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[unmaintainability] Because of a naturally uneven distribution of the resources fundamental to the human life-form, and because of population growth and the way 'the world aristocracy of ignorantly autonomous peoples and nations' (-2005) has so far used those natural resources(*q) -'sustainable resource use' corrupted, and general citizenry become operationally and intellectually inept by 'successive subspeciation(*g) under economic growth', there is some great probability that 'general well-being and civilizational integrity' two to three generations from now (2040-50) will be manifest in a chaotic descent from otherwise classical 'lower animal' econiche saturation into classical dynamic stability -overpopulation and economic growth attritioning into (a) 'citadel aristocracies' at the tops of nations variously controlling critical natural resources among themselves, (b) an ungovernable, triage-abandoned mass 'making-do as best it can' scrabble dying out the bottom (Haiti -2004), and (c) a successively unemployable drone/burden population from top to bottom suffering (i) the unmaintainability of 'once 2005 lifestyle and quality of life' and (ii) a breakdown of civilizational infrastructure, institutions and government about them. |
[bottom-up die-out] The likelihood developed here is that there will not have been enough 'forward-looking anthropologically integral progress' made by 2040-50 to have offset the primary factor leading to 'the absence of sustainable resource use' at that time, namely, the momentum of world population disposed to diasporative use of the resource/environment carrying overpopulation into a de-facto now-manifest saturation of the resource/environment -there having been no way to access and institutionalize off-setting knowledge in A World Democracy Of Ignorantly Autonomous Peoples And Nations(*s) so disposed. Argued further then, is that scientists of primarily western democracy (European federation, in particular) will 'come to the rescue' by intruding upon government -but NOT before massive ecological collapses thruout the world are rippling hierarchically downward into a breakdown of all but the most self-sustaining societies -populations and their 'qualities of life' collapsing in accordance -aristocracy ('western democracy' in particular) and 'national autonomy', the key phrases, and 'momentum of classical, lower animal saturation' by H sapiens, the overwhelming agency. |
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Introduction and OverviewThe basic situation underlying 'sustainable resource use' is that population growth is ultimately limited by the earth's natural resources and their limited maintainability under use. The further situation is that mankind is not 'just another animal'; he is, rather, a 'warm-blooded vertebrate of deliberative capability' which means (a matter of time and 'intellectual' evolution) that he has come to observe some of the various ways in which his proliferation and use of those resources affect the very nature and course of his existence. 'Sustainable resource use' then, is a reference to some 'stability of natural resource use by relatively stable population over some particular time-period of interest'.
'Gross demographic changes' is limited in practicality here to the window of the next 40 to 50 years (2040-50) -the two to three generations of manifestly existing and 'projectable' humans not uncommon in government planning (example -
*3). The general conclusion then, is that because the physical and intellectual dispositions of mankind today are still essentially those of 'a warm-blooded merely cerebrating vertebrate diasporatively inhabiting an econiche new to it' (the
earth), the momentum of 'population growth and degradational use of the resource/environment' will not have made possible anything of a meaningful 'sustainable resource' into that period of time.
(*i) The basic premise underlying 'sustainable resource use' then, is that there is some combination of population mental and physical constitutions and demographics that is best consistent with both the planet's natural
resources and the 'best well-being and viability of the organism-whole', thus- The material of this essay title becomes successively daunting as one digs into 'resolution' and finds himself lost in what Garrett Hardin titled The Tragedy of the Commons. But the problem is addressable and resolvable -it depends only upon the related environmental biologists and anthropologists, and subsequently scientists in general, to rise to themselves being the inevitable 'agency of resolution'.) Following next are several high-order items that should be considered as more or less couching any proper analysis. They identify, so to speak, a configuration-space or extraterrestrial view of some of the more important characteristics of mankind as a thus-far evolved, proliferating and interacting life-form on the planet.
