We already live beyond our means, right now. Any attempts to distract from the need that we must change that, by arguing that we just need to refine our harvesting methods, is pointless. It would only be making sense if we were living in a state of balance at the time of that statement, but we don't. Sweet water is becoming so short that military all over the world, including the Pentagon, play wargames and set up plans for waging war - not over oil, but sweet water. The oceans are overfished already. Desertification on land speeds up rapidly. We need an economic principle of "Nachhaltigkeit" (sustainability) getting implemented, but what we see everywhere is aiming at maximum profit in the shortest ammount of time by exploiting resources to possible maximums.

It is unreasonable to assume that all of a sudden economic harvesting of earth'S ressources will be stopped, that growth will not continue as more and more people make a demand to live in the same material conditions like Eurpeans and Americans, that there will be given a moratorium to the planet in which we harvest even less than what would be sustainable, so that the planet can recover, and just after that we would increase economic growth to the level of enduring sustainability. The examples of carmakers, energy companies and oil companies show that progress gets prevented and hindered massively to protect short-termed profit interests, and not before the damage already is done and is FUBAR, claims are made that now one wants to focus on new energy, alternative car engines etc. what is happening right now, is blind actionism. The IPCC board some months ago admitted that their studies have one major flaw even in their already pessimistic conclusions: it is too optimistic because they were basing on the assumption that from the date of publishing on all climate goals and procedures to reach them would get implemented immediately. They did not calculate the effects of what it will mean if growth rate and industrial harvesting continues at the rates that are to be expected with the growing population and the growing demand of the third world to get access to Western living style.

This madness of constant growth, unlimited growth, economic growth, always, always, always growth - that is not the remedy for our self-made desaster, it is the cause and origin of it. The complete traditional economy theory is a mess, and it has led us to where we are. The financial meltdown illustrated that the finacial dogma is a mess, too. Both need to be replaced, and I do not see that that is possible without mankind bleeding terribly at the time one starts thinking of that. the loss of life we already cause right now by our western life style may claim millions and millions already. but it is only the introduction for the things to come, and not before the agony has reached our own homelands, people will see a need to stop doing like they have done until then. and it is a reasonable estimation that then it will be too late, since long. Pain is the best teacher, but it may come too late.

Maybe it already is right now. What has been started by man has an autonomous dynamic, a swing-by-mass, that will not stop from one day to the other just becasue we switch off all coal powerplants, for example, or reduce the numbers of cars in general, and forbid fossil engines altogether. The proecesses you see right now in most scientific fields are expected to carry on for at least 50-100 years even if all input into the planet's systems caused by man would stop from one day to the other. Considering the massive revolutions of the conditions of the oceans over the past couple of decades it is reasonable to say that some of these processes may even run on for millenias from now on, with all the interactive consequences coming from that. We have accelearted the speed at which earth chnages naturall by factors in the four-digit range - and that acceleration you cannot explain with sun activity and climate macro-cycles, for earth history shows that such things take much longer time to take place .The question wether man has caused it or not, is of little moral value anymore anyway, although realising that we are responsible seem to be a precondition for us to stop acting foolishly and further speed up our civilisational suicide. payed sceptics will ignore it until hell freezes over, and even then try to relativise the new temperatures, but the correlations between when these effects started and the beginning of man's activities starting to contribute input into the global system, are massively, overwhelmingly, and stunning. The probability that a.)the simultaneity of these processes suddenly speeding up by factors of hundreds, sometimes thousands, and b.) man's spread and growing economic activity all over the planet, is by random chance only, and that it'S consequences are meaningless and nullified by sun activity and climatic macrocycles, tends to go towards zero.

Every action has reaction and what force you inflict, inevitably returns. Man's mind does not seem to be well-eqipped to understand this very fundamental lesson that is so very essential for survival, despite our clverness in using tools - an ability we only perfected becasue of the design of our hands. If we had no hands, our intelligence both in scale and nature would be a different one. You can't start messing around with a global biosphere and assume that it means no consequences feeding back on you. Clever economic theories that are not so much interested in realistic assessments but in producing excuses why to carry on with maximum exploitation at all cost - and often are also used to show what a clever dick the speaker is -, will not change that a bit. the state of our global civilisation and the state of this planet's biosphere show that these theories work towards our self-destruction and that of massive volumes of life on Earth. not becasue sun activity, and climatic macro-cycles this time - but because mankind is there.

We need to change. For Obama that is probably just a campaign slogan. For me it is the criterion that decides wether our evolutionary design will survive, or will face extinction. If we carry on like we do right now, we are doomed, we will first face civilisational agony on a planet we have bled to death, and then face the deletion of our design from the list of evolution's experiments. that alltogether may take another couple of centuries, but nevertheless it takes a lot of naivety to assume that colonizing of other planets and stellar exploration could ever become a realistic alternative within the closing time window that we are left with. and seeing what we did with this planet I doubt with determination that it is even wishable that we colonize other worlds.

there is no other hope than that we grow wise.

