Was listening to public radio last night (good distraction from the active act of driving a car) where David Suzuki (Canadian environmentalist) spoke about the paradox of constant growth.
Today people from all countries are conditioned to think about growth as the only imperative, progress in all manners of systems whether economic, monetary, agriculture et al.
The reality though is that there is a limited resource called Earth and by simply making a better mouse trap we are not going to find new mice to trap. There are only 99 mice left (metaphorically paraphrasing).
He uses a test tube full of bacteria that exponentially multiply to elaborate his point. That when supply is constant and demand exceeds a tipping point we are screwed. He indicated that we are already in the last inning but we kid ourselves (through our acquired arrogance) that we can outdo this cycle.
Truly the only outcome I personally see is for places like India to retard and eventually cull their enormous populations while for the so called developed world to figure out a brand new concept called 'Conspicuous Abstinence'. That would simply mean not buying an iphone or new car every 2 years as an example.
Can we do that?
I attempted to read this book by author Chuck Klosterman backward to forward but it started hurting my brain so I decided to stop and do it like any other publication in the English language. Start from page 1 and move to the right. Witty, caustic and thought provoking this is a book you want to read if you believe that the status quo might, just might be wrong. At times bordering on being contrarian about most things around us it tries to zero in on the notion of what makes anything believable and certain in our minds. The fact that there is a fact itself is ironic. Something analogous to the idea that you can never predict the future because there is no future. Many books and movies have tried to play on this concept - best that I recollect (I think I am) was 'The Truman Show'. This book by Klosterman attempts to provoke the reader to at least contemplate that what they think they know may be wrong. He uses examples like concept of gravity, and how it ...
If we were to examine growth of our brains/intelligence instead, we will discover that there is negative growth happening...
ReplyDeleteMust be all that MSG messing up the messages our brain is processing
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