1 - Paleontology has found that the appearances and evolutions of various 'types' of organisms (physical characteristics and properties) typically have 'geological time-frame's associable them. The peculiarity of 'the human life-form' however, is
that not only did its appearance toggle a new 'time-frame', but it did so -because of his deliberative capability, with potential corruptions of planetary proportions -atmospheric properties,
continental and oceanic and freshwater integrities, and annihilation of complete ecosystems -a geological time-frame, in other words, of complexity perhaps well beyond
his ever 'encompassing' it.
4 - It is a fact of our 'only thus-far intellectual evolution' that we try to make our lives as 'comfortable and fun' possible with as little effort possible (example -more below); globalization and 'the superiority of
the United States of America', in this respect, has everyone in the world a 'wannabe to our value-based worth by ownership'(*q) that churns and only further complicates the difficulty of 'sustainable
resource use' thruout the world.
[Intrinsic here, is the subject of economics and the general matter of economic relationships between individuals, peoples and nations, the whole of which intimately ties the existence of every anyone ever born and/or yet to be
born and the nature-in-detail of the earth
-his configuration space, for all its (a) various planetary properties and dynamics and (b) its various life-forms and their evolutionary properties. (This is continued in Appendix 2, A Note on 'Economic Growth'(*l).]
5 - The whole idea of 'capitalism, free enterprise, the financial market, stock ownership' et cetera, is fundamentally incompatible with sustainable resource use except as an extant circumstantiality of 'getting
from here to there': sustainable resource use is wholly and solely scientific and heuristic(*i) in its various elements of discovery, analysis, modeling, projection and 'correction'; 'capitalism et cetera' is merely
institutionalized pecking order.
7 - There are only solar energy, fossil energy and nuclear or related such energy that man discovers accessible. And when the discoveries and 'easily available' fossil peter out, there is left only what biomass the sun
'grows' -'provided, of course, that there is water -and the temperature is right -and the air clean enough'.
-The peculiarity of nuclear energy, furthermore -thus-far mentality, is that its comparatively long-term, high-volume efficiency actually works to prolong overpopulation and further corruption of resource/environment integrity.
8 - It is a fact of classical evolutionary process that 'sustainable resource use' will entail 'an attrition(*t) of overpopulated resource/environment use' determined by (a) how
'institutionalized aristocratic power(*n) accedes to scientific knowledge', (b) what the natures of the various resource/environments and their uses are in 'the aristocracy of individuals, peoples and
nations' (scroll down -*q) and (c) the 'system of momentums' in this (below) -the whole of which determines (sustainable resource use) the nature of population reduction -and 'lifestyle and the quality of life' in that
reduction.
9 - The 'world democracy of ignorantly autonomous peoples and nations' is very much 'an econiche of various evolutionally and ecologically related organisms'. That world democracy (ecosystem) changes, consequently, as a function of how
those individual organisms affect their discrete
(sub-)econiches and how those affects in turn affect the dynamics of other organisms and the whole. -Thus the 'best well-being and viability' of a people or nation depends upon (a) the nature of its dependence upon its own 'sustainable resource
use' and (b) how what it brings to that 'table of the organism-whole' -and its availability, 'sits' on that table -how the world's depletion of Gabon's oil may well 'beggar' it into nonexistence, for example.
11 - It is the further peculiarity of man that the 'machine that goes by itself'-edness of his deliberative capability is able to compound relationals (mathematics, for example) in such
successive way as to outrun the rate-limited(*z) brain-and-body ability of even some H cogitans(*w) to practicably contain such compound -with the result that he has no choice but to subspeciate at least
intellectually -and perhaps
-eventually, physically and genetically too. 12 - Energy and water are both existentially and momently fundamental to this organism. 'Best well-being and viability of the life-form', therefore, depends crucially upon understanding the dynamics of their availabilities and human use -and control thereof in that respect. What this means for 'a world democracy of ignorantly autonomous peoples and nations and the inevitability of economic attrition into dynamic stability' is that the only problem to be addressed is 'the quantity, quality and distribution of ecological collapse and human misery attaching it'.
