For a movement to defend the right to live off of the land (repost from DailyKos) | 30 comments (30 topical, editorial, 0 hidden)

Re: For a movement to defend the right to live off (none / 1)

And an added question: what work will people do to get the money for their food? I ask because in a conversation elsewhere on the internet there arose the key point that "making more stuff" cannot continue indefinitely (due to raw materials.)

I don't believe that to be true. That is I think that certain materials will run out, meaning less of some stuff, replacement of other stuff, but I don't believe that there's any underlying 'ecological reality' that forces us to accept that your average westerner will have to live at the standard of living of the average person in Bolivia, and that there is little scope for improvement for the latter in the medium term. In the same way that I don't believe it when certain right wingers say the same thing, arguing from 'economic realities'. Again, there are such things as economic constraints, but socio-economic systems are primarily a product of politics, power, technology, and values, rather than the result of some 'natural' economic or ecological order.

As for the rest - no, the kind of urban gardening where people grow some vegetables that they couldn't otherwise get to supplement whatever starches that provide the bulk of their calories doesn't require anywhere near a full time commitment. Nor does it require all that much land, though still more than exists in many cities. Actually growing enough to provide yourself with enough for a good year round food supply is something else entirely, both in time and land requirements.

People move, and moved, to the cities for a wide variety of reasons. Those include the efforts of capitalist, or, in the case of England, feudal elites, to get more money that Cass and De talk about. But they also include the desire for a better and/or more interesting life, and population pressures leading to either environmental degradation or lack of land. The mass movement away from agriculture in postwar Europe was largely due to the second one - life as a factory worker in Milan or the Ruhr improved much faster than that of a small farmer or sharecropper. In much of the third world today it is all of the above.

by MarekNYC on Wed Jan 10th, 2007 at 04:46:48 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: For a movement to defend the right to live off (none / 0)

On the first point, is your idea that if the world population stays around the seven billion mark, there are enough resources out there to keep making various things, maybe with more efficient recycling of old things so that tomorrows chairs are todays tin cans, where the planet's resources cycle round and about us without running out? Sorta positing humans as essentially stuff making and stuff acquring animals--I don't mean that in any snide way...a sort of material emanation of our curiosity, so humans are happiest when making things, swapping things for other things (maybe via money exchanges etc.), and kicking back...letting technology do the hard pulling?

Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.

by rg (leopold dot lepster at google mail dot com) on Wed Jan 10th, 2007 at 05:46:56 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: For a movement to defend the right to live off (none / 0)

Yes, and it's not just the stuff making and acquiring, it's also that a lot of that stuff makes life more pleasant. Washing machines, running water, medical technology, furniture, music in your home, books, light, ability to move around, communications, etc.

by MarekNYC on Wed Jan 10th, 2007 at 06:14:19 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: For a movement to defend the right to live off (none / 1)

>Washing machines, running water, medical technology, furniture, music in your home, books, light, ability to move around, communications

What percentage of the world's population has access to these things? If we just take medical technology, how many humans have access (either physical or financial) to medical technology?

I went off to google to see if I could find some numbers, and wandered into this from ...oh my word...dieoff.org

"Science Summit" on World Population:
A Joint Statement by 58 of the World's Scientific Academies

I have no quick way of finding out the truth-worthiness of those academies.

There's a preamble which states:

In a follow-up to several recent initiatives by assemblies of scientists and scientific academies, most notably one taken by the Royal Society of London and the US National Academy of Sciences that resulted in a joint statement, "Population Growth, Resource Consumption, and a Sustainable World, '' issued in February 1992 (see Documents, PDR, June 1992), representatives of national academies of science from throughout the world met in New Delhi, 24-27 October 1993, at a ''Science Summit'' on World Population. The participants issued a statement, signed by representatives of 58 academies. The statement offers a wide-ranging if ex cathedra-style discussion of population issues related to development, notably on the determinants of fertility and concerning the effect of demographic growth on the environment and the quality of life. It also sets forth policy propositions, with emphasis on contributions that ''scientists, engineers, and health professionals'' can make to the solution of population problems. The statement finds that ''continuing population growth poses a great risk to humanity, '' and proposes a demographic goal, albeit with a rather elusive specification of a time frame: "In our judgement, humanity's ability to deal successfully with its social, economic, and environmental problems will require the achievement of zero population growth within the lifetime of our children. '' The text of the academies ' statement is reproduced below.

The New Delhi meeting was convened by a group of 15 academies "to explore in greater detail the complex and interrelated issues of population growth, resource consumption, socioeconomic development, and environmental protection.'' One of the convening organizations, the Nairobi-based African Academy of Sciences, declined to sign the joint statement, issuing, instead, one of its own. The text of this statement is reproduced below as the second Documents item appearing in this issue. Other academies that did not participate in the New Delhi meeting, or did not choose to sign the joint statement (whether for substantive or procedural reasons), included academies of Ireland, Italy, Japan, Singapore, and Spain, and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. Notwithstanding the African Academy dissent, representatives of six African national academies, among them four from countries of sub-Saharan Africa (Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, and Uganda) were among the fifty-eight signatories.

The world is in the midst of an unprecedented expansion of human numbers. It took hundreds of thousands of years for our species to reach a population level of 10 million, only 10,000 years ago. This number grew to 100 million people about 2,000 years ago and to 2.5 billion by 1950. Within less than the span of a single lifetime, it has more than doubled to 5.5 billion in 1993.

This accelerated population growth resulted from rapidly lowered death rates (particularly infant and child mortality rates), combined with sustained high birth rates. Success in reducing death rates is attributable to several factors: increases in food production and distribution, improvements in public health (water and sanitation) and in medical technology (vaccines and antibiotics), along with gains in education and standards of living within many developing nations.

