Stan,
Yes. He replied with a compliment and then today sent out the emails of 20 people who responded imaginatively to that article on him. I’ll let you know if anything develops.
Phil Henshaw
————-
Stan wrote:
Phil — I concur with you completely. Is this Pianka, Eric Pianka the ecologist?
STAN
Phil wrote:
>Dr. Pianka, A friend sent me a notice on your good work.
>They may call you Dr. Doom, but they’d call me Dr.
>Ridiculous! Your clarity
>on what’s happening is superb and your point that
>conservation in a
>growth environment is a waste is completely correct.
>I like to draw
>attention to a very bizarre and hopeful twist! fyi
>There are four
>paragraphs below. Thanks for your work,
Phil Henshaw
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>a hidden door
>At the center of our problem with the uncontrolled 600
>year growth of man on earth is something both far
>worse than most anyone yet suspects, and
>quite mysteriously wonderful. From the solid-as-a-rock
>view of what I think is the outstanding offering for a
>physical model of natural systems (my own private brand),
>modern man seems to have accidentally built civilization
>according to the natural systems design for a bomb. Our
>growth mechanism is absolutely unbounded, with no
>means of climax except ripping what it works with apart.
>That’s what makes a ‘good’ explosion! What makes it the
>coolest dilemma imaginable, keeping it from being a
>perfect non-starter, is that the situation is both genuinely
>hopeless, and full of possibilities, because of what the
>model says is nature’s only possible fix! It would appear
>this whole extended crisis is about our being given the
>chance to be reborn as a new species. Very handy, you
>might say, since clearly almost nothing else at this
>point would do much good! No result is guaranteed, of
>course, and our actual odds may be terrible. Being
>transformed into something else is often highly risky
>business. Still I thing the logic of the fold in potential
>space is excellent (the network of self-reinforcements that
>could propagate) and we do stand some reasonable chance
>of being a “punctuated equilibrium”, i.e., something that
>shoots for infinity and makes it to someplace a lot better.
>What flips the switch would seem to be nothing much, then
>later look overwhelmingly impossible, and still later like
>something easily forgotten as we move on. The first part
>is simple, shock, dismay and wonder at why all the smart
>people would have designed civilization to irreparably blow
> up in our faces. It may be weird, but it’s unavoidably true
>when you check it out. The second part is a seemingly
>innocent choice of people with any money in the bank,
>mostly you and me and people like us, to spend their
>financial earnings.
>That innocent looking choice would unplug the primary
> means of exponential concentration of wealth and the
>exponential driver of the physical economy, letting it
>become responsive. It redefines capitalism to make it
>distributive. Yep, economics involves lots of details, and
>change is always experimental. The key is understanding
>what happens to the speed of change if we don’t. Because
>exponentials get profoundly suddenly steeper as they
>progress, failing to get off the growth curve will result in
>rates of change so big, fast and complicated that people
>will become physiologically disconnected from reality, in
>the midst of trying to make a flurry of important decisions,
>…sort of like now. The natural climax of successful
>capitalism is systemic collapse from confusion and lots of
>measures suggest, to me anyway, that the long wave
>disordering now taking place is uniquely unprecedented.
>Completely ridiculous?? no? I’d love to go over it with
>you in more detail. Â Could we be about to watch a new
>big fish flop around and try to figure it’s new world?
>Regards, Phil Re:
>http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~varanus/eric.html
>http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/4143416.html
>
>