13 - There is, lastly, not only a momentum to 'the human phenomenon and things human', to the dynamics of 'the world democracy of ignorantly autonomous peoples and nations', but a certainty of that momentum by fact of its various
codifications -laws, rules and regulations -governments, agencies, armies, industries, businesses, religions, organizations and families, national and international -an evolving and imperfectly integrated working-whole -all the more
difficult to bring under attrition. Discussion I - 2005
'Sustainable resource use' then, identifies a dynamically evolving situation which is defined solely by what best knowledge there is regarding the nature of the human organism as 'a life-form of deliberative capability discovering the
nature of its existence in a fixed configuration space', a life-form that -pecking-order-based at this time, is operationally more related to its 'time-stuck ancestors' (example -*e) than to some H cogitans(*w)
capable of the heuristics intrinsic of 'sustainable resource use': simply put-
It is, more specifically and so far, the situation of 'an organism of evolving deliberative capability more or less circumstantially diasporating into an econiche of widely varying(*p), evolvingly intellectualizable,
life-supporting conditions' -a mankind of 'individuals, peoples and nations' eventually, in which various of those principals have come to 'advantage' themselves at the expense of others without consideration of either the sustainability of such advantage or its impacts upon the whole -a matter, in other words, of mankind's 'only thus-far intellectual evolution'.
Following next is a progression which takes us from 'the appearance of a new life-form' in general, into 'the nature of sustainable resource use' as inevitably to be determined by mankind, the only principal of the phrase's definition and
meaning.
2 - Warm-blooded animal viability is a function of (among other things) (i) 'congregational sexuality', and (ii) 'cerebration in relationals' which is a rate-limited(*z)
property that effectively 'subspeciates' an organism by fact of differences of capability in interactions with the resource/environment -'pecking order (next), and generic cooperation and democracy' therein (below). 3 - Pecking order is an evolved, genetically-based property of warm-blooded vertebrates which is generally identifiable by
[To one degree or another, in other words, one (thus-far) pecking-order-based human 'succeeds' with respect to another -'deliberate least effort overall', by doing whatever he can to increase, or at least maintain, his 'well-being, lifestyle and
quality of life' by cooperation 'as necessary' and manipulation 'as practical' (more below).]
4 - Deliberative capability facilitates successively 'higher-order, more efficient use' of the resource/environment than that possible by 'lesser, merely cerebrating organisms' in general -'pecking-order-based
expression'(*q) an additional consequence -'aristocracy' expediting and smearing diasporation into econiche saturation and 'corrupting' classical dynamic stability(*y).
5 - Institutionalized 'aristocracy' diasporating (then), 'a world aristocracy of autonomous peoples and nations' is a natural, successively higher-order consequence of widely-varying resource/environments -peoples and
nations effectively subspeciated (scroll down -*q) by environment, culture, knowledge, government, economy, 'quality of life' et cetera.
[The substance of life at this diasporating/saturating stage remains fundamentally 'organic, quotidial and pecking-order-based' thruout the world however -the food, shelter and companionship of the primitive hominid's 24-hour-day -and the
value-based expression(*q) of 'success' and idle-mind time-and-occupation -implications and consequences of which (beyond that time) remain of 'thus-far existential disinterest and
intellectual inaccessibility'.]
6 - The whole of the above ('the human phenomenon and things human') exists out of a certain predictability and routine(*v). There is, therefore, a momentum to it which propagates
'pecking-order-based use' into 'continuing perturbation of classical saturation and dynamic stability' -except as more or less deliberatively modified by knowledge and capability.
[In one sense or another then, 'the human phenomenon and things human' is 'a machine of daily-routines-and-momentum that goes by itself', routines that are NOT easy to change -the gigantic momentum, therefore, of over 6 billion people and their
various hierarchies 'inadvertently overpopulating(*m) and degrading potential use of the resource/environment-whole'.
