4 ms·

All fair points, and "how well do you survive" - for me, if nature as we know it has gone, it would be a pretty shit survival. But I feel we might make more pr

by abraae 9y ago

All fair points, and "how well do you survive" - for me, if nature as we know it has gone, it would be a pretty shit survival. But I feel we might make more progress if we can tell people that they will be able to keep playing their video games, rather than have to fall back to some peasant existence where they till fields from dawn to dusk. Because we do have technology on our side, we will need to travel, and its impossible to imagine us living in anything other than a capitalist structure where people are still working, enjoying themselves, competing with others. Even if its competing for the best quarters within the biodome rather than the biggest beachfront house. I feel that talk of the death of "current ideologies and institutions" is probably scary to many, and (I don't know if you're suggesting this) starting from the point of having to stop all economic growth will alienate many.

crispinb 9y ago
I guess I'm just stating hard truths here, rather than trying to pitch to anyone. I don't know how I'd win anyone over. And in any case for other reasons, I suspect H.Sapiens overrunning the Earth's carrying capacity is probably a biological fait accompli. > (I don't know if you're suggesting this) starting from the point of having to stop all economic growth I sort of am, except that I put "economic growth" in scare quotes not as a childish jibe, but because I believe it is a fiction. The 'growth' is just a transfer of matter from living ecologies to dead technologies. A certain amount of that could clearly have been managed, but as (from most accounts) we're already roughly at 200-300% of the earth's carrying capacity, degrowth (ie. reducing matter transfer out of real complex ecologies so they can re-establish themselves) is now the only thing that could save us. And it won't happen, presumably.
- abraae 9y ago
  That's a fascinating concept, but I don't think all growth is of that sort (even if much of it is). Facebook as one example has seen enormous growth. Was it bad for the planet? (apart from the incalculable cost of being an attack vector against the more easily manipulated members of society, leading to an anti-environmental administration). Maybe not. Facebook users sit quietly, hunched over their phones, sipping small amounts of energy. Comparing them to someone who drives their 4WD for a hobby, they look good.
  - crispinb 9y ago
    You're right of course, and I would hardly claim to have a fully articulated theory. I'm fairly confident though of the minimal notion that aggregate "economic growth" (sorry, I need the scare quotes) is at the cost of entropy increase in evolved ecologies (another way of putting 'matter transfer from living to dead'). There was much talk in the 90s of decoupling economic growth from 'resource use' (sorry about the scare quotes again: I also think the term 'resource' masks a related myth). There were even individual companies that claimed to be getting there (eg. IIRC a carpet company that leased carpets to offices so they could control the whole lifespan?). But evolution has had millions of years to explore state spaces using recycling. Carpet companies notwithstanding, on a planetary scale I doubt we can do it any more efficiently than evolved systems do, without developing systems of comparable complexity. And we're clearly centuries (at least) away from being up to that, and we don't have centuries to play with.

by abraae 9y ago

crispinb 9y ago

I guess I'm just stating hard truths here, rather than trying to pitch to anyone. I don't know how I'd win anyone over. And in any case for other reasons, I suspect H.Sapiens overrunning the Earth's carrying capacity is probably a biological fait accompli. > (I don't know if you're suggesting this) starting from the point of having to stop all economic growth I sort of am, except that I put "economic growth" in scare quotes not as a childish jibe, but because I believe it is a fiction. The 'growth' is just a transfer of matter from living ecologies to dead technologies. A certain amount of that could clearly have been managed, but as (from most accounts) we're already roughly at 200-300% of the earth's carrying capacity, degrowth (ie. reducing matter transfer out of real complex ecologies so they can re-establish themselves) is now the only thing that could save us. And it won't happen, presumably.

abraae 9y ago
That's a fascinating concept, but I don't think all growth is of that sort (even if much of it is). Facebook as one example has seen enormous growth. Was it bad for the planet? (apart from the incalculable cost of being an attack vector against the more easily manipulated members of society, leading to an anti-environmental administration). Maybe not. Facebook users sit quietly, hunched over their phones, sipping small amounts of energy. Comparing them to someone who drives their 4WD for a hobby, they look good.
- crispinb 9y ago
  You're right of course, and I would hardly claim to have a fully articulated theory. I'm fairly confident though of the minimal notion that aggregate "economic growth" (sorry, I need the scare quotes) is at the cost of entropy increase in evolved ecologies (another way of putting 'matter transfer from living to dead'). There was much talk in the 90s of decoupling economic growth from 'resource use' (sorry about the scare quotes again: I also think the term 'resource' masks a related myth). There were even individual companies that claimed to be getting there (eg. IIRC a carpet company that leased carpets to offices so they could control the whole lifespan?). But evolution has had millions of years to explore state spaces using recycling. Carpet companies notwithstanding, on a planetary scale I doubt we can do it any more efficiently than evolved systems do, without developing systems of comparable complexity. And we're clearly centuries (at least) away from being up to that, and we don't have centuries to play with.