and risk nothing of value to us. Please do not bother us with the problems of the world. We choose not to hear, see or speak of them. We are the economic powerbrokers, their bought-and-paid-for politicians and the many minions in the mass media. We hold most of the Earth's wealth and control the power it purchases. If left to our own devices, we will continue in the exercise of our `rights' to ravenously consume Earth's limited resources; to expand economic globalization unto every corner of our natural world and, guess what, beyond; to encourage the unbridled growth of the human species so that where there are now 6+ billion people, by 2050 we will have 9+ billion members of the human community and, guess what, even more people, perhaps billions more in the distant future, if that is what we desire.

We are the reigning, self-proclaimed masters of the universe. We have no regard for human limits or Earth's limitations, thank you very much. We are idolaters of the global political economy. Please understand that we do not want anyone to present us with scientific evidence that we could be living unsustainably in an artificially designed, temporary world of our own making...... a manmade world filling up with distinctly human enterprises which appear to be approaching a point in human history when global consumption, production and propagation activities of the human species become unsustainable on the tiny planet God has blessed us to inhabit........and not to overwhelm, I suppose.

Sincerely,

Steve

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/On Mag's green issue exalts cap-and-trade posted 1 year, 7 months ago 11 Responses

masters of the universe..........................

Dear Dr. L. B.,

I am imagining that your questions are rhetorical ones.

You ask,

"Why are politicians and skeptics so willing to risk their future and everyone else's future on blindly clinging to a course of action that has a high probability of leading to a seriously crippled future? If you even suspect that global warming represents a serious risk to your survival (and we have far more than suspicion these days), why wouldn't you do everything protect and conserve your planet?"

It would please me to hear from others; but from my humble perspective the "answers" to your questions are all-too-obvious.

First, the leaders in my generation of elders wish to live without having to accept limits to growth of seemingly endless economic globalization, of increasing per capita consumption and skyrocketing human population numbers; our desires are evidently insatiable. We choose to believe anything that is politically convenient, economically expedient and socially agreeable; our way of life is not negotiable. We dare anyone to question our values or behaviors.

We religiously promote our shared fantasies of endless economic growth and soon to be unsustainable overconsumption, overproduction oand overpopulation activities, and in so doing deny that Earth has limited resources upon which the survival of life as we know it depends.

Second, my not-so-great generation appears to be doing a disservice to everything and everyone but ourselves. We are the "what's in it for me?" generation. We demonstrate precious little regard for the maintenance of the integrity of Earth; shallow willingness to actually protect the environment from crippling degradation; lack of serious consideration for the preservation of biodiversity, wilderness, and a good enough future for our children and coming generations; and no appreciation of the understanding that we are no more or less than human beings with "feet of clay."

We live in a soon to be unsustainable way in our planetary home and are proud of it, thank you very much. Certainly, we will "have our cake and eat it, too." We will fly around in thousands of private jets and live in McMansions, go to our secret clubs and distant hideouts, and risk nothing of value to us. Please do not bother us with the problems of the world. We choose not to hear, see or speak of them. We are the economic powerbrokers, their bought-and-paid-for politicians and the many minions in the mass media. We hold the much of the wealth and the power it purchases. If left to our own devices, we will continue in the exercise of our `rights' to ravenously consume Earth's limited resources; to expand economic globalization unto every corner of our natural world and, guess what, beyond; to encourage the unbridled growth of the human species so that where there are now 6+ billion people, by 2050 we will have 9+ billion members of the human community and, guess what, even more people, perhaps billions more in the distant future, if that is what we desire.

We are the reigning, self-proclaimed masters of the universe. We have no regard for human limits or Earth's limitations, thank you very much. Please understand that we do not want anyone to present us with scientific evidence that we could be living unsustainably in an artificially designed, temporary world of our own making...... a manmade world filling up with distinctly human enterprises which appear the be approaching a point in human history when global consumption, production and propagation activities of the human species become unsustainable on the tiny planet God has blessed us to inhabit..... and not to overwhelm, I suppose.