"Do we need all these people? If they didn't exist, would we have the problems we do?" -The certainty is that some H cogitans(*w) of the future will still be spread over the earth, but in far, far fewer
numbers of significantly more efficient consolidation -the 'economic growth' of civilization today -buildings, roads, institutions, government et cetera, all superfluous, extraneous and wasted out of the 'best
well-being and viability' of that life-form.]
['Dynamic stability and sustainable resource use' of some kind is inevitable even if only by 'eating our way into it like T rex -against the wall by saturation'. Be that what it be, likely here is that the momentum
of largely unmanipulable, currently existing 'knowledge, disposition and operation' will propagate continuing overpopulation into various breakdowns of the resource/environment, economics and 'organized society' in general
-except insofar as related sciences intrude upon the constitution of government and its economic policies.]
8 - The intellectual and operational dispositions of humans today are such -and institutionalized as such (above), that except for offsetting influence upon goverment by related science, there appears to be no way to prevent 'hitting the
wall of carrying capacity' in classical evolutionary processs of life-forms 'primitive man and earlier'.
(*h) -Thus we know that -State of the Planet et cetera- What is the probability that any one individual, people or nation of the world will -between today and 2050, subject his or its 'lifestyle and quality of life' (or 'endeavor for improvement' thereof) to some 'questionably determined attrition optimizing best viability of the human life-form'? -however 'properly heuristic'? -What is the probability that the intellectual and operational dispositions of children and teen-agers today will bring them to reconstitute government and 'the nature of well-being and quality of life' in favor of 'what the system can bear'? -Those probabilities are low; the probability of continuing momentum , on the other hand, is high.
Probabilities
2040-50 |
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First posted: June 17, 1999; Last modified March 1, 2006
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19 (*o) The Ontogeny of Sustainable Resource Use 'Life style and the quality of life' (today, ~2003) is manifest out of (a) warm-blooded-vertebrate pecking-order, (b) diasporative exploitation of natural resources and (c) 'cheap labor' proliferating out of that. The pecking-order basis of life-style-and-quality therefore, cannot but 'vestigialize' under deliberative capability, genetic-imperative-driven viability and 'econiche' carrying capacity. 1 - Genetic imperative commits all organisms to 'remain viable as long as possible' -viability generally evolutionary in nature then, and manifest as an organism-whole 'well-being' in ('dynamic stability' below) a resource/environment of essentially constant organism-fundamental requirements. 2 - 'Warm-blooded vertebrate' natural selection is determined in addition by cerebrative capability and its concomitant of pecking order -early man's 'best well-being' therein -'pecking-order-based expression' eventually following further evolution (-see The System of Human Experience). 3 - 'New-organism-in-econiche evolution' is generally manifest in three inhabitational stages of population 'mass' affecting the resource/environment: 'invasive' diasporation, 'overshoot' saturation and 'envelope' dynamic stabilization under 'econiche carrying-capacity' (-see The Unemployability Conjecture).
4 - There are (therefore) three domains of related human energy expenditure: (a) 'diasporatively cheap natural resources and labor', (b) 'saturatively depleting natural resources and unsupportable labor' (effective over-population)
and (c) 'sustainable resource use by a stable population'
5 - There are (further) two domains of energy expenditure attaching one's 'expression of life-style-and-quality' (human well-being and 'survival of the fittest' therein): (a) the passive material/substance out of which expression is
optable ('registered experience' included therefore) and (b) the active expenditure ('work'/employment in general) thru which 'earning' is (intended) to 'assure' both (i) the physically-optable existence of passive material and (ii)
time to opt expression
(-complete discussion in Energy and The Nature and Use of The Resource\Environment). 6 - 'As diasporative viability evolves towards stable' (then) -and depending upon how it approaches and 'dwells' in saturation, (a) 'active-expenditure buying power from earning diminishes with diminishing cheap natural resources and labor' and (b -necessarily favoring viability) 'pecking-order-based life-style-and-quality' also diminishes (consequently) under diminishing 'pecking-order-based passive material maintainablilty and time for expression'.
