Gav,
Thanks for the link to the 6 part lecture by David Suzuki. Even though I've been aware of and generally involved in environmental concerns, mostly from the cleanup, emission reduction, and modeling end of things, I'd never heard of David. He is a compelling speaker and very entertaining. (Would love to have dinner with him sometime.) However, he did one thing that made me wince in his speech. FIrst he confessed a lack of understanding of economics, took a 101 level course, and then using apallingly faulty logic, blamed economics for the way in which people behave contra-to-sustainability, although he didn't actually use that word. He does his own argument and his cause damage by doing such a thing. This was analogous to blaming medicine for the existence of cancer. Although he COULD make the case that medicine bears a large responsibility for overpopulation. :-) I wonder what his response might be to someone who pointed out that with a population of 6 billion we cannot afford to treat the earth as heavily per acre per person as the third world subsistence low tech agriculture practitioner does. Per acre yield of food is low and the soil depletion is high. Often when such farmers are done in an area, they've so exhausted it that even the native plants have difficulty recolonizing the area. Places on the planet that applied a more systematic, and sustainable technology, a deliberate economic step, have no such problem. China has large areas in their traditional agricultral zones where the top soil has continually grown in thickness and richness. France has similar areas. These were not accidental occurences, but deliberat decisions by farmers to support the land that supported them, not as anything but the realization of ther survival, the origin of economic practice. Through the eighties, American farm operations in the arid portions of the country pushed land to produce that would normally not support agriculture. They poured chemical nitrogen onto what was often all but bare sand, silt, and mineral soil--nearly lacking the loam-creating organic breakdown material that defines good soil. This threatened to ultimately leave soils effectively sterile. Today, one can often see the shift away from strictly high-soluble chemical fertilizer and the inclusion of more organic debris. Manure and composted material is 'chunked out of trucks and turned into the active later. Again, a deliberate economic decision, in lieu of the abandonment and prarie busting that used to be done. Economics taught to freshmen at university is not something he should confuse with the actual economic behavior of people in the world outside the Ivory tower. The depth and complexity of economic behavior is something he might have better understood in the term he used early in his lecture of 'emergent.' It is also would be more clear to him if the comparison was made of economys with ecosystems. He stated that the economy, as if it were a single thing and not just an aggregate of aggregate behaviors, could not keep growing. In one sense he may be right, the load of potential resources is limited, but that is not an accurate consideration of how economy works. Just as niches in an ecosystem multiply with species radiation, deepening and enriching it, so to do niches within economy multiply with more and greater complexity making greater use of the same resource flows. In effect, rather than dividing economics from biology and environmental concern it might be more to the benefit of progress to utilize economics in a more complemental relationship. thanks--mel . Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