Third, even our top rank scientists have not found adequate ways of communicating to the family of humanity what people somehow need to hear, see and understand: the reckless dissipation of Earth's limited resources, the relentless degradation of the planet's frangible environment, and the approaching destruction of the Earth as a fit place for human habitation by the human species, when taken together, appear to be proceeding at a breakneck pace toward the precipitation of a catastrophic ecological wreckage of some sort unless, of course, the world's colossal, ever expanding, artificially designed, manmade global economy continues to speed headlong toward the monolithic `wall' called "unsustainability" at which point the runaway economy crashes before Earth's ecology is collapsed.

Sincerely,

Steve
On Gandhi, King, and climate change posted 1 year, 7 months ago 15 Responses

Dear Joe Romm.........

Thanks for presenting the distinctly human-driven "human predicament" with such clarity of vision, coherence of mind and moral courage.

Many too many leaders are woefully inadequate. These economic powerbrokers and their bought-and-paid-for politicians, with great wealth and power as well as responsibilities to assume and duties to perform, have evidently chosen to take the human community down a "primrose path" and to race toward oblivion without a care for what our children could confront because of the spectacularly self-seeking behavior of their selfish elders.

The primrose path chosen by too many of our leaders is not the only path, not the one right way to live.  Despite all they and their minions have said and we have heard so often, the path of endless economic growth, reckless dissipation of natural resources, irreversible degradation of the environs, and unrestrained population increase is not the only path, not "the only game in town."  Perhaps the relentless pursuit of precisely this "unbridled growth path" to the future could result in a colossal catastrophe like the one witnessed by the King of kings named Ozymandias.On Death, disease, and infection, thanks to our friend climate change posted 1 year, 7 months ago 5 Responses

Still more about what all of us know.......

.........but about which most of us remain electively mute.

At least to me, it appears the book, Fatal Misconception, by Matthew Connelly is itself predicated on widely shared and consensually-validated preternatural thinking that fails to account for the best available scientific evidence of human population dynamics and the human overpopulation of Earth in our time. Matthew Connelly, Ben Wattenburg, Ronald Bailey, Phil Longman and a remarkably large number of population biologists, demographers, economists and commentators of all sorts are ignoring good science. What is most alarming about this failure to examine scientific evidence is this: the research by Russell Hopfenberg, Ph.D., and David Pimentel, Ph.D., appears to have profound implications for the future of life as we know it on Earth.

One consequence of this elected refusal to examine good science could be that humanity will soon be confronted with huge problems of our own making. When potentially catastrophic challenges become evident in space-time, people will have no means of understanding what is happening, let alone knowing how to ably respond. The people who are to face dreadful circumstances could be our children, yes, the ones whose futures we are recklessly mortgaging and righteously threatening, not only by what we are doing but also failing to do by remaining hysterically blind to admittedly unwelcome science of human population numbers.

We appear to be unwilling to see how the human species has unexpectedly and inadvertently precipitated a colossal predicament by our unbridled overconsumption, overpopulation and overproduction activities, the ones now occurring on the surface of the planetary home God blesses us to inhabit...not overrun, I suppose. We are willfully denying that life as we know it and the integrity of Earth could become endangered by our adamant and relentless insistence upon endlessly increasing per capita consumption, absolute global human population numbers and large-scale industrial globalization, regardless of the soon to become, patently unsustainable gigantic scale and rapid growth of these distinctly human overgrowth activities on a relatively small, evidently finite and noticeably frangible planet with the size and make-up of Earth.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/On Is it only OK to talk about limiting population after it's too late? posted 1 year, 7 months ago 117 Responses

An example of big money and............

..........political power corrupting absolutely?

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/On Massey wins W. Va. Supreme Court case; not doing so well in public relations posted 1 year, 7 months ago 8 Responses

Despite dark clouds looming on the horizon........

