MOTHER NATURE DOWN FOR THE COUNT: PART 2—GLOBAL DASHBOARD GLOWING RED WITH DANGER
By Frosty Wooldridge
A reader Shadow Dancer commented on the first part of this book review on “Wecskaop: What Every Citizen Should Know About Our Planet”: “So you’re starting to grasp exponential mathematics! I posted at Native Sites where people talk about the destruction of the earth with great sorrow in their hearts.
”All I can tell them is the truth that this is the money men's world, and the money men aren't going to stop anytime soon. The human race is not going to stop its destruction of the earth. Meaning the entire human race is destroying itself slowly just through its pollution alone.
”As you begin to grasp mathematics you then should be able to grasp the mathematics of complete zero. The Kogi People of South America still live pretty much the old way upon the earth, the way of the Tribe, and at complete zero, or in the least destructive way to the earth. Once you understand complete zero...and that complete zero was broken long ago...then you have the world now...that is the result of Cause & Effect. Then from that you know all things will get worse upon the Earth...but how much worse is still an unknown. As well as how soon...as other variables come into play.
”Indians way back when did not want to learn what they called the white man's knowledge because they believed such knowledge was forbidden...they may have been right...more right than they know…we may already be far too late to save the earth from destruction as well as the human race or most of the human race.”
I nod my head as to Shadow Dancer’s wisdom. Odd that ‘money men’ control the growth-capitalism-waste paradigm over common sense-stasis-sustainability paradigm espoused in this book. If allowed to continue, we shall all become victims of the ‘money men’s’ paradigm.
Anson said, “Why should we suppose the earth’s environmental machinery is invulnerable? How many organisms can an ecosystem or planet support over a long period of time without suffering severe or irreparable damage?”
Garrett Hardin likens earth’s carrying capacity to an “engineer’s estimate of the carrying capacity of a bridge.” Notice the collapse of the mega-bridge over the Mississippi River last week in Minnesota! It didn’t collapse until that single last car drove onto it to exceed its carrying capacity.
In the living world, biologists use the term “threshold” as to the limits of a system before it collapses. All ecological processes carry thresholds.
Last week, a highly educated woman friend of mine bumped into me at an art show in Winter Park, Colorado. She said, “I don’t agree with your population stance…we’ve got plenty of space.” I said, “If it was about space, why are there only 20 million Australians and not 300 million on a continent the same size our 48 contiguous states?”
“I don’t know,” Paula asked. “Why?”
“It’s not about space,” I said. “It’s about carrying capacity and Australia is nine-tenths desert. They don’t possess water or farmland.”
“Oh, I didn’t think about that,” Paula said.
LIMITED CAPACITY TO ACCEPT WASTE
Anson did and more! He said, “Carrying capacity can also be limited by the ability of an environment to accept and process the wastes of a given population.”
Anson stated, “You might be able to overload the bus with too many people, but when you overload the toilet at the back of the bus, well, you’ve got a problem…food and other resource shortages may be out there on the horizon as looming problems, but earth’s ability to accept, dissipate, cleanse and recycle our societal and industrial wastes appears to be stressed already.”
Anyone can read the papers weekly to see our “global dashboard” light up with warning lights. “Examples include acid rain, ozone depletion, deforestation in the tropics at 136,000 acres lost per day (www.RedJellyFish.com), vanishing wilderness, collapsing fisheries, 100 million sharks killed annually, reefs worldwide dying, accelerating emissions of greenhouse gases, vanishing bee colonies, accelerating desertification, melting permafrost, disappearing polar ice and mass extinctions that may become the greatest biological disaster since the dinosaurs vanished.”
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