Industrial Society Destroys Mind and Environment

[kenneal - lagger]

The question you are asking there, Steve, could apply to Hispaniola with Haiti in one half and the Dominican Republic in the other. Haitians have impoverished themselves and their environment while Dominicans have enriched themselves and their environment, OK, they just haven't destroyed it. The Dominicans have enriched themselves through tourism ironically because of the unspoilt beauty of their half of the island.

Going back a bit, there are a number of chemicals besides GW and CC causing chemicals that are wrecking havoc with the environment. The large scale deposition of plastics with their oestrogen mimicking capabilities, in the sea especially, are causing large scale gender change not only in fish but its starting to show in humans too.

The Easter Islanders could have lived for far longer on their island if they hadn't gone in for industrial scale statue building. It was this that was thought to have been the death knell for their trees as they were used for rolling the giant statues around the island and were destroyed in the process. It was their industry that did for them so, perhaps, we should learn from that.

[Little John]

The question you are asking there, Steve, could apply to Hispaniola with Haiti in one half and the Dominican Republic in the other. Haitians have impoverished themselves and their environment while Dominicans have enriched themselves and their environment, OK, they just haven't destroyed it. The Dominicans have enriched themselves through tourism ironically because of the unspoilt beauty of their half of the island.

Going back a bit, there are a number of chemicals besides GW and CC causing chemicals that are wrecking havoc with the environment. The large scale deposition of plastics with their oestrogen mimicking capabilities, in the sea especially, are causing large scale gender change not only in fish but its starting to show in humans too.

The Easter Islanders could have lived for far longer on their island if they hadn't gone in for industrial scale statue building. It was this that was thought to have been the death knell for their trees as they were used for rolling the giant statues around the island and were destroyed in the process. It was their industry that did for them so, perhaps, we should learn from that.

Regarding the use of trees for rolling the statues around the island, you're quite right, that did sound the final death knell for the remaining trees. However, the latest research that I have read shows that the denuding of the island of trees began very soon after the islanders initially settled on the island. Indeed, the erection of the statues, fairly late-on in the life of the Easter island society, may well have been a cultural response to what the islanders recognised as the ongoing deterioration of their environment. A kind of last, desperate appeal to the Gods, if you like. Thus, whilst the erection of the statues led to a final acceleration of the ecological collapse of the island's eco-system, that collapse began much earlier.

The erection of the statues merely finished the islanders off. The central problem is that their sheer number, given the closed eco-system they inhabited, was too high for the carrying capacity of that closed system. We can say this now with the benefit of hindsight of course. I must confess, though, I sometimes look at the wind farms, solar farms and all the rest being currently hastily erected on the edges of our industrial civilisations and fancy I can see something of the Easter island statues about them, at least in terms of their futility in the face of the real problem we face. The same problem the islanders faced, but chose not to address.

It seems to be the folly of humans that we are unable to learn from our mistakes, only from our successes.

[kenneal - lagger]

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It seems to be the folly of humans that we are unable to learn from our mistakes, only from our successes.

That's certainly true when it comes to nationalisation!! And it wasn't a success last time around.

[sushil_yadav]

Inhabitants of the tiny Easter Island might have destroyed their small forest for some reason but there is just no comparison with the Forest Cover destroyed by Industrial Society.

Industrial Society has destroyed forests of the entire planet.....Industrial Society has destroyed billions of acres of forests all over the world for furniture, paper, wrappers and packaging, Golf Courses, Sports Stadiums, Ports, Airports, Towns and Cities and for all kinds of Industrial Activity......Mining Industry, Manufacturing Industry, Energy Generation Industry, Oil Drilling, Oil Refining, Construction Industry, Transportation Industry, Millions of kilometers of Rail and Road network.


This planet can only sustain "Food Searching" or "Food Producing" Societies.

Hunter_Gatherer Society was sustainable.....Agrarian Society was sustainable.....The question of Industrial Society being sustainable doesn't arise.

We cannot save environment by destroying more of it.....We cannot save environment by destroying it for thousands of consumer goods and services in addition to food, clothing and shelter.


Industrial Machines and Technology have led to massive destruction of biodiversity and ecosystems on earth.

In the absence of Industrial Machines and Technology only limited destruction of nature was possible.

This planet would have been in very fine condition today if Industrialization had not happened.

Industrialization was the biggest crime on earth....The biggest act of killing, murder and terrorism on earth.



Industrial Society Destroys Mind and Environment

[kenneal - lagger]

Sushil, when you live on an island which is, to all intents and purposes, your whole world and you destroy every single last one of your trees, you destroy your world. This is what happened to the Easter Islanders: they suffered a catastrophic collapse in numbers and also in quality of life.

This is very relevant to the world situation as this is what will happen to us very soon if we carry on as we are. We should all be learning from history but we aren't. Your inability to learn from this lesson is symptomatic of the whole industrial culture that you so abhor. If you can't see the lesson in it, how are we going to teach others with a less sympathetic mindset?

[RenewableCandy]

Hydrocarbons and tractors etc don't actually enable much more in the way of productivity per acre, though, they only have a (albeit dramatic) effect on productivity per person.

What would be interesting to compare is two sets of islanders one of whom had a money system like ours, and the other of whom had invented a means of exchange and a store of value (these haven't always been the same thing) that don't rely on debt, and hence growth, in order to function.

I cheerfully call myself RenewableCandy on this forum but even I realise that Renewables, like anything else, can't go on growing forever.

[Little John]

Hydrocarbons and tractors etc don't actually enable much more in the way of productivity per acre, though, they only have a (albeit dramatic) effect on productivity per person.

What would be interesting to compare is two sets of islanders one of whom had a money system like ours, and the other of whom had invented a means of exchange and a store of value (these haven't always been the same thing) that don't rely on debt, and hence growth, in order to function.

I cheerfully call myself RenewableCandy on this forum but even I realise that Renewables, like anything else, can't go on growing forever.

You are right RC, tractors don't produce more per acre. In fact, compared to highly manual-labour-intensive horticulture, tractors produce less per acre. However, given that they produce more per person, this means you need fewer people, in turn requiring less acreage to feed them. So, tractors and the like do, indirectly, mean less acreage needed for food production for a given population if we start from an assumption that a population would only rise to its capacity to feed itself. Thus, for the island analogy, this would mean their population could be smaller for a given level of food production than it would otherwise need to be. In the real world, of course, we know full-well that population almost always overshoots its capacity to feed itself and so food production is always playing catch-up.

As for the other uses of hydrocarbons in farming, the use of hydrocarbon-based fertilisers do, directly, reduce the amount of land needed to grow crops because they allow you to more intensively farm a given acreage. Without them, the land would become exhausted much sooner and so would need to be left fallow for much longer to recover. This, in turn, would require that more land be made available for farming overall, given a particular size of population.

[RenewableCandy]

...the use of hydrocarbon-based fertilisers do, directly, reduce the amount of land needed to grow crops because they allow you to more intensively farm a given acreage. Without them, the land would become exhausted much sooner and so would need to be left fallow for much longer to recover...

Now I have no direct evidence of this, having not yet had The Plot for enough years, but muck and vraic (readily available to islanders, by definition) are said to do a damn fine job of fertilising soil, and they don't run out. Yields can be 90-odd percent of the FF-enhanced yield, and this can go on forever.

The "greenest" use for hydrocarbons, if you ask me, is for cooking. They burn cleanly, are less likely to cause illness than solid fuels, and enable more food to be eaten, by more people, at a wider variety of times (cooked food keeps better than raw, and is usually more digestible). All the other uses of hydrocarbons in food-production require a lot of metalware (tractors etc), the cost/benefit of the 2 alternatives we're imagining probably hinges on whether that is done on the island, or whether the said tractors are imported (for example from the USA, or the USSR )

[Little John]

...the use of hydrocarbon-based fertilisers do, directly, reduce the amount of land needed to grow crops because they allow you to more intensively farm a given acreage. Without them, the land would become exhausted much sooner and so would need to be left fallow for much longer to recover...

Now I have no direct evidence of this, having not yet had The Plot for enough years, but muck and vraic (readily available to islanders, by definition) are said to do a damn fine job of fertilising soil, and they don't run out. Yields can be 90-odd percent of the FF-enhanced yield, and this can go on forever.

The "greenest" use for hydrocarbons, if you ask me, is for cooking. They burn cleanly, are less likely to cause illness than solid fuels, and enable more food to be eaten, by more people, at a wider variety of times (cooked food keeps better than raw, and is usually more digestible). All the other uses of hydrocarbons in food-production require a lot of metalware (tractors etc), the cost/benefit of the 2 alternatives we're imagining probably hinges on whether that is done on the island, or whether the said tractors are imported (for example from the USA, or the USSR )

Oh no, I'm not suggesting that hydrocarbons somehow make the soil, more fertile, or at least, not in any kind of sustainable way. In fact, by definition, hydrocarbon fertilisation is not sustainable. The point I am getting at is that hydrocarbons, both in the form of machinery use and also in the form of fertilizers, allow more food to be grown over a smaller area, per person, than non hydrocarbon fertilizer use. If we were to try to get the same yield per person per acre from human power, it would probably not be possible and, even if it were, without extra fertilizer inputs from hydrocarbons, the land would be exhausted in no time flat.

Of course, if we are prepared to have more labour intensive farming that produces less yield per person per acre, then the land will fare far better over the longer term.

It just won't feed 7 billion though.

[kenneal - lagger]

Hydrocarbons allow the majority of the population to live a long way away from their food production. If we didn't have hydrocarbons, or another energy dense fuel, the majority of the population would have to live much nearer to the place of production. They would also have to be partaking in that production rather than in the production of extraneous STUFF.

In the west the industrial revolution drew people into towns where they could earn more money at a time when the mechanisation of farming was making farm labourers redundant. In the Third world, where farmers by and large work there own land or tribal land, globalisation and the sale of subsidised Western food is being used as a tool to drive people off the land, where they are usually self sufficient, into towns where they become consumers and add to growth.

