Human consumption: Flying in the face of logic
Thanks to Carl Carlson for alerting me to this book review.
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In 1968, six years after Rachel Carson published Silent Spring – the book regarded as marking the beginning of modern environmental consciousness – a young American entomology professor at Stanford University, California, published The Population Bomb. The tenor of Paul Ehrlich’s book echoed the revolutionary sensibility and pervasive anxiety of the time. In it, Ehrlich and his wife, Anne, presented a neo-Malthusian scenario of imminent population explosion and ensuing disaster. “The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” the Ehrlichs warned. “In the 1970s and 1980s, hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programmes embarked upon now. At this late date, nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate…”
For full article, visit:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/jul/16/humanconsumption
December 1st, 2008 at 2:23 pm
Does unrestrained per-capita overconsumption and unbridled avarice in our time “fly in the face” of the biophysical reality of Earth as relatively small, evidently finite and noticeably frangible?
Perhaps it is time for the same ol’ business-as-usual, pin-stripe-suited leaders, the ones who adamantly espouse and religiously exemplify an apostate’s creed of greed, to be replaced by new, environmentally aware leadership.
Too many leading economic powerbrokers and their bought-and-paid-for politicians in our culture of avarice evidently define the culture’s efficacy by their willful exercise of ‘inalienable rights’ to endlessly accumulate material possessions; to acquire ever more money, money, money, money; to recklessly overconsume and relentlessly hoard limited resources. The behavior of these leaders demonstrably declares to all the world that greed is good.
Are we not members of a culture that worships limitless consumerism? Are the many accumulated products of greed nothing more or less than the objects of our idolatry?
Are the pin-striped suits, fleet of cars, chauffeurs, private jets, McMansions, servants, distant hideaways, secret handshakes and exclusive clubs “signatures” of success in a culture promoted by the ‘goodness’ of greed?
Consider for a moment what perversity greed has wrought.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1176