Greetings,
There are some thoughts in Brad's response Mike's post that I would
like to address. First is that wealth is viewed as token accumulations,
not the stuff that is eaten, used for shelters, .. bio-habitat in
general. The composition and distribution of the former seems to change
over generations and centuries; the latter have only declined both in
toto, and even more dramatically, per capita.
Humans in 1750 - 1.7B; 1950 - 2.5B ( 200 yrs, 50% gain); 1987 - 5B (37
yrs, a doubling)
Estimate 2000 - 6B (13 yrs, 20% gain) ( more people of breeding age
alive now than ever before)
Waste occurs in various ways. Technology can be neutral or
positive(sustainable), but usually increases economic throughput,
resource depletion, and waste production in the form of 'less usable' or
harmful material as by-product.
It is human desires, however induced or stimulated, that drive economic
activity. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.
Socio-economic policy critics tend to blur the variables of available
*real wealth* and its distribution, and token distribution. Most
eggregiously perhaps, they often overlook the fact that in the average
lifetime of a WWII baby, the average per-capita share of real wealth
will have declined to 1/3 of what it was at her birth. Pop 2B-1940,
pop 6B-2000, LESS HABITAT, POTABLE WATER, FOREST, FISH, ARABLE
LAND...to divide, sustainably or otherwise.
BTW, I fully support conversion of weaponry efforts to green efforts,
and I find the arts a great pleasure. I also ceased work for $ a few
years ago, and thanks to token accumulation, devote considerable time (
some tokens) to sustainable future activism.
Steve Kurtz
Fitzwilliam NH
B.Mc:
... *All* life produces waste (CO2, urine, feces...), and, obviously, a
person who disposes over a rich cornucopia of natural resources and
the proucts of labor will necessarily be responsible for a lot of
chemical transformations.
But this is not what is usually meant by *waste* and *destruction*.
It does not seem to me a priori impossible for a rich person to
generally devote their life to what is fashionably called "netative
entropy": increasing the information value of their possessions.
Sure they will make some garbage, but it is well known that
poverty is a highly effective producer of waste and destruction
(slash and burn agriculture, spreading of disease by poor sanitation,
etc.).
Instead of saying tht wealth necessarily entails waste and destruction,
why can't we try to change our world so that the well-to-do find their
pleasures in such non-destructive activities as scientific research
(devoted to solving real human problems, (snip)
teaching, architecture (especially moderate cost housing that
enriches the spirits of the occupants), art (_Moby Dick_, _The
Man Without Qualities_, _Gargantua and Pantagruel_, The
Art of the Fugue, The Hammerclavier Sonata, etc.
probably didn't produce too much toxic waste
Yours in the belief that the main thing wrong with wealth if that
not everybody has it, ...