......hope for a bright future for our children remains intact

2007 EXCHANGE OF IDEAS BETWEEN FRIENDS(and perhaps timely in 2008)

______________
Dear B,

In the light of E. O. Wilson's comments about small creatures and today's report from the World Conservation Union (IUCN) that more than 41,000 species of animals and plants are now on its ENDANGERED SPECIES LIST, do you think it is too early to consider that the evolutionary success of the human species may not be guaranteed? Perhaps it is not too late to consider how the human species in our time could inadvertently precipitate a "Human Community Collapse" by adamantly insisting upon more unbridled growth of business enterprise and human numbers now overspreading the Earth.

I am concerned that after threatening biodiversity with extinction and the environment with irreversible degradation, and also dissipating the limited resources of Earth, humankind will become an unexpected threat to its own survival.

Sincerely,

Steve

_______________
Hi Steve,

You bring up a very good point, and one that is foremost in the minds of everyone with environmental awareness. The notion of sustainability does not seem to have been infused in equal value to progress made in both the industrial and technological revolutions. When we look closely, it is as if we are but children playing with new toys, not grasping just what they mean nor thinking very far into the future. Anyone who studies simple biology knows that unchecked growth cannot last, that eventually the system that supported whatever it is gets out of balance, and then...well...things change. So at the very least we are looking for sweeping change. How much of it we will see in our short lifespan is uncertain, but what is certain is that even now we are observing first-hand some negative effects of our actions in the past. Nature is very efficient, and certainly will take care of things one way or another. I agree with what you suggest, that we could benefit from applying caution and implementing the enlightened consideration of experts in our approach to the future. Application of knowledge requires official sanction and public policy, which as you know is not so easy to achieve. Hopefully, the brightest minds among us who post their knowledge and recommendations in research & books and who broadcast their views and information on things like TED TALKS will encourage our policy makers to get on the same page, i.e., as stewards of the earth and its abundance rather than exploiters. Ultimately, I have hope, and think a hopeful attitude can have a snowball effect. I'm pretty sure hope is the official stance of this organization, by the way, and why a forum such as this is so encouraging.

Thanks, Steve, for your posts here and elsewhere on our blogs.
_______________
Dear B,

Sometimes it looks to me as if some of our brothers and sisters are so focused on the accumulation of wealth and power, in feathering their own gigantic nests, frequenting exclusive clubs, flying private jets, sailing yachts and visiting exotic hideaways, that the "powers that be" have overlooked the certain requirements necessary for the maintenance of our planetary home, which is soon to become endangered by certain unbridled, distinctly human enterprises now overspreading the Earth.

How do things look to you?

Always,

Steve

_______________
Steve,

I like the idea of everyone coming to see that we are definitely interconnected. Just as the bees and flowering plants need each other, so do we humans need the environment. The sooner we get truly sustainable in our stewardship of the environment, the better. The last 50 years have seen unprecedented wealth and technology, and a few have enjoyed advantages never dreamt of in the past. Hopefully, we will all start doing our part, even the very insulated among us. I'm actually quite optimistic, as I think there is so much positive focus for new energies coming along in young people, and a rededication to creative efforts to make the world a better place in those of us who are older. I certainly can imagine these things building on themselves. It starts right here, wherever we are.

B.

_______________
Dear B,

I share your optimism. With good science as our guide and the adequate use of intelligence and other splendid gifts granted to human beings by God, we can choose to respond ably to the requirements of reality, whatsoever they may be.

Elders like me will hopefully be open to guidance of our young people, as you suggest, and also of the mothers of children, rather than holdfast to the outworn creeds of the children of men among us. The self-proclaimed masters of the universe in my not-so-great generation appear to have lost their way.

On the other hand, we cannot rule out the possibility that I am one of those unfortunate elders about whom I report, who has lost touch with good science, the natural order of living things, and the limitations imposed upon human life by the very nature of the biophysical world we inhabit.

I and my generation can and will do better. Of that I am certain.

Sincerely,

Steve

_______________
ONWARD!

B.
_______________
Dear B,

I believe this is one way to begin. We have to speak of topics that are taboo, just as we do here.

