Its all interconnected and this film demonstrates how ignorant and stupid we all are. It has nothing to do with Gore and whether human caused global warming is real or not; those are mere side effects of a much larger dysfunction of humankind and the societal structures we build that threatens us all.
for a couple of years now I have never quite disposed of the urge to start a blog called
THE NATURE OF THE BEAST.
the problem is that even though I have this intuition that almost none of us, and at most times not one of us, have consciousness of all the cross currents of shit that ebb and flow in out so called minds. We more readily develop excuses than face the fact that we have done things we regret or can not explain.
The rational opinion of people like my hero Bucky Fuller or King Hubbert that we were destined to run out of oil, water, land, fish...you name it..., has simply gone in one ear and out the other for most of six billion people.
my son's PhD advisor, the chair of the microbiology dept at a certain unversity drops his voice in the midst of the party and says in response to questions I have asked about how it is hard to do science if you are not basically hopeful by nature: "The 900 pound gorilla that not even Gore can mention is over population. I only press on in science because you never know what you are going to find out."
Yes most of us fool ourselves and gladly let the likes of bush or Exxon do the fooling. it is the nature of the beast.
hey.
good blog title. you could run a long way with topics in that one.
over population has been a key concern of mine for a long while. but i liked how that film interwove it with the peak oil and so-on and showed how as you say it is the nature of the beast. is that our viral auto shut off switch? are we just yeast in the vat consuming ourselves to death? it seems so.
the only thing that keeps me from despair is that i see it all as just part of the cosmic dance. I have no real allegiance to the human species and the be all of existence...just another stepping stone. the "life is more important than lives" stuff.
still it can provide a real funk time to time.
a very interesting way to temper your attachment to mankind, Cul. I actually heard a very similar philosophy recently from my daughter. She is an ecologist by training...the kind they turn out at UC Berkeley. She basically said to me in response to my anguish over humanity's self destructive appetites and trends:"why do you think it is such a tragedy if we, like countless species before us, are obliterated from the stage of life? We will be replaced by things that make more sense in the world we are polluting, things that can eat what we have poisoned ourselves with."
I agree with her when the view is large scale, I mean that only makes sense. Human exceptionalism that would assert otherwise strikes me as a vanity constructed to defend against the sight of the abyss. Ego survival.
I mean how long did it take for vegetation to produce enough O2 "shit" that animals were produced to suck it up and refine back into usable CO2? Sometimes I think "God's plan" has as many patches as Microsoft...mind you, without the possibility of failure and the necessary fixes not much would evolve would it?
Kilgore Trout learned from that trucker he hitched a ride from that throwing a candy wrapper out the window is meaningless because God pollutes all the time by way of chaos and systemic upheavals; earthquakes, hurricanes, volcanoes, comets smashing into planets, 40 day floods, bundled derivatives, etc.
When you consider how long man has been around in a relatively modern form, the recorded history we measure our progress by is probably not the whole story. Isn't it possible we've already been through several attempts at civilization and repeatedly blew it like we are likely doing now, all traces of which have been erased by the engendered cataclysms?
And maybe that's true of extraterrestrial life as well; perhaps life hasn't figured out how to get past the self-destruction that the evolutionary acceleration of the introspective intelligence feedback loop creates. There are examples all around of life being as "dumb" as the vat yeast or pathogens that kill their host.
Can you imagine the consumption level if we actually succeeded in harnessing fusion and took off willy nilly into space spreading like a virus throughout the galaxy? How long before we would be using Jupiter's moons as a giant TV monitors to sell ads for wrinkle cream? Maybe the built-in shutoff switch is a good idea.
On the other hand, maybe some of us will transcend all that.