for ongoing topics. Jump in to what catches your attention.
(see also the MAHB blog)
Posted at Jul 21/2010 06:21AM:
Steven Earl Salmony: Remembering a great scientist, Professor Stephen H. Schneider.....
I wonder what Steve and Galileo are doing tonight.
Posted at Nov 17/2010 05:14AM:
stevenearlsalmony: Incidentally, if teleconferencing connections between the USA and Switzerland worked well, yesterday Russell Hopfenberg made a presentation of research on human population dynamics to a small assembly of physicists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva.
Posted at Nov 21/2010 07:55AM:
stevenearlsalmony: Dear Friends,
Given the general mind-set, the one driven in our time by economic globalization and the global political economy, it is difficult to believe how change to whatsoever is sustainable could occur. The mantra of endless growth of unsustainable lifestyles and too-big-to succeed corporations appears pervasive and unassailable.
Gigantic, multinational conglomerates are adamantly engaged in the production of goods (both needed and unnecessary), business and finance, the marvelous edifices housing the great religions, large-scale agriculture, the military complexes. These entities are the actual constructions that drive the process of economic globalization and give the global political economy its leviathan-like structure.
What you are reporting appears correct. It seems to me that two things could happen. First, an internet-driven transformation of global human consciousness will somehow occur in order to bring about necessary changes in the self-serving, destructive behavior of the fossil fools among us. Second, something embodied in this shift in human consciousness will give rise to completely unexpected, somehow interlocking events like the one which occurred at the city of Jericho in ancient times when “the walls fell down”. Even the leviathans of human enterprise in our days could crumble.
Recently we witnessed the near collapse of some of the giants of the automobile industry and the virtual implosion of investment houses and big banks on Wall Street. Are the titans of big business and finance not only “too-big-to-fail” but also “too-big-to-succeed” precisely because they are soon to become patently unsustainable on a planet with size, composition and ecology of Earth?
We have also seen in the past several years the poisonous fruits to be derived from extolling as ‘virtues’ outrageous greed, obscene overconsumption and relentless hoarding of wealth by many too many leaders. Never in the course of human events have so few stolen so much from so many....with a sense of pride. That these people reward each other with medals and awards for their pernicious activities is shameful. I believe we can agree that the unbridled overgrowth activities of the masters of the universe now overspreading the surface of Earth can much longer stand neither the test of time nor the biophysical limitations of the planetary home we are to inhabit and not ruin, I suppose. Following self-proclaimed masters of the universe down a primrose path could be the wrong way to direct the children to go.
The children deserve the chance of facing the prospect of a future that is good enough. I am no longer thinking of leaving the children a better world than the one that was given to their elders. That appears out of reach now. It remains my hope that the elder generation, with responsibilities to assume and duties to perform, will do better than we doing now by changing our ways for the sake of keeping Earth fit for habitation by children everywhere. As examples, we could pay our debts instead of mortgage the children’s future; we could clean up the ecological messes that have been made in the course of the past 65 years; we could eschew “bigger is better” and “the biggest is the best” in favor of “small is beautiful”, doing more with less, and embracing the spirit of living well by living more simply and sustainably.
Perhaps changes toward sustainable lifestyles and right-sized enterprises are in the offing.
And perhaps we have been travelling down a long road over hundreds upon hundreds of years, a road of growing production and distribution capabilities, of wanton overconsumption and reckless hoarding, and of unbridled overpopulation. These activities have been occurring for a long time on a small scale, but only recently exploded in seemingly uncontrollable ways, within the natural world we inhabit and without sufficient regard being given either to human limits or Earth’s limitations. An improbable combination of narcissism, arrogance, foolhardiness and greed blinded leadership to the practical requirements of living on Earth; to the “rules of the house” in our planetary home. Too many leaders decided to willfully behave like kids who were left alone and given the run of the house by their overseers. All the rules were ‘forgotten’ or simply ignored. Laissez faire, whatever will be will be, living without limits and all that ruled!
The children tore everything up and made a big mess. When they realized what they were doing, they felt stuck as if between a rock and hard place. Do they stop their destructive activities or else choose to keep tearing up the house? This is a tough choice for kids at play. Who knows, perhaps they will not be caught red-handed at what they have been doing. And if they are caught, they could always blame the wreckage on other bad boys. How many times have we seen kids at play and men at work blaming their wrongdoing on others and not ever taking responsibility for their own dishonest, deceitful or destructive behavior?
Either the choice to turn back and begin the clean-up or the choice to keep tearing things up is fraught with danger. From a kid’s (or fossil fool’s) perspective they could face more danger by trying to clean up the mess they made than they would be exposed to by continuing with their rampage. Either choice presents its own challenges and threats. After all, so much damage has already been done. There is no longer any easy way forward, that is for sure, even under the best circumstances.
