[extropy-chat] (no subject)

paul illich paul_illich at yahoo.com
Mon Oct 24 07:03:41 UTC 2005


Eugen wrote:

> One of Jared Diamond's cited causes of collapse is
> a climate change. We are not yet sufficiently decoupled 
> from the global ecology to make food from thin air.

So whilst one chunk of mankind scurries off that way to
learn how we can live in closer harmony with our natural
environment (at the same time using the increased
scientific understanding required to tame nature as
well), another lot runs off the other way seeking to
'decouple' our fate from the global ecology.

Self-sufficient O'Neils and other types of biosphere in
space might help, but short of leaving the planet surely
such 'decoupling' is a disaster? Either it makes us so
independent of the biosphere that we casually destroy
it cos you know who cares anyway (I do not believe this 
variety of decoupling can come about in the first place
without us getting definitively off-planet), or we 
continue to damage and make wild (through oversimplification
and industry imposed feedback synergies) tyhe environment
we have just as we are now - undecoupled, just pretending 
we are actually not dependent on the global ecology.

And why is being part of the global ecology such a bad 
thing anyhow? As we learn more and more of how it works,
we can live in closer harmony to its broad needs whilst
protecting ourselves, so long as such 'protection' includes
birth control etc... Whereas, decoupling denies us many
of the survival tools we might need if we hit a diversity
bottleneck, which, decoupled from a larger biosphere, we
surely would?

Paul




	
		
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