Capitalism vs. Sustainability

I've read this multiple times and I don't get what you mean.
The only thing that swirls around in my head, is that you may think that there is not enough technological progress because certain vested interests would rather maintain a stable revenue stream (give the customer what they want.)...rather than bring more advanced and enviromentaly friendly products on the market. In the same instance people don't wish to drastically change because it means the status quo is shaken.

Could you expalin your reasoning a little further for me.

 

Well Odon, you see society, the world is currently going through a major paradigm shift. It happens every so often, but this is one of truly biblical proportions, unheard of throughout human or world history.

It all started in the early 20th century, when science, which had been up until then dominated by a mechanistic world view, was turned on it's head though the advent of quantum theory, relativity and chaos.

Whereas the the technology and inventions that came out of the Newtonian sciences tended to manipulate the worlds resource and nature, new ideas started coming forth that were more ecological and sustainable nature.

The earth had sustained itself for billions of years, until man invented the machine and started to exploit nature for greed and wealth. This materialist nature is constantly in flux with spiritualism, and societies tend to oscillate between the two extremes.

What we are currently seeing is a shift of society from patriarchal, materialistic pratcises to more spiritual ones with more compassion for mother earth.

But of course, the powers at be have set in place a system of democracy, a capitalist state, that is stagnating the evolutionary flow of society.

What is required for these revolutionary new prinviples of sustainability and ecology is for the people of the earth to adopt them, and from there society will start to change at the grass roots level. We also need businesses to adopt more suatainable practises, rather than being in competitoin with one another, which is the capitalist ethos, they must adopt a new system whereby they co-operate with one another, share the resouseces and where possible waste products from one industry can be used in an other industry, so that ideally waste is minimalised, or even completel eradicated, and what we instead have are groups of industries all working together with each other and with nature.

There are organisations already working on these things, and many industrail modesl have already proved a great success in some countries.

But of course there is no profit in that, and also in order for a company to make a profit, they require a work force. So all the people that are needed to change the world for the better at the grass roots level, are instead bound in capitalist chains and made to work in dead end jobs, for industries that are create waste, exploit people, make people sick and generally contribute nothing to the future of humanity except shit.

Well, that's all I can be bothered writing just now, it's sunny outside and I want to go out and sit in the sun before the fucking rain comes. I hope that hekps to clarify what I mean for you.

 

Thanks. That helped.

I can see how it can be helpful for industries to work together.
I'm not quite sure we need to go to the other exreme...but, yeah some co-operation and seeing the bigger picture is going to be of great help to us all.

 

Sounds like communism to me.

 

Well it doesn't involve dropping bombs everywhere!

 

Man, a servant of nature? I'm sorry, but this is a point that really needs to be argued.

The first men, freezing and starving in caves, were subservient to nature, but as victims rather than servants. But they were not content with scavenging minimal food for basic sustenance and huddling together for enough warmth to live through the night - so they asserted themselves. They saw fire and felt its effects, and, rather than fearing it as a force of nature, used it to their advantage. They harnessed a dangerous force of nature and made it work for them, rather than against them. This is the earliest example, but it has continued through the ages, men asserting their right to use nature for their own gain.

Men was not content eating only what plants they could find in nature - so what did they do? They could have accepted nature's right to decide what they ate and in what amount, or they could assert themselves. They chose the latter: they studied nature and understood how plants come to be where they are; then they plowed the earth and sowed crops for themselves, where they wanted them and in the amounts they wanted. But why should they be content to plow fields and sow crops by hand when they had the capability to build machines which can plow much greater areas and sow their crops much more quickly? Should they abstain from doing so, out of superstitious respect for 'the balance of nature'? Can we count the number of times in history that new advancements have been decried as 'upsetting the balance'? Urbanization surely was, and industrialization even more so. Many people expected the human race as a whole to retard its own efforts, to artificially limit its potential, because of such superstitions. Many times we have come through such hurdles, and this is yet another in a long history.

Men understand the world around them through reason: it is their reason that makes them superior to other animals. They have been able to build the things they need, and to make nature serve them. While nature it still a factor, it can hardly be said that we are its servants. If we were, we would still be huddled in caves, afraid to anger nature; or more, likely, we would be extinct.

