[timbo]

Continuing study about the various aspects of peak oil and population overshoot inevitably leads me to the following conclusion.

Anyone who proposes continual growth is your enemy and the enemy of your children.

Its that simple.

[patience]

No doubt about it. The problem I see is that the whole world seems to have swallowed the growth pill, and will trample anyone who gets in the way of it. Like a buffalo stampede, huge and lethal. But they all live on oil and the money it generates. Not to worry! They will starve out, soon enough.

[Ferretlover]

"We have seen the enemy and it is us."

[Heineken]

Growthism is madness.

But we already knew that.

The question is, When does the rest of the world know it?

The answer is, When it is too late.

[canis_lupus]

Someone -- I don't know who -- said that growth for growth's sake is the ideology of the cancer cell.

[threadbear]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('canis_lupus', 'S')omeone -- I don't know who -- said that growth for growth's sake is the ideology of the cancer cell.

[IanC]

I completely agree. The problem is the mental gymnastics necessary to curb your appetites for more. This seems almost impossible. I'm intimately aware of how my consumption affects the planet, but I nevertheless, want stuff. Getting stuff just temporarily satisfies the urge until you want to upgrade your stuff to something better. May Peak Oiler's solution to "preparation" is to buy, buy, buy.

How do we break this cycle? It will probably be broken for us by increasing prices and scarcity.

-IanC

[Kristen]

It's the result of our culture.

[MrBill]

Unless you personally are prepared to curb your reproduction to zero, and die prematurely yourself, then you are the problem! In order to live we need to consume. There is no such thing as negative consumption at a personal level. You are your enemy. Bunch of hypocrits that want someone else to do the dying to save the planet. Have a nice weekend.

[alokin]

But you don't need to consume that much. Consumption could be in a sustainable level (however there is no "green" level of growth eternal growth is always unsustainable, if it's PV cells electric cars or whatever)
I personally don't like to have too much stuff, it's easy, stay away from the shops, but since PO I'm hoarding things like t-shirts, bed linen, fabric etc. and I have ten times more food in the house than before.
I never understood many parts of this growth. Maybe you have a car, why do you need electric windows, or an electric garage door opener? These are really things nobody needs and there is so much of stuff which really does not increase life-quality, like canned drinks (instead of buying beer in reusable bottles), or oil spray, the list is endless.

People didn't live bad let's say in the 60's. What would be if we would have preserved the life standard there and really increased energy efficiency, longevity and design of our daily products? What if we would have worked much harder on renewable energy?

There are so few inventions since then (apart from the renewable) that really gave us something - the internet and the PC and that's it, maybe better bicycle technology.

[FreakOil]

As I was reading that last post, someone behind me screamed, "By more, buy more! Money, money, money!"

[Scactha]

As a historian I want to offer the point that although it is the current state of mind the consumerist is a very recent man. We are
the result of the reprogramming needed for the industrial revolution to continue.

E.g. a typical industrialist looking for workers to his factory didn´t have problems finding people to employ. The problem was to make the worker to stay beyond his needed subsistence level. Enter Marx but lets leave that. In a nutshell, our ancestors didn´t work business hours. The concept didn´t exist. They worked "subsistence hours". The crux is to change the mentality and here lies the foundation of everyone on this boards thinking. The consumer man and the industry supporting him.

[drew]

A lot of what drives us is psychological in nature. Consumerism has a lot to do with maintaining high social status relative to one's peers. It all comes down to reproduction to a certain degree, although emotionally/intellectually most of us are unaware of this driver.

Women tend to seek men who are able to provide security and plenty for their offspring. Men seek social dominance in order to procure more desirable mates. In our society the display of material wealth is a tool (unless that wealth is based on credit card debt) to show high social status.

Unfortunately people are dimly unaware of these motivations and thus continue along on the consumerist treadmill.

In other societies such as the Yanamamo of Venezuela/ Brazil high social status is maintained by other factors such as the number of enemies a man has killed. In ethnographic studies it has been seen that even killing just one enemy has a marked difference in reproductive success. Generally speaking the more a man has killed the more wives and children he has.

Sorry for the women folk in this tribe, they are merely property for the most part.

We are in competition with one and other; we are just animals after all.

Therein lies the problem.

Drew

[Heineken]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('MrBill', 'U')nless you personally are prepared to curb your reproduction to zero, and die prematurely yourself, then you are the problem! In order to live we need to consume. There is no such thing as negative consumption at a personal level. You are your enemy. Bunch of hypocrites that want someone else to do the dying to save the planet. Have a nice weekend.

[bodigami]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('IanC', 'I') completely agree. The problem is the mental gymnastics necessary to curb your appetites for more. This seems almost impossible. I'm intimately aware of how my consumption affects the planet, but I nevertheless, want stuff. Getting stuff just temporarily satisfies the urge until you want to upgrade your stuff to something better. May Peak Oiler's solution to "preparation" is to buy, buy, buy.

How do we break this cycle? It will probably be broken for us by increasing prices and scarcity.

-IanC

[bodigami]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('MrBill', 'U')nless you personally are prepared to curb your reproduction to zero, and die prematurely yourself, then you are the problem! In order to live we need to consume. There is no such thing as negative consumption at a personal level. You are your enemy. Bunch of hypocrits that want someone else to do the dying to save the planet. Have a nice weekend.

[KingDavid]

i have no car, no cell phone, no wife, no kids, no compi (this is my fathers), no tv, no fat ........... . I have a bike and i eat (not a lot i'm a vegetarian, only eat what i kill myself). I'm leaving europe and will walk to jeruzalem or something. I got some money but in the end i will live on the kindness of others. So i won't last that long.
Enjoy speculating, have a nice weekend

[timbo]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('MrBill', '.').. In order to live we need to consume...

[mos6507]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('zensui', '
')But with 1 condition: if I'm a survivor of a die-off I will reproduce (altough with control, about 2).

[Tyler_JC]

And why would anyone want to reproduce with someone who was so careless with his life?

Life is a beautiful thing, negativity is your enemy, not "growth".

Rather than try to accomplish the impossible (STOP ALL GROWTH RIGHT NOW!!!) why not work towards making that growth more sustainable or at the very least less harmful?

I know that growth isn't going to go on forever but that's ok. We don't need it to.

Human population will be on the downward slope by the mid 20th century and human consumption per capita can stabilize at a high quality of life without destroying the planet if population is decreasing.

The Peak Oil Movement (such as it is) is useless if its members believe all hope is lost and that we're all going to die tomorrow.

How exactly are we going to get policies changed to reduce our impact on the planet and promote sustainable development. Forget policy changes, why make personal changes if everything is pointless.

I just can't understand doomer mentality. Why do y'all keep posting? Is life just a bleak death spiral punctuated by the occasional clever post on Peakoil.com.

I really hope that's not what it has come to. But I read the posts of folks like zensui and it makes me wonder.