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'Peak Wood' Offers Parallels For Our Time
Harperdog sends in a piece from Miller McCune looking back at the history of mankind's relationship with virgin timber. Again and again, civilizations have faced a condition of "peak wood," and how they handled it (or failed to) illuminates the current situation with regard to oil. The piece ends with a quote from the 19th-century social scientist and communist theorist Friedrich Engels, who is not generally thought of as an environmental seer: "What did the Spanish planters in Cuba, who burned down the forests on the slopes of the mountains and obtained sufficient fertilizer from the ashes for one generation of highly profitable coffee trees, care that the heavy tropical rains later washed away the now unprotected upper stratum of the soil and left only bare rock behind? ... Let us not flatter ourselves on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel the first."
That is set to reverse. The price of wood has dropped so low here in the south that many timber companies can't afford to stay in business and the huge plots of land they grew trees on are in danger of being sold. If that happens, they will most likely be cleared for development or cattle and will never again grow forests.
I live in an area surrounded by forests that are planted and cleared for use by lumber companies and paper mills. We fear the closing of lumber companies because it will mean our forests will start shrinking.
The really sad part about it, is the huge number of enviro-nutbags that want lumber companies out of business in a completely backwards effort to "save the forests."
I really want to get a tshirt that says "Save the trees! Use more paper!"
Any time these conversations come up, the only real solution (reducing the population to about 2 billion) is ignored by everyone.
Which means, we really are not going to solve the problem before it blows up in our face.
Reduce the population to 2 billion and the earth becomes verdant and rich within 50 years.
It's possible to peacefully reduce the population to 3 billion in 50 years. Just stop saving people who have more than 1 child per 2 parents and stop providing tax incentives for second children.
But it's not going to happen. We are going to 9 and probably 11 billion people with all the hell that results from that.
By my current math, it happens a little while after I die.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
This is where the expression, "even a broken clock is right twice a day" comes into play. Just because someone had some other ideas that were bad doesn't mean all their ideas are bad.
You assume much, young Jedi. And you know what they say about "assume"...
Everyone looks at Soviet Russia and says, "See? PROOF that Communism is bad!" when in fact the USSR was never a Marxist country. Lenin and crew used Marxist-sounding buzzwords to justify establishing a police state, which was certainly a dictatorship but by no stretch of the imagination could it be thought of as a dictatorship of the proletariat (which Marx himself said was only a temporary state). They also completely ignored Marx' teachings regarding the historical and economic processes by which Socialism and Communism might come about, attempting to force Russia to follow a model that it was (according to Marx) not yet ready for.
Likewise Mao's China.
Meanwhile, the socioeconomic evolution of the US is progressing in almost exactly the fashion predicted by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto, which you should really take the time to read and understand (along with some history) before spouting any more nonsense.
Meanwhile, in several European countries where the rights of the workers were actually taken seriously, and where pseudo-Marxist rhetoric was not merely employed as an excuse to make a grab for power for its own sake by some band of megalomaniacs, Socialism is actually alive and doing pretty well, thanks very much.
Summary: Marx and Engels were very largely correct, and their characterisation of history as a history of class division and class struggle has largely been bourne out. And anyone who can't look at the world (and especially the USA) today and see that this class division between bourgeoisie and proletariat continues very much as they described is a fool.
Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, on the other hand, were basically self-serving bastards using Marxist rhetoric to justify their lust for control and prediliction for mass murder. Not to mention the lasting disservice they did the world by polluting the namespace for any serious discussion of the issues raised by Marx and Engels.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
If it's wrong to force them, it's wrong to force me.
Except that as a citizen of the West you are currently burning far more fossil fuel than those in the developing world. Energy consumption per capita. You can complain how China is now polluting more than the US, but per person a Chinese citizen uses 47.81 GJ per year, whilst an American uses 327.38 GJ per year. There is a strong link between the amount of energy used and quality of life, so bringing everyone in the world up to Western standards would mean doubling present consumption rates. Whether you think global warming is a problem or not, this is not sustainable. Consumption in the West has got to fall by a significant amount, whilst consumption in the Developing World should rise.
