Living sustainably doesn't mean giving up GM foods it means giving up our firstborn.GM is a tool that can be used for good or evil. Overpopulation is the biggest issue.
After you.
Ooh, Terence Mckenna Vinnie?
Now we’re getting to the interesting stuff.
Bit of hubris there maybe, VD?Humanity is not capable of, even if it wanted to, wiping out life on earth. The earth is a ■■■■■■ big place and life teems all over it from deep ocean thermal vents to nematodes deep in the soil and squillions of bacteria EVERYWHERE. And those things are hard to eradicate - consider the vast effort of an advanced industrialised and technological society required to exterminate smallpox - and that was a relatively easy case cos it could really only survive in human bodies. We can’t even eradicate rats in cities, which are the most heavily human-optimised environments on earth.
Can we wipe out a few varieties of megafauna - hell yes. In fact, the northern white rhino went extinct just the other week, yay us.
Can we wipe out life on earth? No. Humanity is very small, and very brief, and we’ve only lived on the planet for ab eyeblink, geologically speaking. Life will outlive us. Even if we’re stupid enough to allow the worst global warming predictions to come true and we drive ourselves and 50-odd percent of other species extinct, in a mere 5 million years or so evolution will have done its thing and produced an incredible fascinating array of critters in all shapes and sizes to replace us. It’s happened before - the Permian extinction and the K-T extinction didn’t wipe out life on earth, we have precious little chance even if we wanted to.
Unless we do something cosmically stupid like accidentally generate an artificial black hole to consume the earth or trigger the sun going nova or something, the worst we can do is annihilate ourselves and generate another major extinction event to add to the world’s long, long, long list of them. Big deal.
Pretty much no human neglect or everyday activity is going to exterminate life on earth. Life is TOUGH. We’ll destroy our own food chain, trigger mass starvation and war, and starve/slaughter ourselves to death before we even get close to making a serious dent in the capacity of the earth to sustain life.
Don’t worry about life on earth, worry about human civilisation, if you think (as I do) that any of it is worth preserving.
Um yeah, it was pretty obvious I was concerned with the human species. I guess the higher meaning of what I was getting at went through to the keeper. I wasn’t referring to every single microbe and moving thing on the entire planet, I meant life, as in life as we know it, in that it it is currently in danger of being radically altered. I didn’t go into detail like a primary school teacher, sorry.
If you’re going to get all narky when people don’t understand precisely what you’re thinking, then you might want to choose your words more carefully. “Extinction of life on earth” is pretty plain in its meaning. No additional detail required - you just need to use words that actually mean what you want them to mean.
Before we do that master shift on conscious thinking, how about we stop ■■■■■■■■ in our own backyard, and when the effects become clear to the clear majority of scientists who try and warn us to stop, we all stop calling it a conspiracy of eugenics and stop buying into the propaganda machines of the people doing the most ■■■■■■■■.
(sorry about the small screen, GEO restrictions…).
2:18 onwards is the best part.
Campaigning for Do Everything is preeeetty much the same end result as campaigning for do nothing.
Vine D, stop worrying, I got about 15 seconds into that video and up popped Paul R Ehrlich. Paul and Anne Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb in 1968, an alarmist piece of garbage designed to panic, as an example I give you this.
“The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate”
And in 2012.
“Ehrlich who was described as alarmist in the 1970s but who says most of his predictions have proved correct, says he was gloomy about humanity’s ability to feed over 9 billion people.”
There were famines in the 50’s and 60’s but improved agriculture and one other factor which I won’t mention here for fear of causing mass hysteria amongst the young has enabled the feeding of a population that has increased from 3.5 billion in 1968 to 7.0 billon now.
The techniques used are the same as presently used with “Global Warming”. Create a panic and use it to gouge every last cent out of the people.
In this he is no different to charlatans and rent-seekers like Al Gore and Tim Flannery, money grubbing hypocrites who make unprovable claims and the charge $50,000 for a lecture, then go and buy beach properties they claim are going to be flooded by rising tides.
You may wonder why old people are cynical, it it because we have been there and done and seen that.
The world is full of people who will take advantage of you, so grow up and look critically at any statement that worries you.
As far as extinctions go, the natural background rate is 14 species per year.
Most animals that are in danger today is because of habitation pressures by humans or because old Chinese men think they can get a hard-on by eating them, so you had better figure a way of reducing the population or invent a real good aphrodisiac.
all those changes in animals and plant behaviour responding to climate change. Pretty sure they’re not causing a panic to suit their own agendas.