 

Yes, prehistoric man harnessed a very powerful force in nature, and used it to his great advantage. But fire was never a force of nature that worked against us, it was never our enemy. Yes, there have been many instances whereby people have died in forest fires, and still do, but overall if you consider the "whole" picture (to quote a buzz word) fire is a powerful force of nature that has always worked in our favour, in fact without it the earth, and man a part of it, would not have evolved.

People fear what they donot understand, and what people donot understand they try to control, or destroy, and sometimes, when man exerts one of his greatest virtues, wisdom, he understands.

Man did not invent fire, he only learned how to use it to survive. It has always been there since time immemorial, from the great fire of the cosmos that gave birth to the sun in the sky, to the raging volcanoes that seeded the earth with the minerals and nutrients necessary for life to evolve, to the forest fires that are a necessary part of the evolutionary life cycles of forests, and indeed the planet.

Fire is a force of nature we have learned to manipulate, but we are not it's master. Quite the contrary, and should it decide to come along in it's full glory, we are very much powerless to stop it. In it's most destructive form, we are very much at the mercy of nature. We are only masters of our own destiny.

Actually, what we are currently doing at the moment is limiting our potential.

If we only had the wisdom to match our knowledge, the possibilities are endless. Modern advances in science and research are uncovering alternative materials based on natures design, rather than man's synthetic design, that have both the properties of their toxic synthetic nemeses with the added advantage of not producing an environmental pollution through their manufacture/use.

And of course, if we continue down this road whereby we view everything in nature as there for us to exploit, and that there is an endless supply of resources at our disposal, then we will eventually limit our potential so much there wil be a global cataclysm never before seen in the history of the world.

Just because we invented machines that make our lives easier, does not mean we necessarily have to use them ALL THE TIME. Are we really in control of our machines, or are they in control of us?

Or houses...

If nature is your servant, why don't you give up your house and go and live in a forest. See how long you survive.

Nature is subservient to us, until a storm comes along, and then we all go and run and hide, because nature is a force that, even in our state of technological advancement, we are powerless to stop. We can only build shelter for it, which is pretty much what every other species does really, and they are nowhere near as smart as us.

If you could put nature and man in a ring, and let them fight it out, nature would always win, because it is way more powerful than us.

So we MUST learn to live with it, as a part of it, or the whole system will fall apart, and this will happen soon.

When you use language suggesting that man has harnessed or tamed a powerful force of nature, or that man is master of nature, you should really consider just how powerful a force nature can be.

What you really mean is man has learned to survive along side nature, by understanding a very small part of it, and using that knowledge to manipulate a small part of it, to allow him to perpetuate himself and his species.

Or you could perhaps say, that by manipulating a small part of it man and nature are co-operating with one another, to create a perfect state of quasi-equilibrium.

Man is not the master of everything in nature.

You can strike a match and wallow in all your glory as the smartest species on the planet, but at any time the earths crust could open up and swallow you up, or a bolt of lightning could come from they sky and knock you down with such a force you will never get back up again.

The only way we can survive along side nature, is by understanding it, and that means understanding it in all it glory and complexity. Proceed with caution.

When man discovered fire, did he go round setting fire to everything? Maybe, I dunno. Maybe the first cave man who discovered fire burned himself and his family to death, OR maybe he had the wisdom to take a step back and learn more about this mysterious force that produced light and heat from wood, maybe he learned first how to use the fire sensibly and safely.

 

Fire has never been man's friend, the fact we learned how to make and tame it made it our friend. What history classes have you been taking.

And no nature is in fact controlled by people now. Yes things happen, volcanoes, earthquakes, tornadoes, hell icebergs that sink giant ships, but the point is those are isolated events compared to the vast control man has exerted over nature for thousands of years, especially in the past 100 on a daily, hourly and minutely basis

 

What is it that makes the sun shine and the blood flow through our veins if it is not fire.

I take it you are not a vindaloo man, then?

 

Obviously not ones from the school of Francis Bacon.

Do we control every living species that grows, do we control the weather cycles, are we in control of climate change, or the melting glaciers?

 

Yes, we are in fact are. We could wipe out, or over populate, or clone near every species there is, including making new hybrids. Climate change is believed to either some or full extent be responsible by people, we control that, and we could stop it too.

 

Just because we are (questionably) responsible for triggering or causing climate change, does not necessarily equate to us being in control of the climate!

We always have affected our climate, every living species affects the climate, because we are all, us and the weather, a part of the whole global eco-system.

If we are in so much in control of climate change, then we'll just reverse it then! Let's knock the average global temperature down a celsius or two, and freeze back up the glaciers, shall we?

