jim at heartfield.demon.co.uk 06/28/00 10:39AM >>>
> Yes, please do. Gutta Percha, perhaps? My point is that some
> specifically named natural phenomena might reach exhaustion, but there
> is no record of any reversal of the increasing rate of interchange
> between man and nature, ever. There are no absolute boundaries to human
> development, only relative, and generally social ones.
Charles Brown:
> CB: Of all the species that have gone extinct, might many of them have had no record of any reversal of an increasing rate of interchange between them and nature, up until very close to extinction ? I can't quite understand how no record of reversal of increasing rate in the past insures no such reversal in the future at some time. Of course , that doesn't say a "future" reversal is imminent, but what about the possibility of a midterm future reversal ?
I was thinking of various agricultural disasters like the Dust Bowl and the Irish potato famine, which followed particular agricultural practices and led to situations in which the inhabitants of formerly productive territories had to disperse (or, in the case of the Irish, die _en_masse_).
However, there are also some instances of non-humans exhausting environments. A few years ago I read about an island in, I think, the Great Lakes, with deer and wolves; the populations regularly go out of balance and crash because the island can't easily export and import deer or wolves. Of course, bacteria do this sort of thing all the time, but they can rely on a 20-minute reproductive cycle and do not attempt to maintain a very high level of culture. One might also think of parasites which kill their hosts.
Gordon:
> >As human powers of production and transformation increase,
> >then, it seems certain that misadventures of these kinds will
> >become increasingly likely on a broader scale, especially if
> >(as is now the case) those in authority and their flacks deny
> >the possibility.
jim at heartfield.demon.co.uk 06/28/00 10:39AM >>>
> 'Seems certain'? Isn't it precisely those things that seem certain that
> ought to be questioned. You seek to demonise counter-arguments ahead of
> time as the work of government spokesmen. But it is government spokesmen
> who have done most to insist upon the limits to development, and
> naturalise the engineered scarcity of capitalist societies.
You're certainly welcome to question the idea, although I think you need to question the opposite assumption at the same time. My assertion is: if you keep doing bigger and bigger stuff, then when accidents happen and things go wrong they will be bigger and bigger accidents and wronger and wronger things. Yours, I take it, is that nothing serious can possibly go wrong. It reminds me of the automated airplane joke.
The destruction of the environment is a way of maintaining scarcity. "They took all the trees and put 'em in a tree museum, then they charge you five dollars just to go and see'em." We have long since achieved the power to feed, clothe, and house everyone while radically reducing the amount of time worked; that we haven't done so indicates to me that no amount of purely technical progress will bring about an end to scarcity as long as the bourgeoisie or some similar ruling class remain in control of the economic system. Their authority depends on organizing people's lives through employment and consumption, therefore scarcity must and will be produced.