What to do here? Now what? These are the questions, I suppose.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czvxyDgqxmM
Sincerely yours,
Steve
Posted at Dec 08/2010 06:08AM:
stevenearlsalmony: Dear Doug Carmichael and Friends,
Would it be possible to request of the experts in the field of human behavior analysis that they immediately begin an assessment (and perhaps feature an open discussion on the MAHB Blogs) of extant scientific evidence regarding human population dynamics. You have likely noted already that more and more attention has been paid lately to the global ecological challenges posed to humankind by the human overpopulation of Earth, but no one is commenting on scientific research regarding what could be causing this population explosion, eg, human population dynamics. Please consider that we have before us the need both to acknowledge what appears to be the “mother” of human-driven global challenges: the human overpopulation of Earth, and the very last of the last taboos regarding the human species: human population dynamics. Perhaps there is a problem, human overpopulation, and also at least one possible cause of it, which is to be found in the scientific research of human population dynamics. I believe we can be guided by wisdom of the ages contained in two words, that we have seen and heard since the beginning of Western culture. If ever there was a timeless shibboleth of humanity, it has been eternalized in two words from Socrates, “Know thyself”. Unfortunately, self-knowledge of the kind Socrates spoke is not voguish or a guarantor of success or easily achieved like accumulating money, gaining position and power, and doing politically convenient and economically expedient things. Educated sychophants, absurdly enriched minions and other vendors of words have been adamantly putting forward anything and everything imaginable that promote the supreme and selfish interests of the wealthy and powerful. Every bias and rationalization under the sun has been employed; every rhetorical device and ideological artifact used to minimize or deny the import in these words from Socrates. These two words tell us where we need to look for knowledge, finally, after we have looked everywhere else and regarded everything else in the Universe. I fear modern cultural determinants, the ones pervading human thought and action as well as leading us to ignore watchwords of the likes of Socrates, could turn out to be a distinctly human flaw. Let us agree here and now that this flaw is not necessarily fatal and that there is still time to gain knowledge of self, and respond ably to the human-induced threats looming before human species.
We are evidently ready, willing and able to examine the population dynamics of non-human species. Why not assess the science of human population dynamics? After all, if we know that the human population is exploding worldwide in a soon to become patently unsustainable way, but deny scientific evidence of why the population explosion is occurring, how on Earth are people to make meaningful behavioral changes required for sustainability?
Human behavior analysts could help us now and here.
Sincerely,
Steve
Posted at May 12/2011 07:22AM:
Ronnie Hawkins: I have just read Ehrlich & Ornstein's _Humanity on a Tightrope_, and came here looking forward to some stimulating discussion: has everybody picked up their toys and gone home?
I'm a science-educated philosophy professor, on the verge of retiring from one of the U.S.'s populationally largest universities, looking forward to helping move this sort of dialogue along in creative ways.
I agree with the premise of the 2010 book that we need to turn up the empathy and come together as a species.
Human population growth is a phenomenon I've been following for all of my life--ever since I became able to think, I have been worried about that frightening J-curve, and wondering why others around me did not appear to be doing the same.
Frankly, I think it's time to bite the bullet on that--we can't sustain anywhere near the number of people we already have on a long-term basis, and we're facing some sort of population crash in the not too distant future (scenarios may vary). Sooner or later, the knife of natural selection will come down hard on our species.
My primary motivation for decades was trying to stop the devastation of nonhuman life. I appreciate the efforts of those who work tirelessly within the current institutional system to slow down the loss of biodiversity, but I'm afraid the only way Life on the planet will really begin to recover will be after the human "crash" (I'd love to be wrong about this).
Recently it has come to my attention that a very sizeable proportion of our human destructiveness has little to do with feeding and maintaining our extreme population, however, and almost everything to do with our fascination by our systems of symbols. This is an important thread running through E&O's book, but philosophers can analyze what's going on in such a way as to make it more explicit (as can psychologists, anthropologists, and many from the humanities).
We need to increase our reflexivity as well as our empathy--our ability to "see ourselves" as if from the outside, allocentrically, as the primates that we are: not only agentive (as are all lifeforms) and aggregative (as highly social animals) but also deliberative and capable of cognitively overriding the emotional circuitry that divides us into "us and them."
And, pivotally, we need to understand that MONEY is nothing but a social construction. It's entirely symbolic, subjective in its ontology. And it's something we humans created--it seemed to be "useful" in enhancing our lives, and certainly had its role in promoting the "growth" of our societies. Today, with large numbers of us following the linguistic "rues" that have grown up around this entirely abstract "object," our fixation on a symbol is inducing us to destroy the biosphere that really--in a fully concrete, not symbolic way--supports our lives.
Can we not attain the reflexivity to become fully aware of the socially constructed nature of what we think of as modern global economics, propagate that awareness widely, and then activate our human agency so as to change the overall configuration?
The next step in our evolution requires us to "see through" our symbol-world in order to grasp what's really happening biologically!
Ronnie