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sobriqueEvery now and then, I am engaged in a discussion about the future of the world. Things like recycling and energy efficiency come up.
Things like the intrinsic cruelty implicit in industrialised agriculture, and how actually a cow is actually quite expensive in terms of the food it consumes over it's lifespan.
And then we often get onto energy security - rates of consumption of oil. And how we should all be moving over to wind power, because that's basically free, and how 'people' like the idea of more, cheap and plentiful power, but don't like the idea of living near a powerstation.
But here's the problem. All these things seem rather a lot like ... well, frankly treating the symptoms, not the disease. Rearranging deck chairs on the titanic if you will.
You see, even if we did really well, and halved our waste levels overnight... that gives us a little under 50 years before we're back to square one, at the current rate of population growth. The disease, if you will, is humanity - geometric population growth of a greedy self centered mammals.
I mean, we're already at a point where there is just not enough farm land on the earth to support everyone in a fashion comparable to the 'average western lifestyle'.
Am I being a pessimist, or is it really the case that we're playing a game of global "chicken" with 6 billion participants?
Things like the intrinsic cruelty implicit in industrialised agriculture, and how actually a cow is actually quite expensive in terms of the food it consumes over it's lifespan.
And then we often get onto energy security - rates of consumption of oil. And how we should all be moving over to wind power, because that's basically free, and how 'people' like the idea of more, cheap and plentiful power, but don't like the idea of living near a powerstation.
But here's the problem. All these things seem rather a lot like ... well, frankly treating the symptoms, not the disease. Rearranging deck chairs on the titanic if you will.
You see, even if we did really well, and halved our waste levels overnight... that gives us a little under 50 years before we're back to square one, at the current rate of population growth. The disease, if you will, is humanity - geometric population growth of a greedy self centered mammals.
I mean, we're already at a point where there is just not enough farm land on the earth to support everyone in a fashion comparable to the 'average western lifestyle'.
Am I being a pessimist, or is it really the case that we're playing a game of global "chicken" with 6 billion participants?