And cloning is bullshit, they call them clones mate, but they are not clones. A "clone" requires three separate animals whatever the species is to create it and contains genetic material from all three. Now that is hardly what I would call a clone, is it. More like a monster of creation.

Whatever it is, it's hardly of any fucking use to us either, seeing as most of the "clones" that have been created donot live healthy lives and tend to die prematurely.

What makes a person, or a sheep, is not only it's DNA make-up, it is also the environmental factors that are there throughout it's conception, birth and life, and these rarely can be recreated so well.

 

Well if you want to give up the awesome western world life we have that allows us to sit in front of computers and debate then yes, we could in fact stop climate change. Groups in Greenland are laying gigantic reflective blankets over glaciers to stop the melting. We can make babies using 2 eggs, and scientists last week announced they were able to make sperm in a lab. Not only do we control nature, we have so much control that we in theory just made the entire male gender of our own species no longer needed for survival.

Saying we don't control nature is just hippie mumbo jumbo. God damn we have the power of the atom. And fusion power is on it's way, we are going to have the power and energy of the sun soon.

Hell, we can leave our planet, we can beat gravity, one of the 4 fundamental forces in the universe

 

Oh is that right.

How far do you think the human species would get if we started using laboratory made sperm instead of "man"-made?

They've been doing this for years, and conceiving animals in the lab from it, and guess what, they were all weak and and they all died prematurely.

Again, and instance whereby you use to show how dominant mankind is that only goes to illustrates the impotency of our knowledge in the absence of true wisdom.

It will indeed be a milestone if they can show in the lab that they can produce energy from fusion. BUt this is really a long way off of putting a technology like this into practise, and no-one really knows how we can take what is ultimately nothing more than a small ball of H gas producing a huge pulse of energy for a split nanosecond and build a reactor to harness enough electricity to power a small city.

But the fact that we are doing it is amazing, and I wish them all the success.

Man has survived for very short times in space, and we are capable of escaping the gravitational pull of the earth. But guess what, there's fuck all in space, there's fuck all on the moon, and there's fuck all on mars, and if we try to live outside of gravity, our muscles waste away. So where exactly do you think space travel is going to take mankind?

 

How would you define "control"? Wouldn't that ultimately infer an end point at which time you could say "There, that's under control..." You nor anyone else has any way of knowing the ultimate outcomes of all our tinkering. From looking at our history of tinkering with the ecology and natural environments, we are not doing so well.

Yes, humans have much information and "intelligence" and power. But not the brains to use them wisely.

 

Part of the issue here is that you're personifying inanimate forces: fire will never 'decide' anything. We have understood and harnessed fire. That is not to say that it cannot create problems for us - of course it can. But pound-for-pound (so to speak) man dominates fire immensely. There's no contest.

We are in control of them. We created them, we use them to make our lives easier. It is true that such conveniences cause most people to become complacent, forgetting how to survive without them. I see this as a problem.

As far as the environment goes, if there is an issue created by our machines, we will fix it - not for the environment's sake specifically, but for our own. You're right that it takes wisdom to properly apply knowledge - but wisdom is not superstition. Discomfort with the appearance of technology encroaching on nature is not wisdom. If a real, tangible problem exists, we will deal with it.

This is stupid. Where once we would have died from exposure to nature, we can now protect ourselves from it. We don't have to stop its operating altogether.

 

This is exactly the point I was trying make. Manipulation is not control. Control imlpies exactly what it says, control.

You can light a fire and contain it, but you are not in control of fire.

Wherever we stand, beneath lies a part of the sun that has cooled down and is still burning, and every so often it bursts open and all hell breaks loose.

We are all going to die eventually, and eventually all species on earth will die.

 

Who says.

Have you ever stared into a fire?

Do you think it just randomnly generates this beautiful patter out from nowhere?

Go to the nearest fire, and jump into it, or stand on it, or put your hand in it.

A fire burns, and if man throws water on the fire, it dies and the light and the heat turn to darkness and smoke.

If man throws water on the fire, and the fire goes out, is it man destroying the fire, or is it water?

 

Are you and Prince Charles promoting Cap and Trade, the creation of a new derivative driven commodity(pollution) market as the only means of saving the environment?

If so I have to disagree.

 

Everything will someday die, but I disagree that all species on earth will die out. Mother Nature will win out. She will find a balance.