Even the capitalists are beginning to ask if earth’s resources are now being exhausted: BusinessWeek’s article The Age of Scarcity asks if this is our Malthusian moment. They offer evidence to support that point of view but conclude that policy changes will allow new technologies to make resources go further. Unfortunately this is wishful thinking. The simple science is that there are too many people on the planet. The 10% at the top consume as much as the rest. The bottom 20% barely have enough to eat. The 10% at the top (yes, that means you too) waste 20-30% of what they consume simply through over eating, over heating/cooling and land fill.
The simple truth is that the sun’s energy drives the biosphere (the living part of this planet), but humanity consumes many times more energy than that absorbed by the biosphere. (This is because we consume fossil fuels – a store of millions of years worth of sun’s energy, which is irreplaceable. Humanity is eating the planet to death.) The only (possible) solution is to eat less, of everything (food, clothes, travel, stuff …). Coincidentally, it was a year ago that the same suggestion was made in Astraea’s Newsletter.
(More on the Malthusian moment is in the Newsletter Perspective of May 2007 and August 2007.)
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