7 - 'Genetic imperative' commits us (consequently) -'deliberation evolving', to deliberatively evolving a life-form viability of correspondingly reliable organism-fundamental requirements (1, above)
-to, in other words, deliberatively vestigializing pecking-order expression in favor of 'sustainable resource use for best continuing viability of organism life-form' -Dirigiste Heurism and The Base-Domain of Human Requirements therein. Whereas 'primitive genetic imperative' drives us merely to reproduce, deliberative capability (genetic imperative) drives us, further, to deliberate our viability as a continuing life-form -pecking-order implicitly superceded therein. 20 *l - A Note on Economic Growth A common phrase, in this respect, is 'economic growth' -that, in particular, 'The economy has to grow'. This is important because the definition of the phrase -and its intellectual and institutionalized pursuit in particular by once all first-world nations, has brought the world to what economic situations are described in the parent essay.
Following next are definitions of 'economic growth' and 'wealth' kernel to that; following that is a short commentary by an economics professor. Especially remarkable here -falling out the bottom, is that 'economic growth'
measures itself with 'relative disconsideration of pejorative affects upon the configuration space'; worse still then, it more or less casually or blindly includes in this sui generis 'good', the consequences of overpopulation. -Or to put it in an
absolutely perverse way: 'Overpopulation may not be good for the resource/environment, but it makes for good economic growth'.
21 a short view from the inside The typical definition of economic growth is rising GDP, and the typical definition of economic development is rising GDP per capita.
However, when asked, most economists admit that GDP is a terrible measure of an economy's production of economic goods and services, let alone wealth, because:
Many efforts have been made to adjust the GDP to better measure economic output; probably the best is the GPI (Genuine Progress Indicator) that is put out by Redefining Progress, a San Francisco-based group
committed to debunking not just GDP, but any "icon" that serves as a general proxy for progress.
When pressed, most economists admit that GDP tells us very little about how well off people are. However, most economists, relying on ceteris paribus and the old reliable assumption "More Is Better", nevertheless argue that a rising GDP indicates
improvement in the economy and improvement in peoples' well being. This, of course, is nonsense. >>>
Even aside from environmental degradation, there is ample research suggesting that, beyond a very modest income, happiness and satisfaction depend far more on relative income and other factors than on GDP. For example, while average U.S. real income has
more than tripled in the past 50 years, average "life satisfaction" is unchanged.
[An aside: IMO, the ability of the Bush 43 Administration to scare the hell out of people over not just terrorism, but even over health care ("Kerry's plan is a government takeover of health care.") suggests that one of the costs of our rising GDP
has been a rise in paranoia. I think part of it is the result of globalization and peoples' fear of employment insecurity, but I think it is also related to the decline in community and extended family that have accompanied the maturation of our consumer
culture. Juliet Schor and Robert Frank are economists who have done some good work in this area.]
Ecological economists led by Herman Daly are highly critical of the mainstream "neoclassical" claim that higher GDP generally indicates higher economic wealth. Daly, following Kenneth Boulding, argues that a rising GDP as we measure it in the U.S.
indicates a rise in "throughput"; that is, an increase in the volume of materials and energy extracted from the earth. It doesn't take a Ph.D. in physics or ecology to realize that these additional materials must eventually return to earth as residuals
from the economy. Viewed in this light, a rising GDP probably measures reductions in future economic wealth as well or better than it measures increases in current economic wealth.
