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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: