We’re finally going to get the bill for the Industrial Age. If the projections are right, it’s going to be a big one: the ecological collapse of the planet.
What the public needs to understand is that these new technologies, especially in recombinant DNA technology, allow scientists to bypass biological boundaries altogether.
The interesting thing is, while we die of diseases of affluence from eating all these fatty meats, our poor brethren in the developing world die of diseases of poverty, because the land is not used now to grow food grain for their families.
The electronic media introduced this idea to the larger audience very, very quickly. We spent years and years and years meeting with activists all over Europe to lay the groundwork for a political response, as we did here.
You can eliminate, for example, a Brazil nut gene if you know that it will create an allergenic effect.
One thing I’ve learned over these last 30 or 40 years is that people make history. There’s no fait accompli to any of this.
The most important question facing humanity is this: Can we reach global empathy in time to avoid the collapse of civilization and save the Earth?
The laws of thermodynamics tell us something quite different. Economic activity is merely borrowing low-entropy energy inputs from the environment and transforming them into temporary products and services of value. In the transformation process, often more energy is expended and lost to the environment than is embedded in the particular good or service being produced.
The democratization of manufacturing means that anyone and eventually everyone can access the means of production, making the question of who should own and control the means of production irrelevant, and capitalism along with it.
Studies conducted around the world have shown a close correlation between materialist values, depression, and substance abuse.
He asks, “how hard would it be to go a week without Google? Or, to up the ante, without Facebook, Amazon, Skype, Twitter, Apple, eBay, and Google?”33 Wu is putting his finger on a disquieting new reality – that the new communication medium a younger generation gravitated to because of its promise of openness, transparency, and deep social collaboration masks another persona more concerned with ringing up profit by advancing a networked Commons.
Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need but not enough for every man’s greed.”56.
Every religion holds forth the promise of either defeating time, escaping time, overcoming time, reissuing time, or denying time altogether. We use our religions as vehicles to enter the state of nirvana, the heavenly kingdom, or the promised land. We come to believe in reincarnation, rebirth, and resurrection as ways of avoiding the inevitability of biological death.
The global financial collapse exposed the longstanding myth that commercial exchange is a primary institution. There are no examples in history where people created commercial markets and exchange before creating a culture.
Even though the transformation of energy, in all of its various forms, is the very basis of all economic activity, only a tiny fraction of economists have even studied thermodynamics. And only a handful of individuals inside the profession have attempted to redefine economic theory and practice based on the energy laws.
The well-being of the biosphere is measured over millennia of history and necessitates a human consciousness that can reflect and project along a similar time table.
There is a saying in the Middle East that goes something like this: “My grandfather rode a camel, my father drove a car, I travel on a jet, and my grandchild will ride a camel.” Not necessarily. The deserts of the Middle East and North Africa have more solar potential per square inch than any other region in the world – more energy potential, in fact, than all of the oil ever extracted from deep beneath its sand dunes. The.
The extension of the empathic bond is the social glue to establishing a global network of millions of human beings. It’s probably not surprising that in the most technologically advanced countries, where self-expression is high, the older theological consciousness, with its emphasis on strict external codes, the communal bond, and a hierarchically organized command and control, is losing its hold. Religious hierarchies make less and less sense in a fl at, networked world.
The new science takes us from a colonial vision of nature as an enemy to pillage and enslave, to a new vision of nature as a community to nurture. The right to exploit, harness, and own nature in the form of property is tempered by the obligation to steward nature and treat it with dignity and respect. The utility value of nature is slowly giving way to the intrinsic value of nature.
To bring our human population in line with the biocapacity of the planet and transform our society from scarcity to sustainable abundance, we will need to address the great disparity in ecological footprint between the rich and poor, while simultaneously lowering the overall human population on Earth.
When I empathize, I feel the frailty and transitory nature of another’s existence. To empathize is to root for the other to flourish and experience the full potential of their short abide.