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310 comments on Six steps to “getting” the global ecological crisis

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step back on November 5, 2007 - 8:05am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

I think people need to ... have a reasonable amount of foundational knowledge to "get it" - to make the leap that you mention.

Exactly.

Even experts do not of necessity have "foundational" knowledge.

You have to be an obsessive compulsive type to sweat the details. Not everyone does.

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Engineer-Poet on November 6, 2007 - 1:00am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

I'm not OCD by a long shot, but I do sweat details where they matter to me.  And one of those details is that carrying capacity is not a fixed quantity.  It can go down, and it can also go up.

This has been established already.  Consider the Amazon societies which created terra preta.  This amendment turned easily-leached tropical soils which rapidly become sterile after a few cycles of annual cropping into nutrient-holding soils which remain fertile year after year.  These greatly increased the carrying capacity of those lands.

Could we do the same, in that way and others?  It seems likely.  We have the benefit of broad historical knowledge, depth of scientific analysis and technological expertise to do many things.  We can already build zero-energy homes which slash the non-food footprint of a family to a fraction of an acre.  The question is less "can we?" than "will we?"

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step back on November 6, 2007 - 7:18am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

The question is less "can we?" than "will we?"

I'm OCD in that I read TOD and back track on old posts :-)

I don't think there is a clear line of separation between "can we" and "will we".

If we did not have the evolution-limited brains we do have, then "we can" do many great things: end hunger, end injustice, end wars, bring on utopia and the singularity, etc., etc.

But the fact is, as Donald Rumsfeld might say in one of his snowflakes:

You come into this world with the brain you do have rather than the brain you would prefer to have.

It is that brain and its many severe limitations that blur the line between "can we?" and "will we?".

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310 comments on Six steps to “getting” the global ecological crisis

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