If I am digging a hole and I decide that I want to get out of it, I should stop digging it deeper. Whatever my options are, they are likely to be better if I stop digging the hole deeper. Doing nothing would be more likely to get me out of the hole than continuing to dig deeper.
If my friend Snik is also digging a hole next to me and he also decides that he wants to get out of the hole, he may continue digging. When I ask him why he is still digging the hole deeper if what he really wants is to get out of the hole, he may tell me: "At least I'm doing something."
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With respect to the addiction analogy, as I recall, President Bush used the term "addiction" to describe our dependence on oil. If even he's using this analogy, there must be some value in it for purposes of describing our situation.
To the point about not having a vision of the future, that's silly. Merely having a fantastic vision of the future is meaningless if the conditions upon which the realization of the vision depends are not consistent with the physical laws of our habitat.
Hitler had a bold vision. So what?
My bold vision is that human beings will find a state of enlightenment to complement their remarkable reasoning and tool-making skills. That would be an amazing cultural/spiritual evolution there. People would begin saying "Wait a second, exponential population and economic growth in a finite world is impossible. We need to stop seeing these states as the ideal and start realizing that they represent a tremendous risk to our survival."
When you say "more energy is the answer", what is the last step in that process? What end is that strategy moving you toward? Is it just "live for today"? If it is, then that is actually a more coherent philosophy than trying to argue that the consumption oriented world we live in is somehow more than an aberrant evolutionary blip.
My point is that our civilization need not be a blip. There are sustainable ways for human beings to live. A very high quality of life can occur with vastly lower resource inputs than we are now using. But for some reason this vision is called doomer apocalyptic thinking. It's called defeatist. It's called stone age. Its opponents suggest that people who think this way would have trouble identifying something round as a wheel.
Sustainability is deeply distasteful to some people, and I don't know why. Perhaps it is because part of the sustainability paradigm involves an admission that mankind is not the king of the world, that we are not god-like, and when we try to be god-like bad things happen.
But no one wants to talk about LESS consumption, they want to talk about MORE energy. They want to talk about this lavish way of living as being "non-negotiable."
I consider "vision" to be the ability to look past tomorrow and the next day and to be able to make tough-minded cause and effect connections between our actions and their consequences.
Maybe to some people "vision" just means finding a rationale for doing what they wanted to do in the first place.
PeakOil is You
Lifting the Ban on Off-shore Drilling:The Facts
Re: Lifting the Ban on Off-shore Drilling:The Facts
by MonteQuest » Thu 26 Jun 2008, 18:05:58
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Snik', ' ')We cannot simply stop using fossil fuels without completely, and utterly destroying our way of life, not to mention causing billions of untimely deaths by starvation, exposure to the elements, disease, etc.
But our way of life is unsustainable using any energy source.
Untimely deaths? Populations in overshoot die-off because it is their time to so so.
It's the way the world works.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I') know that is what you believe is going to happen anyway, but as far as I am concerned I would just as soon put that off for as long as possible, just in case we can find a way out that is not as draconian as intentionally depriving people of medical care when they are ill, or allowing millions at a time starve to death so we can reduce our population to a sustainable level.
I'm just not ready to give up quite yet.
What? Like Carousel?
No, I believe it is more like this:
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Montequest', 'S')o, here we are in overshoot. We are living beyond our means. We spent our “bag of money” on toys and a phantom lifestyle that we don’t want to give up. We are insistent that giving up our toys, our lifestyle and our huge family is not an option. We won’t cut up the credit cards, nor powerdown our lifestyle.
We want a fix. We want something that keeps this phantom going...at all costs.
We foolishly believe that renewables will allow us to do so, while ignoring the writing on the wall from deforestation, loss of biodiversity, fisheries collapse, and global climate change.
We don’t want to submit to nature’s population correction. We wish to avoid that.
We are dreaming, while at the same time making matters worse with talk of electric cars and other techno-fixes to perpetuate an unsustainable lifestyle…a pure construct of overshoot via fossil fuels.
We want to focus on short-term, short-sighted, selfish solutions that allows us, (those living right now) to avoid bankruptcy, with no lasting solutions for those generations to follow. We need to stop this “solutions obsession” and focus on our options, instead.
A Saudi saying, "My father rode a camel. I drive a car. My son flies a jet-plane. His son will ride a camel."
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Re: Lifting the Ban on Off-shore Drilling:The Facts
by Snik » Thu 26 Jun 2008, 19:04:37
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Re: Lifting the Ban on Off-shore Drilling:The Facts
by MrBean » Thu 26 Jun 2008, 19:19:49
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Snik', 'W')ithout ideas and vision, we would still be hunter/gatherers dying at age 30, and wondering why round things roll.
Hunter/gatherers had and have visions and even special social function for especially talented visionaries - shamanhood.
That's why they they live or lived or would live if industrial society would let them full satisfied lives. Because they had visions beyond their nose, beyond the most short sighted greed, visions seven and more generations ahead and where not, instructing them how to behave in order not to disrupt the natural balance that would give their future generations fair chance to live a full satisfied life.
We have very little to teach "primitive" peoples and not really anything of any real value, but a world to learn.
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