In short, the encyclopedia is simply wrong. The standard definition of economic growth, a rising GDP, fails even to indicate greater production of material goods, let alone a greater level of economic wealth. All it indicates is that the stuff that it
measures is going up. It does not accurately measure increases in economic output; it does not account for ecosystem degradation, and it certainly does not indicate an increase in economic wealth. 22 (*s) A note on 'The World Democracy of Ignorantly Autonomous Peoples and Nations Classical evolutionary process is fundamentally mechanistic -the introduction and evolution of organisms in an econiche identifiable and defined by (evolving) natural selection uninfluenced by deliberative capability. Because organisms of such an econiche are unable to influence that process in anything of a 'deliberative' way, it is 'an econiche of ignorantly autonomous peoples and nations' even to the inclusion of 'merely cerebrating organisms as happen to be influencing and influenced' by pecking order. The definition remains, in other words, as long as some organism -'deliberating mankind', for example, does not somehow offset or preempt the mechanistic pecking order enclaused the definition. 'The evolution and progression of mankind' however, because it is that of 'an organism of eventually/now deliberative capability', has also so far been 'the evolution and progression of ignorantly autonomous peoples and nations' -each, 'an evolving organism of discrete cultural genome under econiche/democracy natural selection'. Given the nature of such 'natural selection under pecking order' then, the role of each of the 'autonomous peoples and nations' in its, whole-earth/econiche dynamics depends upon the evolution of 'a new kind of natural selection', one that depends almost entirely upon (a) the sophistication of a people or nation -purely intellectual, therefore purely scientific, and (b) the nature of its sub-econiche 'sphere of influence' for how that sophistication -or poverty of it, and the 'substance' of that sub-econiche/ operate within the whole.
The implications are clear and unambiguous: 23 (*n) A Note on The Nature and Definition of Aristocratic Power (work in progress -still) *z A Note on Rate Limitation and Sustainable Resource Use We are rate-limited organisms in a rate-Iimited universe. The momentum inherent 'the human phenomenon and things human' then, is, more properly, one of complexing subroutines and submoments -and 'sustainable resource use' then, depends upon knowing what the dynamics of the system-whole are as a function of time and 'manipulating' them accordingly -heuristic process thruout, thus the deeper the complexity of that phenomenon and things, the greater in time the 'black box distance' between (a) 'knowledge of best direction heuristically evolving at the top' and (b) its 'heuristic evaluation of consequences developing out of the bottom' -'a world democracy of ignorantly autonomous peoples and nations being manipulated or driven to unlearn bad habits and dispositions to what good ones under what authority by whom'. *w - A Note on H cogitans
There are two arenas of consideration regarding 'the human organism in its and the earth's co-evolution':
A conceipt then, H cogitans distinguishes 'continuously thinking and learning man' from H sapiens, 'arrogantly knowing man'. Existentialism, in this writer's view, is not so much 'a complex, philosophical ideation' as a reification of 'the circumstantial, merely cerebrative modus vivendi of thus-far humankind', thus -reductively, it is the here-and-now-ness of what life routinely and briefly appears to be -here-and-now-ness of 'me and mine' existence and welfare and NOT some 'nature and course of human evolution and progression' -nothing deep -'the human condition'. |
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*p - re: "peoples and nations effectively subspeciated by 'knowledge', culture, government, economy and 'quality of life'": (also SCROLL DOWN)
March 2, 2001 Science Magazine, Vol 291, Issue 5509, 1722-1725 |
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June 9, 2004 National Geographic Magazine
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Science Magazine VOL 304 25 JUNE 2004 Documenting the Bushmeat Trade's Toll Many conservationists consider rampant commercial hunting for bushmeat one of the biggest threats to Africa's apes, forest antelope, and other species (Science, 11 Apri12003, p. 232). This site from the Bushmeat Crisis Task Force pushes an agenda, but it also offers abundant background information for researchers interested in the problem. Bibliographies list more than 300 technical books and papers, nearly 150 reports, and 800-plus news articles, many ", available online. For example, you can read a recent report on measures some logging and mining companies have taken to reduce bush meat trade on their land. You'll also find synopses of bush meat research projects in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. |
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August 7, 2004 The Economist Magazine South Asia's floods In all the wrong places DELHI AND DHAKA Human intervention could do much to mitigate the monsoon's annual tyranny
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