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Re: Responsible comments wanted on DRAFT essay
Jeffrey Ranalletta wrote:
>What do you suggest we do?
>
>Who should we condemn to starvation when "sustainable" agriculture fails
>to yield enough food to feed a hungry world?
>
>What forest and habitat acreage should we burn down in the meantime to
>make up for lost yield?
These questions must be asked in view of our present
"organizing prnciple", which is essentially Smith's
Invisible Hand.
Smith said that "laissez-faire" (let alone) economics
would allow selfish individuals to raise the wealth of
the working class automatically, as if by an "Invisible
Hand." The idea of laissez-faire economics is
described in a short passage from his Wealth of
Nations:
"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the
brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but
from their regard for their own self-interest. We
address ourselves not to their humanity but to their
self-love, and never talk to them of our own
necessities, but of their advantages. Nobody but a
beggar chooses to depend chiefly upon the
benevolence of his fellow citizens."
Our present organizing prnciple seeks to maximize
economic activity, which is equivalent to maximizing
resource depletion. Needless to say, this can have
only one outcome: crash and die-off.
So, what should we do? Change our organizing prnciple.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
I have an idea about HOW to do it at my web site:
http://csf.Colorado.EDU/authors/hanson/
Here Garrett Hardin informs us what our new organizing
principle should be:
"Animal lovers and professional biologists should be
able to agree on the ultimate goal of game management:
to minimize the aggregate suffering of animals. They
differ in their time horizons and in the focus of their
immediate attention. Biologists insist that time has no
stop and that we should seek to maximize the wellbeing
of the herd over an indefinite period of time. To do
that we must 'read the landscape,' looking for signs of
overexploitation of the environment by a population
that has grown beyond the carrying capacity.
"By contrast, the typical animal lover ignores the
landscape while focusing on individual animals. To
assert preemptive animal rights amounts to asserting
the sanctity of animal life, meaning each and every
individual life. Were an ecologist to use a similar
rhetoric he would speak of the 'sanctity of carrying
capacity.' By this he would mean that we must consider
the needs not only of the animals in front of us today
but also of unborn descendants reaching into the
indefinite future.
"Time has no stop, the world is finite, biological
reproduction is necessarily exponential: for these
combined reasons the sanctity strategy as pursued by
animal lovers in the long run saves fewer lives, and
these at a more miserable level of existence, than
does the capacity strategy pursued by ecologically
knowledgeable biologists."
I have over 60 files on various subjects at my web
site. Here is the table of contents:
http://csf.Colorado.EDU/authors/hanson/page1.htm
Give it a look.
Jay
References: