Quote:
Originally Posted by Ducimus
Human nature is to be concerned only about ones own prosperity. If it won't effect the individual directly, they typically will not care. The people in charge do not care about what might happen after they're dead.
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Yes. History shows that although natural tribes and primitive people also can destroy their environment and by that contribute to their own extic ntion, this does not seem to happen as often with communities that by geography are crunshed into a limited and relatively small space (a small island) with limited resources, where every individual is fully exposed to the attention-.taking of any other living in this community, and has everybody else in sight. By that people calculate what conseqeunces the other'S behavior has for himself, and the other way around. Often, this leads to self-maintaining resource-management, strict birth-control, and the formation of a leadership structure legitimised as long as it protects these essential needs, and gets kicked if it acts selfish. However, even such environments are no guarantee that the people lioving in them screw them.
An example for the above model working, is the small island of Tikopia, 5 km2 in size, and Tonga, 750 km2 in size, which both harboured stable local civilisation by humans for over 3000 years by running self-maintaining resource-management and strict birth control that was dersigned so that the population was kept stable. An example for the model failing, is the Easter Island.
Centralised, totalitarian social structures also are helpful in enforcing resource management and necessary but maybe unpopular measures. Helpful it is also when those making decisions and governing a society, cannot escape the negative conseqeunces of events hitting a society, no matter whether they are self-emerging or the result of policies.
An example for this is Japan. During the Tokugawa era and after the Shoguns practically had taken over the power over the united empire, precious woods were in danger to become rare due to the excessive use of wood in Japanese economy (woodfires in households) and house- and castle-building. The totalitarian power structure allowe dthe Shogun to enforce self-maintaining foreswt-management, if for no other reason to save his own wealth. Today, the Islands of Japan are still covered with woods and forest, they make up for roughly 70% of the natiopn's territory, and the forest management in Japan probably is the most efficient and self-maintaining in all the world, running an economic model that satisfies the demands of the economy as well as prfeserving the forests. The system is described to run in a better way than in Germany or America or Canada or Sweden.
7 billion people on this globe, climbing. This is madness, total madness. I estimate this globe can maintain just 1-1.5 billion at max, if you want the model surviving for longer than just a few generations. The most important answer to the needs of the future is birth control and population management, finding ways to drastically reduce global population levels all over the globe. If we fail to achieve that, then all other ways to tackle environment changes and shortening of resources necessarily will fail in the medium and long run. Reducing global population by 80% over the next 30-50 years must become an absolute top issue of politics. If we do not manage to acchieve this in a civilised way, then nature will - without caring for humane solutions and civilisational values.