Thursday, May 29th, 2008
As intelligent and technologically advanced as humanity appears, we remain animals living from and within a dynamic ecological system. The fundamental error that has led humanity to the brink of ecological collapse is the spurious notion that we exist independently, that we belong to some exclusive club that does not have to follow the laws of ecology, and that nature is here simply to supply us with "resources" for our galloping economies.
Wednesday, May 28th, 2008
The word “deep,” was first associated with ecology by Norwegian naturalist and philosopher Arne Naess at the Third World Futures conference in 1972. Naess remarked that environmentalism had already diverged into (1) a “deep,” ecocentric, long-range movement advocating respect toward wild nature for its own intrinsic value; and (2) a “shallow,” anthropocentric ecology that treated nature as a “resource” for human economics.
Tuesday, May 27th, 2008
Since the late Pleistocene, 100,000 years ago, when a few thousand Homo sapiens poked around Africa, Asia, and the Mediterranean, human population has doubled 22 times. We have one more such doubling left, and that’s it. Human population may level off at 10 to 14 billion sometime around 2100, if population does not crash before then, likely exceeding the earth’s carrying capacity. Mass human starvations are already underway in degraded environments.
Economists imagine that average consumption is going to increase, so we must also consider a projected annual world economic growth of approximately 1.5% in wealthy nations and 10% in China and other developing nations. Economists consider anything below 3% world economic growth to signal a global “recession.”
If we assume a “low” annual economic growth rate of 3.6%, then human activity will double in 20 years. (72 divided by the % growth = doubling time). Is this economic doubling possible?
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