I'll put it this way: sometime just after 2050, we're going to have 10 billion people on this planet. This is not something we can actually stop or control, realistically speaking. Most of them will be living in dire poverty. Whatever the case, we are not going to stop consuming massive amounts of resources anytime soon. The desire for these resources will be intense, and the gaps between haves and have-nots will only be bigger. Now, I'm not worried about the resources running out, actually. They're not very likely to. The real threat comes not from the strain on the resources themselves, but the strain induced by competition for these resources. Even at 6.5 billion, we have really deadly tensions for resources at all levels - from local to global. With 10 billion people, these tensions will increase geometrically.

Rogue elements of humanity - the kind that'd kill a lot of people out of ideological belief - are a danger. But they're not nearly as much of a danger as the competition over resources, a drive to be like the wealthy elements in the world by an impoverished majority. This, like the population growth, you cannot realistically stop. Combined, these two factors are going to be a serious strain on the modern world, which is pretty much an illusion by now anyway. What the post-modern world will really look like a few decades on is anyone's guess.

You know, if you have ever played "Age of Empires" from Microsoft it is easy to understand how it all goes:

You start with two citizens and a vast amount of resources,

you create more population to collect more resources, and your empire grows,

new technology becomes available and helps you deplet resources faster and also make a better use of them,

but then inevitably there comes a moment when you must fight with the neighbour for those resources that become scarce

And how does the end look like? Well, anybody who has played the game to the end succesfully has been able to see his citizens standing still near a depleted forest, a depleted gold and a depleted iron mine, the fishing ships all standing still in the harbour with no fishing left to go for.

Got the idea? Still not? Then get Age of Empires and play it for yourself.....:roll:

Regarding the financial system and the stellar and still growing debts of the US, as well as the deficitary life style of most European nations as well: there is another metaphor, Sim City.

Look what a great city I have build, and how lovely it looks, and so hugh buildings and so green parks, and so blue water, and so much satisfaction everywhere!

the only problem in this metaphor would be that you would have entered an unlimited money cheat at the very beginning, so that your credit counter shows $SIM 9999999999845463 even after having populated the whole map and every garden house is a skyscraper. you effectively have build it by completly ignoring the financial aspect of the game. In other wordS: you just constructed and planned. That is great fun, I did it myself that way. But in reality it simply leads to growing anger of those who have to pay for the money cheat with their real money, and anger turns into hate, and hate turns into aggression. Also, the system destabilises from within.

Or you have available a money cheat that only works once, and is limited. You start to build like crazy, you expand without taking care of sustainability of the resulting financial maintenance. Then the cheat-money is all gone, and all of a sudden you have to finance the system you created by what it creates in incomes, and you have huge red numbers only, and no more cheat-dollars to compensate for the flaws in what you have constructed, for your growth was rushed and the produced income does not cover the maintenance and future investement costs. Your town collpases, your debts grow, you see beauty turning into ugly, and things collapse and the whole place turns into rubble, with you not only not being able to maintain what is there, but being unable to build new, even needed things.

Cheating like this is banned on many game servers, I hear. It should be banned in real world economy and real world financial market and real world politics as well. Unfortunately, leaders often even get bonusses when cheating like this. Nobody kas less interest in changing the system than those who currently have profits to claim from it. After it became known that 70 billion of the 700 billion in state aid to US banks would be spend in paying top bankers bonusses for the mess they created, it became also known short time ago, that another 30 or 40 billion would be used - to pay dividends to shareholders this year.

No wonder that these people do not wish to chnage this cancer of a system, even if it consumes the whole economy and nation, even the whole globe.

Over here in the US we don't call it cheating, we call it a "Bailout".

Cheers!

The bailout the Democrats pushed into law...

I'm pretty sure there was more than just democrats involved. Especially considering Bush pretty much initiated it and, AFAIK, McCain has voiced support for it as well (if we map it onto the election, which is obviously what this is about). Wouldn't blame just one side here, especially at this stage in the election...

Nevertheless the main opposition to the bailout came from the Republicans.

Not to mention that the current finance minister is former chief of Golden Sacks and still has many buddies digging for gold in there. He helped to design the flaws that he now claims to repair - by allowing dozens of billions of tax dollars being payed as rewards to bankers who brought the global economy to the edge of an abyss, and feeding dividend-hungry shareholders. Strange priorities for using tax money. Now the tax payer has to pay private enterprise's dividends...?

And that the Taxpayers, regardless of party affiliation, will pay for... :shifty:

still the countries aren't unified the Human being can't prevent himself from messing around but the big danger of the globalization 's to erase the differences which are essential to a sane evolution . That's the whole Europe problem right now ..

Sorry for the late reply fish - I've skipped over this thread recently!!

When at primary school I developed a strong interest in history. Throughout high school/college, I developed that general interest into a more anthropological interest. I continued it at university when I was there, and now its tailed off in the workforce.

I found anthropology the most interesting, as to know where one is going it helps to know where one came from - and funnily enough, we still don't know our evolutionary course for certain, which makes looking at the past much more important :D :know: