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



On 10 Dec 1996 21:38:54 GMT, jmc@Steam.stanford.edu (John McCarthy)
wrote:

>                                                 If they were
>separated, the cities would starve, the rest would have a big die-off
>but would survive and would then re-create cities in order to get the
>services cities supply.
>
>Is there some deeper issue that I am missing?
 
Perhaps a point of emphasis.  As a general proposition, when the two
are "separated" as by total upheaval during the Little Red Book perod
in China or the Siege of Leningrad what happens is not as you say
above.
 
It is quite the opposite: the cities suffer, but the countryside dies.
 
The countryside has almost no resources.  Most of those that it has
are just stuff lying around that has no value unless combined in the
ways cities do this.  In rural China somewhere between 20 and 36
million starved -- almost all of them in rural areas.  During the 900
days of Leningrad tens or hundreds of thousands starved, but most
lived: the city's peculiar resources consisted of a realistic demand
that people trek food across the lake to them.  Rural areas, being
resourceless, cannot make such demands, and indeed rural Russia was
depopulated during WWII.
 
It has always been this way.  Venice decided whether North Africa or
Carpathia, both bread baskets, should starve.  It was not the other
way around.
 
On the earlier point, Tamara is simply confusing coal with energy.
Coal and oil need to be treated for the energy to be extracted.  It
does not happen by accident or incident.  It happens through the
fundamental process of our civilization: the application of thought,
most of which goes on in cities.
 
This thinking is not some epiphenomenon of the food supply or the coal
supply.  It is the other way around.  People grow the food and find
the coal because of the thought, including trade, speculation,
discussion, record-keeping, and computing.
 
These are what make resources resources.
 

-dlj.
 




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