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?
Here is another essay on the subject of first names. As in birth names. Or names provided to an offspring at birth. While the developed world tends to shy away from the exotic like Refrigerator or Coca Cola for their new production there is a plethora of Jims and Johns and Bobs or Robs. Speaking of which I do not think there is a categoric decision point at the time of birth if a child will be hereafter called as Bob. I mean have not yet met a toddler called Bob or Rob for that matter. At some point though the parental instinct to mouth out multiple syllables runs out and they switch from calling the crawler Robert to simply Robbie to Rob. Now speaking of - it is strange that the name sounds like something you would not want Rob to do - i.e. Rob anyone. Then why call someone that? After all Rob Peter to Pay Paul is not exactly a maxim to live a young life? Is it? Perhaps Peter or Paul might want to have a say in it? Then there is this matter of going to the John. Why degrad...
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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