Tuesday, April 04, 2006

Survey: Are humans good or bad for the planet?

Posted by Mickey Z on 04/04 at 04:45 AM
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  1. I feel most people on planet are interested in living peacefully and harmoniously but we have a relatively small bunch of coldblooded ones who are ruining it for everybody and since they have the loudest set of PA equipment have managed to convince the rest of humanity they´re nothing better than a virus.

    Posted by owen from Gyarrcelona  on  04/04  at  06:45 AM

  2. As one of my mates pointed out: “We ain’t bloody Yanks. It’ll be 01:02:03 05/04/06 for us. We’ll have to wait till May.” He’s an accountant. I rarely even know what the date is.

    I suspect few of those students really imagine they’d be in the 90% that gets it, but thats just a sniffy reaction…
    If we did adopt a low-impact, low-entropy society, hardly damaging other species or systems at all - an epidemic could still all but eliminate us. The logical-moral connection just isn’t there, a virus is not an avenging Fury.
    Me, I’m only a part-time misanthrope, perfectly happy to deny anthropocentrism but lacking the commitment to carry out a <style mass-murder. Or for that matter, to explain to other human beings in other parts of the world why they <b>should</b> die because we screwed the planet up.

    Posted by mew from not london, hooray!  on  04/04  at  07:08 AM

  3. Not sure why that came out like it did, should have been “Twelve Monkeys” style mass-murder (oh, what an original reference).

    Posted by mew from not london, hooray!  on  04/04  at  07:11 AM

  4. Good Morning Mickey, Mew, Owen, and all....I strongly disagree with the 90% solution as offered by the professor. I think it is counter-productive for many reasons. For one, it devalues life and could make things worse. It sets up a conundrum...if life has so little value why bother with any solution to preserve it?
    I admit that I did not read the article carefully. Maybe I am missing something but that is my view after scanning it quickly.

    It is snowing here right now. Seems that many MZer’s have been busy and unable to participate much. I think that will change. They will be back as soon as their lives calm down a bit. It looks like a lot of provoking events will be coming in the near future. It is great to have a place like this to discuss things.

    Posted by RMJ from Churchill 4 Prez Hdqts  on  04/04  at  08:08 AM

  5. I am not sure what the argument is here...is the argument whether or not we should just go ahead and kill 9 out of 10 people?  That is pretty ridiculous.  But, I have to say, there is no doubt that humans currently overpopulate the earth.  I have heard that our way of life is causing the extinction of 200 species A DAY.  There is no doubt in my mind that we will see massive, destrucive repercussions in the next 100 years or less.  Perhaps the next 30...who knows.  I mean, even the Pentagon knows what’s coming:

    http://tinyurl.com/34otx

    Posted by JOS from Chicago  on  04/04  at  09:25 AM

  6. speaking of cell phones:

    http://tinyurl.com/g27k7

    Posted by JOS from Chicago  on  04/04  at  11:17 AM

  7. Hi JOS...The topic of EMF’s is really interesting. It is fun to go all around your house or apartment with a Gauss meter and see how the level changes depending on where you are relative to clocks, stoves, etc… The cell phone debate has been going on for a long time. I come down on the side of caution. What do you think?

    Posted by RMJ from Churchill 4 Prez Hdqts  on  04/04  at  01:18 PM

  8. Hello Expendables. Thanks for the comments...but where the hell is Mudge, the Empress, Cat Lady, and the others?

    Funny you should talk about cell phones today. Verizon screwed up our phone installation in the new place and I have to wait for the guy to come by tomorrow. In the meantime, Michele left me her cell phone and it’s the first time I’ve ever carried one. Feels odd, in a way.

    Posted by Mickey Z. from Astoria  on  04/04  at  01:27 PM

  9. Hey RMJ, Mick…


    I think cell phones will most likely cause today’s teenagers to develop some sort of illiness...whether from radiation or a complete lack of actual face-to-face human contact, I don’t know.

    I’ve been seeing a lot of these studies pointing towards tumors lately...it would not surprise me at all.

    Be careful where you carry that phone, Mickey!

    If Joe doesn’t get back here soon...I think we should form a search party into the Oregon wilderness.

    Posted by JOS from Chicago  on  04/04  at  01:55 PM

  10. looks like Chomsky’s new book is going to be a good one:

    http://www.tomdispatch.com/indexprint.mhtml?pid=73753

    Posted by JOS from Chicago  on  04/04  at  01:59 PM

  11. I don’t know about Amelopsis and Mudge, those two bigshots with jobs, but I’ve had my mind on other things as you can imagine. I could be a whole lot worse off, after all the overtime I put in before getting fired, I did save a bit of money, even if that’ll be gone soon enough. But I have enough contacts to find other proofreading soon enough, I kinda think. And no I wasn’t canned for too much websurfing, so I won’t sue Cool Observer; it was just that I made too many mistakes, which I blame on how much I hated the whole job anyway.