My greatest concern is that the undoing of the human species, and life as we know it, could inadvertently occur as a result of the adamant and relentless maintenance of SILENCE.

Silence is something to be feared. Silence is especially terrifying and potentially ruinous when it is actively employed as a tool for denying good science.

Thank YOU,

Steve

______________
Steve,

I don't mean to be flip, but the old saying comes to mind: "The more the merrier!" We can hope more voices will speak up for beneficial uses of our stunning technologies to forge a path to a wise, efficient, and fittingly sustainable paradigm for the future world. There is another saying that comes to mind should we fail to understand what we need to do, and that is, "That way lies madness." I am so looking forward to the tipping point, where all accept as a given the need to create and live in a balanced world. I know it is coming.

B.

_______________
Dear B,

You make wonderful points. Let me see if I understand you well enough.

Would it be correct to say that we have a choice: either we can choose to accept the knowledge derived from the best available, good science and deploy that knowledge to maintain a sustainable world, one fit for human habitation, or we can fail to do what is necessary by holding fast to an unsustainable paradigm for the future world...and by continuing to defend flawed data derived from politically convenient and economically expedient mad science?

Always,

Steve
______________

...and having the wisdom to know the difference.

B.
_______________
Dear B,

At least in my humble opinion, THIS IS COMMUNICATION!

Perhaps humanity has global challenges in the offing, challenges that are formidable, even as we begin to take the measure of them.

As we steady our focus on these challenges, it becomes evident that there may be no quick fixes to the problems with which we are presented. Business-as-usual brought us to this moment in human history, but cannot take us to the future we picture for our children.

Contemplate and picture in your mind the business-as-usual activities with which we are familiar. We can see that the unbridled growth of economic activities is overspreading the Earth.

Now for the hard part: questions.

Can the seemingly endless growth and the astonishing success of unregulated human production and consumption activities continue in the same old business-as-usual way and at their current scale on a relatively small, finite planet the size of Earth?

If the Earth is round and has physical limitations, is it reasonable and sensible to consider that there are limits to the unrestricted global growth of human activities on Earth?

Are there no alternatives to untethered economic globalization?

Are there no options to the unchecked per capita consumption of Earth's limited resources?

Who knows, before long questions like these will become a part of open discussions at international conferences, in governing bodies and spoken of by those in the mass media.

I and my generation are going to do better, much better.
______________
Steve,

Your questions almost answer themselves and wholly appeal to common sense. I believe that love of humanity, passion for life and a strong will to survive will eventually corral all of us into the same camp, which is good because we must work together to solve our problems. We may be lucky that things are getting so blatantly out of hand, because a cry for better will eventually emerge. Hat's off to any who can keep their heads while some around us are losing theirs. Like a teenager on a joy ride, flagrant environmental abuses cannot have good results and therefore cannot last that long. The trick will be coming to the tipping point. I believe we are very very close. I hope others will participate in this inspiring conversation. We believe in the exchange of ideas and invites it with these blogs. Thanks so much for participating.

________________
Dear B,

Thanks to you, D., Al and the great scientists of the IPCC, it does appear more and more people are beginning to awaken, finally, with the coming of each new day, to something that is fresh and unforeseen about the world we inhabit.

I and our dearest colleagues have only become awakened just a matter of days earlier than those who are soon, or else eventually, to be released from their slumber.

Once awake, people are going to be able to see that while nothing about the surface of the Earth has changed, not really; everything about the wondrous landscape is different in unexpected ways.

When many in the human community perceive what you and other leaders are saying and doing, it will be as if they are seeing the world God blesses us to inhabit for the first time, I suppose.

That is going to make a difference.

All the best to you,

Steve
On Wow posted 1 year, 7 months ago 19 Responses

John Gray speaks out.............

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/mar/30/fossi ...

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/On Delayers and doomsayers receive a chilly reception from pragmatic business leaders posted 1 year, 8 months ago 37 Responses

Jeff Sachs appears to grasp.......

