Message-ID: <3.0.32.19970106070857.0085fb30@ilhawaii.net> Date: Mon, 6 Jan 1997 07:09:00 -1000 From: Jay Hanson <mailto:jhanson@ILHAWAII.NET> Subject: Re: Re[2]: pushing development--or pushing the status quo? To: Multiple recipients of list DEVEL-L <mailto:DEVEL-L@AMERICAN.EDU>
At 07:00 PM 1/6/97 EST, mailto:Angus_Barnes@AUSAID.GOV.AU wrote:>Indigenous cultures didn't live in a static,
>environmentally-friendly cocoon for centuries. Its fine to use
>that as the mythic basis for a new age of environmentalism, but
>the history of indigenous cultures also includes exploration,
>colonisation and exploitation of resources.
According ecologist John Logan, humans evolved as a "patch disturbance" species. As the name implies, we evolved to trash our patch and then moved on. [ http://csf.Colorado.EDU/authors/hanson/page78.htm ]
In other words, human activity is inherently not sustainable -- period. Human activity over time will inevitably lower the human carrying capacity of the environment where it occurs.
In order for any given human society to persist over time, it must be mobile. It must be able to move to an area that humans haven't degraded yet. That is how humans survived before the invention of agriculture.
Today's essential problem is that there are no more places left for us to move. People are already busy everywhere lowering the human carrying capacity of their environments.
We in the developed world are presently hanging on by our fingernails (fossil fuel). Not only is this by definition, unsustainable, fossil fuel temporarily allows more humans to survive and greatly amplifies the amount of damage they are able to inflict upon their life-support systems.
When the fossil energy goes, our cities will become nothing more that giant charnel houses.
So from an ecological/evolutional perspective, we are committed to follow the other animals through cycles of exuberant expansion, crash, and die-off.
I think we are right on schedule. Loook at the graphs at: http://csf.Colorado.EDU/authors/hanson/page14.htm
Jay -- http://csf.Colorado.EDU/authors/hanson/ ---------------------------------------------------- "It was thus becoming apparent that nature must, in the not far distant future, institute bankruptcy proceedings against industrial civilization, and perhaps against the standing crop of human flesh, just as nature had done many times to other detritus- consuming species following their exuberant expansion in response to the savings deposits their ecosystems had accumulated before they got the opportunity to begin the drawdown... Having become a species of superdetritovores, mankind was destined not merely for succession, but for crash." [OVERSHOOT,p. 172, 173]
OVERSHOOT by Catton, 1982, University of Illinois Press, 800-545-4703, Fax 217-244-8082
To learn out about the coming energy crash and die off: BEYOND OIL, by Gever, et al., 1991, University Press of Colorado, 303-530-5337