    Don’t get me started on the cell phone thing. Right now, I’ll gladly take the cancer risk over the risk of missing any temp jobs, or offers of perm ones, from having missed calls from people who couldn’t reach me. Bad enough the times when I was on the subway and missed a call for an ASAP job. That’s one expensive train ride! And yeah, not having to deal with a land line has made it a whole lot easier each time I’ve moved.

    I definiely wouldn’t switch over at least until I have a so-called permanent job. Mickey, haven’t you ever lost work due to clients who couldn’t reach you? Or maybe it’s not the same situation. Sometime law firms need a proofreader in an hour, or not at all.

    I love this idea of wiping out 90% of humanity, bring it on, I say… or at least eradicate everyone who’s ever fired me before I had enough saved up or turned me down for a job in the first place. I also volunteer my ex-fiancee for that 90%...

    Um, was this not the actual question? Reminds me again of this: http://qntm.org/why, with the reminder that destroying the world and the life on it are not the same thing. Thanks again, off now to keep the idea of how many people need to die for the sake of the Planet’s well-being, and how I prefer a brain tumor to destitution as I send out more resumes…

    But oh, I already have some homemade vegan mac n’ cheese and other surprises planned for housewarming gifts, so I’ll check you later about that.

    Posted by James from Hell's Kitchen  on  04/04  at  02:08 PM

  12. James...you put a smile on my face with the comment about putting an ex-boss in the 90%. Would you believe that I once had a boss who would not allow me to leave work an hour early to rush my little girl to the hospital. My daughter had a blood vessel break in her head and needed immediate medical attention. My boss said,"No." To be included in the 90% I can also think of a lawyer and also a dentist who once did 3 root canals with NO anesthesia on me. Never let that happen to you.  See what you started here, James.
    I just made rice and beans. I wish that I could send you some.

    Posted by RMJ from Churchill 4 Prez Hdqts  on  04/04  at  04:19 PM

  13. JOS, overpopulation is a myth. If you took six billion people and divided them into groups of four and gave each group 50 meters squared to live on you´d fit everybody neatly into Oregon. Sure it looks like planet is packed but everybody is wedged into urban centres and nobody in the countryside. The overpopulation hoodwink has been propagated by foundations fronting for eugenics movements since the fifties. George Bush senior stood up in Congress in 1969 and more or less said “Black people. Too many of them.” A year later Henry Kissinger drafted Memorandum 200, in which he recommended that the populations of the 14 “least developed” countries be reduced by 50%. He said a nuclear bomb was too obvious so he had a more subtle solution. In the seventies the WHO vaccinated 100 million Africans based out of a lab in the middle of the Rwandan jungle, ostensibly to protect against a smallpox epidemic that nobody had been complaining about funnily enough, and what do you know, up pops an AIDS epidemic. In New York and San Franciso in the seventies thousands of gay men were vaccinated for hepatitus. Homosexuality was illegal in Ireland until 1989 and for a government to take an interest in gay health in the 70s was out of this world remarkable - but less so when the AIDS virus made its presence as it did among gay men in NY and SF. The 14 countries Kissinger named in Memo 200 are the 14 countries with the highest rate of AIDS sufferers. Rather than overpopulating, humans are being wiped off this planet at a fair clip.

    Here´s more http://tinyurl.com/k3l7p

    Posted by Owen from gyarrcelona  on  04/04  at  04:44 PM

  14. Mickey,
    I for one think that 6 billion humans are bad for the planet - and the population is going to rise to 10 billion before it levels off. And how come people who choose to remain childless constantly have to justify themselves, whereas those who keep having children whom all too often they cannot support and bring up properly are NEVER asked why they keep ‘breeding’.  Sorry but I have strong feelings about this issue.  And it is interesting that the countries with the highest birth rate are also the poorest countries which treat their women appallingly.

    And hi, Owen, Mew, Rosemarie, James and JOS - where are the rest?  Have been in Melbourne over the weekend, so I have to play catch-up now.

    Posted by Helga Fremlin from Daylesford, Australia  on  04/04  at  04:45 PM

  15. And this is the FIRST TIME you carry a cell phone, Mickey?  Wow!  IMHO all those cell phones aka mobile phones in Australia are akin to a plague - all those utterly boring conversations one is forced to listen to on trams, trains and in shops.  SCREAM!

    Posted by Helga Fremlin from Daylesford, Australia  on  04/04  at  04:49 PM

  16. Owen, I’m afraid I deeply disagree with you there.  I hope you don’t think every corner of the Earth would have to be populated with human beings before you would say the planet is overpopulated with people...the human population on the planet has more than doubled in the past 40 years...don’t you agree that is scary?  The effect of our overwhelming presence and life style (take all we want and ask for more) is shown in the 200 other species that go extinct every day.