......one aspect of the knotty "human predicament" that is presenting itself to the family of humanity in these early years of Century XXI.  He appears to be recognizing something real about "limits to growth."

Since 2002, when I first met Jeff Sachs at the Earth Summit on Sustainable Development in Jo'burg, S. A., I have often disagreed with him. Even so, in this instance I do completely support what looks to me like a surprising realistic perspective from him.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/On Since when is regulation optimal? posted 1 year, 8 months ago 25 Responses

Economic growth versus ECO: NOMICS

What concerns me is this: the captains of the corporate world in my generation of elders could be "selling a bill of goods" to our young people today; but we have no intention of fulfilling our promises and will fail to deliver the goods. In part, these unfortunate circumstances result from my generation's conspicuous over-consumption of finite resources as as well as from our reckless dissipation of limited natural resources bound up in the colossal scale and soon to be unsustainable growth of economic globalization.

My not-so-great generation appears to be mortgaging and threatening the future of its children by remaining religiously focused upon the endless accumulation of material wealth, the unchecked increase in per capita consumption of scarce resources, and the continuous expansion of large-scale industrialization capabilities.

Despite all our high-minded rhetoric to the contrary, we need not look far to see that money, power and privilege for ourselves, for our bought-and-paid-for politicians, and for our newly-made rich minions in the mass media are the primary objects of our desire. Regardless of the human-driven calamities that might befall coming generations, the leadership in my generation advises all of us to live long, and to "achieve in life" by living large, in a patently unsustainable world of idle comforts, effortless ease, ravenous consumption, secret handshakes, exclusive clubs, exotic hideaways and thousands of McMansions and private jets, having abandoned our regard for the less fortunate among us, for the maintenance of life as we know it, and for the preservation of the integrity of Earth.

Please consider that the single-minded pursuit of dollars, political power and privileges to profligately consume, and to magnificently ignore the practical requirements of biophysical reality, as our raisons d'etre, come what may for the children.

When my generation completes its unsavory 'mission' on Earth, I fear young people will look back in anger and utter disbelief at the things we have done and failed to do.....all things we proclaim loudly now as exercises of virtue.

Yes, of course, there is a huge, outstanding and growing ecological debt.... but, please, let us get real for a moment and understand what my generation does not want its children to know: your elders are determined to let the gigantic ecological debt and looming threats to human and environmental health, for which our generation is largely responsible, fall into your lap, come what may.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/On Delayers and doomsayers receive a chilly reception from pragmatic business leaders posted 1 year, 8 months ago 37 Responses

The unsustainable activities recklessly driving...

......economic globalization toward some sort of colossal wreckage.

What could be happening?

Perhaps powerful people and huge human institutions are driving the relentless, and soon to be unsustainable, expansion of the global political economy, that is requiring unbridled increases of economic production/distribution capabilities, conspicuously unrestrained per-capita consumption of resources and the continuous growth of absolute global human population numbers.

But why?

As we having been observing in recent months, another huge "bubble" has been "manufactured" by economic powerbrokers and allowed to grow ominously within the world economy. Not unexpectedly, the sub prime "bubble" is doing now what bubbles eventually do. Bubbles burst. We can readily observe how the credit markets of the world banking system are seizing up, stocks are tumbling and the value of the dollar is sinking. Who knows, a financial meltdown of the economic system worldwide could be in the offing.

How could this be happening?

For a moment, let us consider that the organizers, managers and Wall Street whiz kids overseeing the global economy (and the unraveling of the worldwide sub prime swindle) are running the artificially designed economy of the human community as a pyramid scheme. This is to say straightforwardly that the international financial system is being operated so that most of the wealth rises pyramidally into the hands of a small minority of people at the top of the world economy where this wealth is accumulated and consolidated endlessly. At the same time, the vast majority of people on Earth, near the bottom of the global economic pyramid, are left with very little wealth. In the 1980s, this global financial operation was called a "trickle down" economy. We have been told over and over again how this economic scheme "raises all ships." From this limited scope of observation, the billion people living on resources valued at less than one dollar per day and the additional 2.7 billion people being sustained on two dollars per day of resources in 2008 appear to be stuck in squalid conditions. The 'ships' carrying these billions of people do not appear to be lifting them out of poverty.

