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Re: Yuri receives hypocrite of the week award (was Re: Ecological Economics and Entropy)



charles barber (cmbarber@cmbarber.easynet.fr) wrote:

: the world problem is over consumption, not over population. consider the
: following quote from "Preserving Wildness'  by Wendell Berry, the
: American writer, farmer, and ecologist

First, I'd like to ask how long ago were these lines written by Berry? 
Was it a while ago? Perhaps the circumstances changed since then?

Next, I'd like to suggest that, with all due respect, more than a whiff 
of paranoia is discernable in this theorizing of his. 

: ....There is great danger in the perception that 'there are too many
: people', whatever truth may be in it,

Yes, there're too many. 

: for this is a premise from which
: it is too likely that somebody, sooner or later, will proceed to a
: determination of who are the surplus. If we conclude that there are too
: many, it is hard to avoid the further conclusion that there are some we
: do not need. 

Yes, there're "some we do not need". Who are they? They are the people WHO
ARE NOT YET BORN! This is the key! The philosophy of our society should
change from pro-nativist -- the rule today -- to anti-nativist. We should
see that more births is BAD. Simple? Yes! 

: But how many do we need, and which ones?  Which ones, now
: apparently unnecessary, may turn out later to be indispensable? We do
: not know; it is part of our mystery, our wildness, that we do not know.

We know. I repeat: those who are not yet born are the problem. Let's keep
them from being born, especially those who otherwise will be born into the
conditions of extreme poverty. 

The following anti-technology vituperations of Mr. Berry are a useful 
critique. Yet I wonder what's the point of trying to stop the freight 
train by making a speech in front of it? Isn't it better to get aboard 
the technology train and try to control its momentum? I suggest that 
technology can be used equally to help nature as to hurt it. Technology 
doesn't have a brain of its own. We can and we should think about it 
and _give_ it a brain. An eco-brain!

Ecologically,

Yuri.

: I would argue that, at least for us in the United States, the conclusion
: that 'there are too many people' is premature, not because I know that
: there are not too many people, but because I do not think we are
: prepared to come to such a conclusion.  I grant that questions about
: population size need to be asked, but they are not the first questions
: that need to be asked.

: The 'population problem', initially, should be examined as a problem,
: not of quantity, but of pattern. Before we conclude that we have too
: many people, we must ask if we have people who are misused, people who
: are misplaced, or people who are abusing the places they have.  The
: facts of most immediate importance may be, not how many we are, but what
: we are and what we are doing.  At any rate the attempt to solve our
: problems by reducing our numbers may be a distraction from the
: overriding population statistic of our time: that one human with a
: nuclear bomb and the will to use it is 100 per cent too many. I would
: argue that it is not human fecundity that is overcrowding the world so
: much as technological multipliers of the power of individual humans. The
: worst disease of the world now is probably the ideology of technological
: heroism, according to which more and more people willingly cause large
: scale effects that they do not foresee and that they cannot control.
: This is the ideology of the professional class of the industrial nations
: - a class whose allegiance to communities and places has been dissolved
: by their economic motives and by their educations. These are people who
: will go anywhere and jeopardize anything in order to assure the success
: of their careers.

: We may or may not have room for more people, but it is certain that we
: do not have room for more technological heroics.  We do not need any
: more technological heroics.  we do not need any more thousand dollar
: solutions to ten dollar problems or million dollar solutions to thousand
: dollar problems - or multi billion dollar solutions where there was
: never a problem at all.  we have no way to compute the inhabitability of
: our places: we cannot weigh or measure the pleasures we take in them; we
: cannot say how many dollars domestic tranquillity is worth. And yet we
: must now learn to bear in mind the memory of communities destroyed,
: disfigured or made desolate by technological events, as well as the
: memory of families dispossessed, displaced, and impoverished by 'labour-
: saving' machines.  The issue of human obsolescence may be more urgent
: for us now than the issue of human population.

: ''
: cmb     
-- 
Yuri Kuchinsky          | "Where there is the Tree of Knowledge, there
------------------------| is always Paradise: so say the most ancient 
Toronto ... the Earth	| and the most modern serpents."  F. Nietzsche
-------- A WEBPAGE LIKE ANY OTHER: http://www.io.org/~yuku -----------



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