Hydrocarbons allow a much greater area to be used for the production of food because 30% or 40% of the land doesn't have to be used for the production of fodder crops for the horse power needed to run the agricultural and food distribution systems. That extra food has allowed for an expansion of the population. We probably have a greater absolute population living in the country now than at any time in the past; the difference being that now they are unproductive and are also a very much smaller proportion of the overall population than in the past.

Hydrocarbons, in the form of artificial fertilizers, also allow for the non use of the humanure that they replace. Without hydrocarbons we would require a larger proportion of the population to live in the country to produce the fertilizer required for the soil. The carting of "night soil" from our current cities out to the market gardens which would supply them would not be possible on the current scale. It worked quite well in the past.

The difference between our agricultural production and that of Easter Island is that we, in Northern climes need to grow enough food in the summer to last us through the winter. In Easter island and the tropics in general they don't need to do this as they can crop throughout the year. This makes a big difference to the type of farming undertaken and the labour requirements for a concentrated autumnal harvest.


Edited once

[sushil_yadav]

We don't have to do research on Easter Island to learn that we should care for environment.

We are alive because of nature....We owe our very existence to nature.....For millions of years on earth life has sustained because of animals, trees, air, water and fertile soil.

It is so obvious that we should not destroy the things that sustain life on earth....It is plain common sense.

When the European invaders were ruthlessly destroying the natural resources of America , Chief Seattle of the Indian Tribe had warned about the consequences of loot, plunder and exploitation :

"only after the last tree has been cut down....only after the last river has been poisoned.....only after the last fish has been caught.....only then will you realize that you cannot eat money"

He did not do research on Easter Island to know this truth....He knew it from common sense.

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Research is an unnecessary creation of Industrial Society which is making people more and more crazy.

Before industrialization almost the entire population was engaged in production of food [ hardly 1 - 2 % of population was not producing food]....In Industrial Society 50% of world population is producing food for entire population ......The remaining 50% population has created thousands of unnecessary and destructive professions to keep itself occupied.....Research is one such profession.....Millions of people are doing unnecessary research on thousands of topics.

Women feel sexiest at age 28.....Money makes you happy....Money doesn't make you happy.....10 million dollars is needed for happiness, beyond that it doesn't matter.....Alcohol is good for you....Alcohol is bad for you....Alcohol in moderation is good for you....Office gossip can harm you.....How Titanic sank....Why Titanic sank.

Millions of people are doing unnecessary research which is making Industrial Society more and more insane, day by day, moment by moment.

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It is very unwise to seek a solution after creating the problem......If you don't create the problem the solution happens automatically.

A pure non-industrial society is not possible now because Industrialization has increased world population to 7 billion.

If we want to save the remaining environment we must minimize the things that are destroying environment.

Man is not the only inhabitant of earth...This planet is home to millions of other species which destroy environment only for food....Human species is the only species which is destroying environment for Food, Clothing, Shelter plus thousands of consumer goods and services.

We must eliminate the things that were added last to the list......which means Thousands of consumer goods and services, most of which have existed for only about 100 years out of Hundreds of Thousands of years of Total Human Existence on earth .........these have to be eliminated.

The maximum that can / should be allowed to humans is food, clothing and shelter.

Human work must be primarily limited to Food, Clothing and Shelter......And even in these three fields production and consumption must be kept to the minimum.

[kenneal - lagger]

I going to stop watching this topic.

[sushil_yadav]

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When there was still time to save environment a whole century was wasted in the futile debate over Capitalism, Socialism and Communism.

Trying to save environment after 250 years of relentless Industrial Activity is like trying to revive a dead man.....There is hardly any environment left to save.

Industrial Activity destroys environment.....Where there is Industrial Activity there is environmental destruction.....Capitalism, Communism or Socialism doesn't matter at all.

Monsanto is not going to become less harmful under Communism or Socialism.

Nuclear Power Plants are not going to become less harmful under Communism or Socialism.

Mining Industry is not going to become less harmful under Communism or Socialism.

Logging Industry is not going to become less destructive under Communism or Socialism.

Construction Industry is not going to become less destructive under Communism or Socialism.

Transportation Industry is not going to become less harmful under Communism or Socialism.

Oil Drilling, Oil Refining, Tar Sands and Hydraulic Fracking are not going to become less destructive under Communism or Socialism.

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This planet can only sustain "Food Searching" or "Food Producing" Societies.....It cannot sustain an Industrial Society.

This planet can only sustain Hunter_Gatherer Society or Agrarian Society.....It cannot sustain an Industrial Society....It cannot sustain an Urban Society that produces thousands of consumer goods and services instead of food.

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[RenewableCandy]

B***er. This thread was just beginning to get interesting.

[sushil_yadav]

This is not a movie that is supposed to provide interesting entertainment to you.

This is about decimation of millions of species, destruction of biodiversity and ecosystems.

This is about the biggest act of insanity, abnormality and criminality......the biggest act of killing, murder and terrorism on earth.

This requires ability to feel guilt, remorse, pain, anguish, empathy and compassion, not a positive thinking attitude which keeps you moving on the wrong path forever.