Rex Weyler

Economy and ecology

Rex Weyler — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 23:29:14 +0000

Global economic systems crash not only because of greed, fraud and toxic assets, but because those systems rest on fallacies about the natural world. The Ponzi scams and derivatives swindles of international bankers are no substitute for real economy: the living ecological systems, energy, soils, minerals, forests, and seas.

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Population: The real inconvenient truth

Rex Weyler — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 15:27:43 +0000

In 1972, the world’s first UN Conference on the Human Environment, in Stockholm, failed to even discuss human population. During the meetings, Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, urged the delegates to consider ways to mitigate human population growth, as a driving force of ecological destruction.

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It’s the soil, folks.

Rex Weyler — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 20:03:19 +0000

On top of everything else we face in the global mess that industrialism has left us — crashing financial markets, ponzi scams passed off as economic theory, peak oil, disappearing forests, ocean dead zones — we also face a global soil crisis. Note these interesting developments regarding food production and arable land:

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Irony, sex, rain, and the Gestapo National Convention

Rex Weyler — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 18:30:19 +0000

Lovers of irony:

We hope you are enjoying the soap opera: Uhmerika Turns. We viewers in Canada (country to the north) love the Vice Pregnant fundamentalist, Bible-thumping, no-sex-education, no condoms, right-wing soccer mom, her preggers teen, and the hockey-player boyfriend who says on his Facebook page, "I’m a fucking redneck" and "I don’t want kids."

And the family proudly announcing, "She’s going to marry the father!" Oh, great. Nice life planning. Who writes this stuff?

Remember after after 9/11, how sombre pundits declared, "Irony is dead." Well, ironically, it’s back!

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The Dispossessed

Rex Weyler — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 22:31:51 +0000

In 1969, Marie Aimee took her two children for medical treatment, a six-day voyage across the Indian Ocean from their home on Diego Garcia island to Port Louis, Mauritius. Her husband, Dervillie Permal, stayed behind to work at a coconut oil factory and tend the family garden and animals.

After visiting the doctor and picking up supplies in Port Louis, Marie and her children arrived at the quay for the trip home. However, a British Government agent refused to allow them onto the boat, stranding Marie and her children in Mauritius. Throughout the following weeks, other marooned islanders appeared, congregating in a local slum, living in boxes or tin shacks. Two years later, Marie’s husband arrived in Port Louis with one small bag and a chilling story.

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Peak Oil Changes Everything

Rex Weyler — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 21:24:45 +0000

As the era of cheap liquid fuels draws to an end, everything about modern consumer society will change. Likewise, developing societies pursuing the benefits of globalization will struggle to grow economies in an era of scarce liquid fuels. The most localized, self-reliant communities will experience the least disruption.

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The End of Price

Rex Weyler — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 20:25:28 +0000

In the 1980s, fishermen caught the last wild Beluga sturgeon from the Sea of Azov, source of prized caviar, and wild sturgeon in the Caspian Sea failed to reproduce. The sturgeon catch plunged by 95 percent, and the cost of caviar soared. Such extraordinary price growth is known as "hyperinflation," or as economist Eric Sprott says, "the caviar syndrome."

This may sound trivial regarding caviar, but hyperinflation turns critical with commodities such as oil, gas, copper, zinc, water, or fine hardwood, all now growing rare on a global scale. Industrial civilization has already depleted the best and most accessible of these resources. Sturgeons might recover if we leave them alone, but copper and oil do not reproduce themselves.

As humanity scours every last region of the planet for resources, we enter a new historic period in which certain vital commodities no longer have a traditional market price linked to demand and supply, but rather to the cost of access.

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12 fundamentals of ecology

Rex Weyler — Thu, 29 May 2008 18:09:19 +0000

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.

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What’s so deep about ecology?

Rex Weyler — Wed, 28 May 2008 16:02:00 +0000

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.

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Humanity’s economic, ecological dilemma

Rex Weyler — Tue, 27 May 2008 17:14:33 +0000

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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