    Posted by JOS from Chicago  on  04/04  at  05:02 PM

  17. this graph is one of the scariest things I’ve ever seen...it’s kind of hard to read, but the bottom graph charts human population growth over the past 2 million years...check out what happens starting 10,000 years ago:

    http://www.drhern.com/fulltext/why/fig3.htm

    Posted by JOS from Chicago  on  04/04  at  05:07 PM

  18. of course...my opinion is not whatsoever based on specific races...I am talking about the human race.

    captcha:growth

    Posted by JOS from Chicago  on  04/04  at  05:10 PM

  19. Hello again, all. Welcome back, Helga.

    I must agree with JOS. While I concur that overpopulation is a racist myth, that doesn’t mean we need more humans and it certainly doesn’t excuse what we humans have done to this planet. But, as captcha remidns me, my mind is not “closed” about this.

    Posted by Mickey Z. from Astoria  on  04/04  at  05:14 PM

  20. Hey thanks RMJ, and here I’d though I’d be chastized for sounding too negative. I’m sure I could think of a few professors who weren’t patient enough with me in college for that 90%. Yes, overpopulation is a complex issue, but I lean toward JOS on this, too. I mean, most of that 90% just doesn’t deserve a whole 50 square meters anyway.

    Posted by James from Hell's Kitchen  on  04/04  at  06:50 PM

  21. Good luck with the job hunt, James.

    Posted by Mickey Z. from Astoria  on  04/04  at  06:59 PM

  22. Thanks, it’s on its way…

    Posted by James from Hell's Kitchen  on  04/04  at  07:20 PM

  23. Hello everyone

    The fact remains we treat famine in the Third World by increasing food production in the First World. Obviously this does not stop the millions from starving because to do so would require a worldwide global effort to seriously deal with population control. So the starving millions get fed and then they reproduce and so yet again we have more starving so we increase food production which leads to a population explosion which leads to more famine which leads to an increase in food production which leads to a population explosion, etc. The population is never allowed to decline to a point where it can be supported by its own resources. So do we just go ahead and kill 9 out of every ten people? That does seem silly but clearly our current way of life is not working for the community of life on this planet as 200 species go extinct every day.

    Posted by Fiona from   on  04/04  at  08:46 PM

  24. Are humans good or bad for the planet?

    One must, of course, define exactly what is human.

    I won’t. 

    Now back to right field-- and hopefully with some rewarding and complex ideas for those who have the time and interest to check it out:

    Over at Radio Curious, Barry Vogel interviews Temple Grandin, Ph.D.  Here’s a link to the mp3: http://tinyurl.com/rnms8

    Vegetarians might get a shock hearing what Grandin has done for the meat industry-- but I certainly admire her for her effort to try to relieve suffering on this planet-- especially in helping us to understand autism.

    After listening to this program, one will certainly question conventional wisdom-- what it means to be a human, what it means to do good, even how we relate to animals.

    I like her book recommendation, and intend to check that out… later.

    Evolution Not Revolution!

    Robert B. Livingston
    San Francisco
    http://tinyurl.com/mbzst

    Posted by Robert B. Livingston from San Francisco  on  04/04  at  08:49 PM

  25. For what it’s worth this morning, I think that article that started this discussion is outrageous and horrendously counter-productive (except for that “scientist’s” career). Too many similarities to the whole “Left Behind” Christian fundamentalist fantasy.

    That said, it’s not people themselves that are overpopulating the planet. If you cut the population in half, but we still had post-industrial Euro-American culture hanging in there, the destruction and extinctions would surely continue. If we all adopted vegetarian diets, sustainable lifeways, and humanist principles you could easily double or treble the population without too much of a problem.

    As for Owen’s remark about spreading people out into the countryside, I strongly disagree. Chip Ward has written compellingly about how to heal some of the wounds of our culture. He recommends sustainable, responsible urban living, emptying out the suburbs (especially), ending urban sprawl, letting the countryside and wilderness heal and the highways crumble and disappear, and leaving only farmers outside of the cities. Interesting stuff.

    Posted by Keir from The Hague  on  04/05  at  03:26 AM

  26. Owen, I have to disagree with you. Overpopulation is a serious problem. We are currently living in a state of existence that is entirely unsustainable.

    I suppose you could argue that the current population is theoretically sustainable, which I would agree with, but under present conditions, it is not.

    Incidentally, I’m reading Jared Diamond’s “Collapse” right now. Very interesting and thought-provoking.

    Posted by Jeremy from Taiwan  on  04/05  at  04:07 AM

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