So what do we do then ? We all know our parents (or "babyboom generation") and their parents are responsible for the really excessive "borrowing" from nature. When they started, world population was less than 1.5 billion people. Worse : those 1.5 billion people lived a lot more efficiently than us (not that they knew, there just wasn't sufficient energy. Nothing makes a man quite so frugal as an empty wallet), so "efficiency" increases, barring getting nuclear fusion plants operational, aren't going to help us get above that 1.5 billion.
If this is true :
For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel the first.
Then we're about to lose 3 out of 4 people worldwide to genocide, war or hunger. Including 1 out of 2 Americans. But the countries that would be truly fucked in this case would be Europe and Africa.
What I don't get is how this can even get discussed ? Surely anything -anything- is preferable to losing the large majority of world population ? Add to that, the "sticky" question : who dies ? We all know how the question of "who dies" is going to be answered, since it's just the same as ever : with wars. If you lose, you get exterminated. If you don't fight, and are lucky enough not to get attacked, you starve to death. Anyone in favor of that ?
And before anyone says birth control, please remember "birth control" will only have real results in 50 years, and 90 or-so if birth control is done in a sustainable manner (meaning there is both an upper and a lower limit to how many babies we get to have). And even if you do compulsory birth control, who gets to have babies, and what do you do about "over the limit" babies ? Or perhaps more directly : how do you kill "over the limit" babies ?
Seems to me that unless you want every state world-wide to start it's own holocaust, you'd advocate the solution of funding every man with an idea about power generation. Funding it, not just through academia (who have a somewhat tarnished track record here), but more along the lines of : if a dog comes with a napkin with an idea, give him 1000$ for it and see where it goes.
actually there has already been an experiment that demonstrated the converse rat park
which appeared to demonstrate that addiction in rats was as much related of their being held in tiny cages, as to the inherent "addictiveness" of opiates
the funding was withdrawn, and doubt cast as to Alexander's integrity
one could speculate that it is not popular opinion that the way to reduce drug dependance in humans is to improve their general quality of life, such that they don't feel the need to compulsively take drugs in the first place
The biggest difference is that there is complete class mobility. Nobody tells you that you are limited to the class in which you are born. Doesn't mean you can move up the economic ladder with ease, but it does mean you can. There are countless examples. This is far different from the system of nobility you saw in places like Czarist Russia where if you were born a noble, you were one and could more or less do nothing to lose it, and if you were born a peasant, you could never rise above that.
The "countless" examples you speak of are very, very few, in actuality (if only even because the number of rich and super-rich people is so small to begin with). Your assertion that class mobility was inexistent in pre-revolutionary Russia is patently untrue. There are countless examples in Russian history of boyars being created from peasant families (mostly those that got rich or provided some valuable military service to a czar).
Another difference is that there is not a "rich/poor" divide. For sure there are rich people, who can have a kind of life normal people cannot, and there are poor people, who lack basic necessities. However most people are neither, they are somewhere in the middle.
The economic "ladder" you speak of is not a ladder. Wealth distribution follows a Pareto law in most places (certainly in the US).
I find it hilarious, by the way, that you acknowledge the existence of distinct groups of super-rich, rich and poor respectively, all while denying that the class divide is real.
> just every single time someone tried to establish it it led to military dictatorship and starvation
:).
The reason why that happens is because the Communist Manifesto encourages violence (read it and you'll see it). This is the fatal flaw in their implementation plan.
When you encourage violence as part of your "overthrowing", you'll have a violent revolution. In a violent revolution, the people capable and willing of exerting the most violence will normally get to the top. Most of the time the people that reach the top aren't benevolent and aren't going to give up their power. The American Revolution is probably a notable exception (perhaps someone who knows about it better can figure out why it ended up OK - but from what I see, the USA was lucky to have good leaders at that point).
In summary: the popular Communism/Socialism Implementation Plan is easy for Dictators to hijack into starting their own Dictatorships.
This "design flaw" does look rather obvious to me, but I'm "just an EE" working in an IT line so it's really out of my field of expertise. Thus I'll be happy to see good arguments on why I'm wrong
No, ultranova is right. Those in control do the exploiting. We, the powerless, don't exploit anybody and most of us are exploited ourselves, just not as badly as the poor sods in the overseas sweatshops. Just because I buy a product from an exploititive company, particularly when that's the only option, doesn't make me an exploiter.
Stop making excuses for evil people.
Free Martian Whores!