[Marxism] Unattended is unintended.

[Barry Brooks]

Forget money and politics for a moment!
 From a physical/engineering view ...

The short-term fix is ...
We must stop doing all unnecessary work.
Our attempts to be too "creative" will result in unintended creation of
a toasted planet. Toasted planets are unintended and will be unattended
by the likes of us.

The long-term fix is ...
Coming to terms will the GROWTH issue.
Growth in consumption, or growth in population, or whatever...

When growth never stops we call it cancer. Blame has nothing to to with
growth. We didn't know what we were doing. Local vision is a normal kind
of blindness. Now we are about to learn (too late?) that the whole world
we are all part of is not just a valley or the street where we live. The
world is a system.

Barry

****************

http://www.greenpeace.org/international/about/deep-green/deep-green-september-2008

<http://www.greenpeace.org/international/about/deep-green/deep-green-september-2008>

Maybe Greenpeace will stop avoiding pop. Then maybe Oxfam?  Nah....

Deep Green - September 2008

*Population: The real inconvenient truth ***

People bomb - poulation explosionIn 1972, Ben and Dorothy Metcalfe from
the budding Greenpeace Foundation in Canada attended the world's first
UN Conference on the Human Environment, in Stockholm, where they
succeeded in putting nuclear bomb tests on the agenda with the help of
Australia and Japan. However, one critical issue failed to make the
agenda of this historic meeting: human population.

Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, urged the delegates to
discuss ways to mitigate human population growth as a driving force of
ecological destruction. Barry Commoner, the scientist who first detected
radioactive Strontium-90 in children's teeth, argued against Ehrlich,
insisting that human population growth did not pose a critical
environmental threat. Technology, he believed, would allow us to feed
billions more people, and the real issue is wasteful consumption by the
rich.

Ehrlich agreed about excessive consumption, but maintained that sheer
population growth would degrade the planetary ecosystems and lead to
humanitarian and ecological catastrophes. He urged environmentalists to
advocate a global contraception drive to reduce unwanted pregnancies and
the human fertility rate. Ehrlich's proposals, however, collided with
cultural, political, and religious resistance. The Stockholm conference
avoided discussing population, and the environmental movement since 1972
has almost entirely ignored human population growth. Nevertheless, the
nagging issue remains, 36 years and three billion people later.

_Denial ___

Some resistance to discussing population reflects the common-sense
reluctance to blame the world's poor for our environmental problems.
Most environmental groups have focused on the excesses of consumer
societies, wilderness protection, pollution, and species loss, all valid
issues. China's response to burgeoning population, the
"one-child-per-family" policy, appeared like totalitarian control over
personal freedom. Ultimately, however, the greatest obstacle to
addressing population growth has been religious and cultural hostility
to contraception and women's rights.

Growth advocates - real estate developers, retailers, and others who
profit from population growth - insist that our communities can "grow
forever." Head cheerleader for this group has been Julian Simon, a
corporate lobbyist in Washington, D.C. In 1995, Simon wrote:

"We have in our hands now ... the technology to feed, clothe, and supply
energy to an ever-growing population for the next 7 billion years. ...
Even if no new knowledge were ever gained...we would be able to go on
increasing our population forever."


Simon - out of deception or ignorance - misrepresents the simple truth
about organic growth. Any percentage growth, whether stable or variable,
like compound interest in a bank, has a doubling time, and numbers reach
extreme values after several doublings. Even if the current population
growth rate of 1.14 percent could be reduced to half a percent, 0.5
percent, then human population would double every 140 years. After five
doublings, 700 years - somewhat shy of "forever" - world population
would be 32 times today's 6.7 billion, that is, over 200 billion people.
This is not remotely possible. Simon may secretly understand the
mathematical certainty of this impossibility, but he hopes his audience
can't.

...

**************

(belief is NEVER a system!)
Barry