Could anything be done to beneficially change these unfair, inequitable and, in so many billions of instances, intolerable circumstances?

Of course. There is plenty to do. The global economy is undeniably a manmade construction. Because the world's economy is a product of human activity, our economic system is known to one and all to be imperfect. Afterall, human beings can better themselves and their imperfect products can be ameliorated. Only works of God are perfect, I suppose. With this in mind, if it is so that the human economy is imperfect, it is just as obvious that the global economy of the family of humanity can be re-designed, modified and otherwise changed, as necessary. The system of economic globalization can be reorganized, "downsized" and "powered down" so that the global economy meets the primary needs of majority of people. In this way, the economy of the human community could be sustainably reconstructed so as to realize more fully and more equitably the principles of democracy.

What are the principles of sustainable ECO:NOMICS?

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/
On ECO:nomics: Overload posted 1 year, 8 months ago 3 Responses

How to destroy a great country..........

.....and a most remarkable civilization by reflexively "staying the course" of evermore expansion of "big business as usual" until unbridled human over-consumption, overproduction and overpopulation activities become patently unsustainable in the bounded world we inhabit.

Too many leaders of the family of humanity in our time evidently intend to keep on living without having to accept limits to the growth of the global human economy, per-capita consumption and human population numbers worldwide; their wishes and desires to consume appear to be insatiable; they have chosen to believe (and widely share as if true) any ideological factoid that is politically convenient, economically expedient, socially agreeable and self-serving.

Even so, well-established scientific knowledge makes clear that Earth exists in space-time, is finite and has limited resources and frangible ecosystem services upon which humanity and life as we know it utterly depends for existence.

Whatsoever is is, is it not?

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/
On The plot to destroy America posted 1 year, 8 months ago 3 Responses

Avoiding global threats in our time......

....by choosing to ignore human responsibilities for the emergence of these threatening circumstances.

When will the economic powerbrokers and their bought-and-paid-for politicians do that which is within their power: save humanity and life as we know it by acknowledging, addressing and overcoming converging global threats, all of which are induced by huge scale and unbridled growth of human overproduction, over-consumption and overpopulation activities now overspreading the Earth?

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/ On ECO:nomics: Overload posted 1 year, 8 months ago 3 Responses

Go Heels !

On Pushing for 'fair food' on campus in the land of hog factories posted 1 year, 8 months ago 22 Responses

A resident of Chapel Hill, NC speaks out..........

My not-so-great generation of elders appears incapable of doing what is required of us to save the world as we know it.  

Young people like those at UNC-CH are providing the necessary leadership, thank God.

Who knows, maybe our young people will teach their elders how to preserve the world the old folks are inadvertently ravaging.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/
http://journals.aol.com/sesalmony/HumanandEnvironmentalHe ...On Pushing for 'fair food' on campus in the land of hog factories posted 1 year, 8 months ago 22 Responses

A few more open questions...........

.....related to the ominous potential for mass devastation that could result from human-induced climate change between now and 2025.  

Is it somehow harmful to ask direct questions regarding good scientific evidence of the potential for either apocalyptic climate change or pernicious impacts from the rapidly growing, colossal presence of the human species on Earth?

Is there some reasonable, sensible or moral foundation upon which faithful scientists can stand upright and say, "I refuse to speak of the evidence I have carefully and skillfully obtained?"

Are willful blindness, hysterical deafness or elective mutism ever acceptable "defenses" for scientists who choose to deny evidence developed from good science?

Are scientists who present good evidence of climate change and human population dynamics, even though their research is plainly unforeseen and surely unwelcome, entitled to have their evidence openly discussed by professional colleagues with established expertise?

