All,

One reason I see to criticize a great organization like NRDC (I’m a long standing member too) is that one of their effects is to divert the effort to heal the planet away from dealing with the central problem.  They and other genuinely well intended efforts to protect the earth are, in their physical effect, really just putting on a show of addressing the problem, diverting attention to various immediate ‘newsworthy’ issues and away from the relentlessly widening impacts of our fundamentally unsustainable development process.

There’s a growth turning point for any natural system where multiplying good becomes bad, that we passed for most things, say 50 to a 100 years ago, and are bounding merrily along thinking that we’re still multiplying good, though the net effect has become the opposite.  That we’re not watching and these turning points sneak up on us is obvious, and that we need to learn to look for such things should be too.  On our road to infinity, where are the tipping points?  It’s a good question, that’s never been widely asked.

It may be a bizarre truth, but nearly everyone trying to effect change is caught up in multiplying what used to be ‘good’ that now has the actual effect of multiplying harm.  NRDC’s approach would work fine if there was not a growing cause of environmental impacts…. the institutionalized growth imperative of business, that they explicitly avoid mentioning, fixing its smaller impacts as bigger ones relentlessly develop. It’s not from malintent in any way.  It’s from a shared mistaken perception held by both the ‘do-gooders’ and the ‘do-badders’ , that good intentions are good enough, even when the actual whole effect, fairly easily traced from a self-critical approach, is the opposite.

Phil Henshaw
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Responding to:Frank Vraniak
Sent: Friday, September 22, 2006 9:52 PM
To: overpopulation@googlegroups.com
Subject: RE: Another good link to ponder

Let me get this right. The NRDC statement is lacking in insight but they are doing something and not just throwing ambiguous e-mails back and forth. We are making feeble attempts at making sure that we survive and it is better to “watch the world go round’” and do nothing. The fight against global warming is for the protection of us against the devastation of nature but lets not save nature because it really doesn’t support us in any way, shape or form. Got it. We are own best enemy but we are just now starting to look in the mirror and should destroy ourselves because we don’t like what we see. I am complicated but I am only the enemy if I choose to be. I know who my enemies are and they are ignorance, selfishness, greed, as well as a few others. Those are the enemies that cause the problems. They reside in people but not all of the people. The enemy is pretty simple if you ask me.

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Responding to: Espey, Lawrence L.
Sent: Friday, September 22, 2006 7:59 PM
To: overpopulation@googlegroups.com
Subject: RE: Another good link to ponder

Frank,
Although a mission statement is important, the NRDC statement is lacking in insight.  Nature (not mankind) ‘knows’ best how to “safeguard” itself.  This is the precise reason Homo sapiens is threatened with extinction.  Most, if not all, of our efforts to be “stewards of the Earth” are, in fact, only feable attempts to save our own habitat.  It is “us” that needs protection, not Nature. As the cartoon character Pogo once said, “We have met the enemy, and it is us!”  We are a terribly complicated enemy.
I wish you well.

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Responding to: Frank Vraniak
Sent: Fri 9/22/2006 6:36 PM
To: overpopulation@googlegroups.com
Subject: Another good link to ponder

All,
This is a mission statement from the NRDC.I just thought maybe we could move forward a bit and see if we are going to come up with one. Or am I just whistlin’ Dixie? Here is the link. It may be a good framework for something that I thought we were doing and not just talking about. “My opinion”,
Frank http://www.nrdc.org/about/mission.asp

Frank Vraniak’s Motto: I accept myself as a kook and a dreamer. Are there more of us than there are of you?

To: overpopulation@googlegroups.com

All,
I can hear that having a clear direction would be a relief and its own reward. The direction I hear being taken, though, is one that sounds the same as the ones taken many times before with much effort and commitment, and I don’t hear any sense of curiosity about how the others might have gotten lost along the way and why they failed to accomplish what they set out to do, or perhaps made matters worse.

Natural systems are so incredibly complicated. They frequently do things quite backward from how we think, and don’t come with any instruction manual… and we ARE talking about further interfering in natural systems that we appear to have made a mess of already. I’ve spent a lifetime closely observing them, all kinds. I developed a rigorous observation method. It’s my sig. ¸ ¸ ¸ ¸. · ´ ¯ ` ·. ¸ ¸ ¸ ¸ Continue reading Religion and Overpopulation →

Eric & all,

>Stan said:
> >Frank said:
> >I agree wholeheartedly that there are way too many people on this
> >planet using way too many resources. As far as what to do
> >about it, I think we should do nothing.
> In my opinion this should include doing nothing to help
> people live longer. Use medicine to alleviate pain, but not
> to prevent dying.

I don’t have time tonight, but I think this is a very important part of
the puzzle. How to do what we can and know how to feel about the
tragedies we’re unable prevent. The outside interventions in other
people’s societies that have been failing us for a long time, sometimes
just multiplying the tragedy to come, need to be stopped by a
combination of being reinvented, and the wisdom of accepting the things
we can’t change. Continue reading Good ideas, so far, more still needed . . . →

Lawrence needs no excuse to give time to his other interests, but he
said something intriguing. He said he was also withdrawing partly
because he found something disconcerting, but he couldn’t say what.
When I notice that in myself I take it as a real discovery, something
deep speaking up, a beginning of insight that remains poorly formed, a
little loose thread of hidden truth. It could be many things of course,
but two things come to mind. He seems accustomed to very civil
discourse, in a healthy world. We’re looking at the opposite on both
counts. In our discourse there’s a little taste of how what’s
physically happening to the earth is becoming quite ugly. Continue reading Another dropout →

Eric & all,

Thanks for asking. Let me just attempt to describe the ship and the wave idea. You know any great graphic designer types? It could be a good poster, and could make good money too!The idea of turning the ship of mankind into the wave of calamities coming at us, is so we don’t get blindsided and capsize. It would be a matter of doing one thing right, even though we get everything else wrong. It’s also about the common idea that you can’t learn from habitual mistakes until you watch as you make them.If you make a big mistake 10 times without seeing how it happens, it could happen to you 100 times. But when you see it as it’s happening, once or twice, then you don’t do it again. My best realistic hope for us is that we become aware enough of the genuine hidden errors of our ways to be watching as the earth’s bounty crashes down around us… Continue reading Good ideas . . . →

Eric & all,

A few days ago I asked: Can anyone offer other examples of growth systems that get into trouble from being unable to control their own limits? People don’t seem to understand how the best of intentions lead human systems to overshoot, so looking at natural ones might help us understand the problem. Here’s an interesting one that can’t be studied in detail. It was a long time ago and this is all the data there is, a plankton species transition that went through overshoot and partial collapse 4 or 5 times as it evolved from one to the other…!