If the global challenges looming before humanity are as formidable as the best available scientific evidence indicates, then is the family of humanity not well-advised to begin widely sharing in open discussions in the mass media, not just in blogs like this one, what is to be done in order to avoid whatsoever is unmanageable, while managing and mitigating everything else?

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/On What drives climate change denial? posted 1 year, 8 months ago 34 Responses

Dear Stockypig............

Surely, you jest.

It pleases me that you think certain of your rhetorical devices are worth sharing with me.

Why not be forthright?  Tell us how you really feel and what is on your mind.

Steve.On Do Big Oil and Big Tobacco share a similar smokescreen? posted 1 year, 9 months ago 26 Responses

Is economic globalization the colossal expression

.....expression of a contagion well-known to everyone: human greed?
On Investors meet at U.N. to discuss how to stay wealthy amid climate change posted 1 year, 9 months ago 10 Responses

Uncommon covergence of perspectives.........

....from some of our most brilliant Nobel Laureates.

I saw NOBELITY last year. It is worth your time to watch it.  Although 9 different human beings make presentations, the continuity and clarity of their points of view are remarkable.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/On Nine Nobelists on the big problems posted 1 year, 9 months ago 2 Responses

Dear Black Wallaby.........

......  while no one knows, perhaps a suggestion for thinking in a new way could be helpful at the moment.

Why not begin thinking "outside the box" about new and ingenious ways of providing humane and powerful incentives to citizens (individuals) who will agree to have one child per family as well as to `citizens' (corporations) that accept a limit to their unbridled, dissipating consumption of Earth's limited resources and limitations on the soon to be unsustainable globalization of their environmentally degrading big-business activities?

Please take note of the remarkably large number of well-established incentives propelling our human-designed, pyramid scheme, global economy that are patently perverse for most of the family of humanity because the standard incentives favor not more a small minority of people at the top of the global economic pyramid.

As everyone who looks already knows, that pyramid is symbolized on every One Dollar Bill(US).  The people with the most dollars, and the political power they purchase with money, money, money, money, think about little else other than wealth accumulation and their 'rights' to do as they please, particularly to conspicuously consume the limited resources of Earth without regard to limits.

Too many reckless and selfish elders in my not-so-great generation of consumers, producers and propagators are trying to "brand" the obvious truth about climate change as junk science. Economic growth appears to be all that really matters to many too many in my generation, come what may for biodiversity, our children, life as we know it, and even the Earth as fit place for human habitation by coming generations.  My generation is "flying for the buck" and going for the gusto.  We want it all and we want it now.

If humankind is to reasonably address and overcome the challenges posed by runaway climate change, let us consider how we might begin to sensibly and ably respond to the threats presented to the family of humanity by the colossal scale and rampant growth of the endlessly expanding, runaway global political economy on the relatively small, evidently finite and noticeably frangible planet God has blessed us to inhabit....and not to degrade and overrun, I suppose.

Steven Earl Salmony, Ph.D., M.P.A.
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/On Today: Christopher Castro posted 1 year, 9 months ago 68 Responses

Dear JoSullivan

Dear Jo,

Your personal support means a lot; it also inspires me to say that I am the father of three grown children, two are now married, so I think of myself as the father of five.  They mean everything to me. If I had my life to live again, I would not want to do anything differently.  Life has been wonderful to people in my circumstances.

The recommendation of a "One Child Per Family" plan of action is not one I take lightly or make easily.

If I was to sit here and say what I wish could be, I would begin by saying simply that the world we inhabit should be flat (and therefore unbounded) and human beings could be invited to continue doing exactly as we like, doing what we are doing now forever. Freedom and dignity of the individual are cornerstones of my life and I would extoll these virtues above all else.

Unfortunately, the world God has blessed us to inhabit is not flat. Earth is a bounded celestial orb, set among a sea of stars. Human beings evolved here. Sometimes we forget that we are a part of this Earth and members of a species that is often not adequately recognized for its distinctly human creatureliness. Until very recently, a mere two hundred and ten years ago, no one had publicly discussed, just as we are doing again now, the potential threat to humanity, life as we know it and the integrity of Earth that could one day be posed by the growth of absolute global human population numbers.  

That day when the human species poses a threat to the future of humanity and life as we know it on Earth appears to have come.  Here and now the human community appears to be challenged as never before by the unbridled growth of its propagation, production and consumption activities, ones we can see rampantly overspreading the surface of our planetary home.

As much as I would like to suggest we continue with "business as usual", that option may not be open to us for much longer.  Good scientific evidence from many sources indicates with remarkable clarity that humankind desperately needs to accept both human limits
 http://www.ehponline.org/docs/2005/8647/letter.html

and Earth's limitations

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0CYP/is_17_112/ai_ ...

If only humanity could keep doing as it likes, and as it is doing now, without threatening human wellbeing, environmental health and a good enough future for our children, then please be assured you and other Gristmill participants would be spared my contributions to this and other discussions on the internet.  After seven years of going to conferences, sponsoring Earth Day Summits on Human Population, writing letters to editors, sending thousand of emails and blogging, I would honor my long-suffering spouse by fulfilling a promise I made to her in 2001: end the AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population

http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/

Jo, thanks again.

Sincerely,

Steve On Today: Christopher Castro posted 1 year, 9 months ago 68 Responses

Dear Ben P........

Even though you and I disagree on fundamental issues, my respect for you leads me to say that I will heed your point about my posts not being on topic in this thread.

Inasmuch as I enjoy the repartee, and intend to keep leading the AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population for several more years if my long-suffering spouse of 36 years allows it, please know that I hope more favorable circumstances in other threads will make it possible for us to exchange perspectives on the Gristmill Blog in the near future.

Sincerely,

Steve

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/ On What happens when a group's position statement does not reflect its members accurately? posted 1 year, 9 months ago 89 Responses

Dear Ben P. and A. Dessler............

I hesitate to comment here out of respect for Ben P's desire to remain "on topic"; nevertheless, I will inject something now that is related to the topic of science and values.

Ben P, in your comments to A. Dessler you state that "'consensus' includes a variety of perspectives - many of which are quite distasteful according to genuinely liberal values."  The history of science indicates with remarkable clarity that advances in science have also "been distasteful" and objectionable to people holding values in conflict with new and usually unforeseen scientific evidence.  Copernicus, Galileo, Newton and Darwin are adequate examples of scientists whose views were at least initially found to be distasteful to many people.  Each of these giants of science produced good but unwelcome evidence, just like Rajendra Pachauri (with whom I and others had lunch just last week) and the other Nobel Prize-winning scientists have brought forth. Yes, the introduction of unanticipated science seems to regularly come into conflict with human values.

Ben P, you have also stated that I "appear to have confused virtue with the scientific method."

Not I, but you are the one who is confused. The science of climate change evidently conflicts with YOUR liberal values and YOU are reacting to that insult, I believe. The evolution of science is replete with examples of individuals in denial such as you are evincing.

The science of climate change is not something I welcome.  It is something that is.  Whatsoever is is, is it not?  What we wish to be real; what values we hold dear; what we ardently believe to be true, mean nothing if good science directly opposes our wishes, values and beliefs.  There are no exceptions, I suppose.

Perhaps this is at the core of the difficulty you and I are having with our communication.  I do not like the science of climate change any more or less than you do.  But I will not engage in some sort of rear-guard action to deny the evidence of good science because I do not like what the science is showing me, as in instances when good scientific evidence happens to be politically inconvenient, economically inexpedient and socially disagreeable.

Who knows, perhaps changes in the way we organize and operate the global political economy are in the offing, whereby we move from unsustainable current operations toward sustainable business practices in the future.

A conflict between science and values is evident, but that conflict appears to be in your head, Ben, not mine.

Sincerely,

Steve

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/
On What happens when a group's position statement does not reflect its members accurately? posted 1 year, 9 months ago 89 Responses