Over the last 30 years, many regions of the world have also dramatically reduced birth rates. Some have already achieved family sizes small enough, if maintained, to result eventually in a halt to population growth. These successes have led to a slowing of the world's rate of population increase. The shift from high to low death and birth rates has been called the "demographic transition."

The rate at which the demographic transition progresses worldwide will determine the ultimate level of the human population. The lag between downward shifts of death and birth rates may be many decades or even several generations, and during these periods population growth will continue inexorably. We face the prospect of a further doubling of the population within the next half century. Most of this growth will take place in developing countries.

So a question:

What is the best way of transitioning developing countries to the developed world's arriving standard of low death and birth rates? One way would be to make them more like us. But aye here's the rub...Is our position only maintained by their being a lot of people who are not like us...and never will be like us? We have the power, they don't. And "we" is spread across the globe, the nation state is dead, but the regional block is thriving, and some nation states are, in fact, regional blocks...

So, thinking in terms of schooling, medical services, a warm place to read a good book, all the non-tech heavy experiences we could all have...and maybe it would look very similar to some more enlightened democratic countries, but...people don't have time for all that, because they don't have access to food unless they do something for someone else. Does the capitalist expansion model help them out of that trap? You need money to live in a capitalist society, or else you're reduced to picking up the scraps. No free lunch! But once upon a time, people picked food from the trees, and from the ground...

...this is where I hear the gritting of teeth. Because they were also attacked by wolves (though apparently this is a myth...man's best friend is his dog...why did we have it in for wolves...the besrmiched species...bemerded...by humans...to keep them away...their howling....

I'm sure someone once said, "Before we have any more children, shall we sort out making the world a nice place to be?" The nicer the world, the less children will have, on average...an average of two. One for you and one for me. If every couple has two children, there is no net gain to the world's population...except it has increased by two for every adult couple...and then it stabilises at two...and we can get on and enjoy our funky new friendly world...ah shit, the techonic plates are shifting again. Shit!

Ah, Nomad! A planet is not a risk-free environment. Yes! Exactly!

Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.

by rg (leopold dot lepster at google mail dot com) on Wed Jan 10th, 2007 at 08:29:08 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: For a movement to defend the right to live off (none / 1)

On the second point, a quick google got me this page, from theworld.org, the website of "PRI's The World".

It was one of those lateral wanders through the internet. I was wondering you know, really, how many of those city people are there because they want to be there?

Fink: Many governments demolish slums under the banner of eradicating urban blight and crime. But often it's just a pretense to quash centers of political opposition, or to clear land for developers. Almost always, the slumdwellers simply rebuild or relocate, and the slums often grow even larger than before.

Anna Tibaijuka directs UN-HABITAT. That's the United Nations agency charged with improving shelter for the world's poor. She says slums are booming for reasons that many countries share, like poverty and war, which push people from the countryside into cities.

That's the kind of quote I was looking for, a closer analysis of the situation, make humans human again, and anyway, I wondered, "Who is www.world.og?"

A few clicks later, I was at wikipedia.

Public radio, PRI, and NPR

Public radio is a generic term for radio stations or programming that is not funded by advertising -- specifically commercials. It is the opposite of commercial radio, the funding setup for most radio stations in the United States. PRI, NPR, and APM are the largest producers and distributors of public radio programming in the United States, and they compete with each other for slots on public radio stations and the attention of listeners. Any given public radio station may be an NPR member and an affiliate of PRI simultaneously.

PRI is a younger organization than NPR, which was founded 13 years earlier in 1970. Many PRI shows draw a younger overall audience than shows produced by NPR. Some listeners and critics believe that PRI programs feature a wider range of voices than NPR programs. Many programs that were formerly distributed by PRI, such as A Prairie Home Companion and Marketplace, are now distributed by American Public Media. In addition, PRI distributed World Cafe for many years, but in 2005, its distribution was switched to NPR.

...visions of...that guy...with the glasses...lives in Minessota...St. Paul's, he invented that small town...Lake Woebegon...

Has moved to NPR...perhaps...

Anyways, I'm not anti-tech in any way shape or form, I just get bored with new tech being shoved under my nose all the time...being conned at times, and the best way not to be conned is not to take part in the game, just walk away. But what if someone's put up a fence?

So I see renewable energy, locally distributed and with the possibility but not the necessity of connecting wider, except under good, healthy long term agreements beneficial to both sides....

Ya know I think a lot of human's have a grim lifestyle. The statistic tonight was, "One in eight adults in the U.K. is a carer for someone with a serious illness." And did he say "Eight million of us?", I can't remember--maybe I misremember. But then they flashed up the new projection: By [I can't remember when. Not tomorrow or next year, but five years? I can't remember], yes by this year in the not too distant future, the figure would have risen to 1 in 5.

Ya know, there's a bad attitude that let's that happen, something harsh and unforgiving, like a potato field in February, perhaps, when the wind is harsh once more, ach.... I don't think I've heard a single voice on ET that wants to move back to that. But I don't think that's a genuine reproduction of life under modern tech. farming techniques. And I don't think the huge food providers follow those modern tech. farming techniques, I think they're more like chemists mixing proportions, swishing liquids, and the product is...food. Was nature really that violent and dangerous? I'm sure for some it was, but I reckon for others...and how many are those others? Where are the statistics? I suppose they don't all live in one place as they are a product of the construction of social spaces....kcurie! A diary on magic, please.

Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.

by rg (leopold dot lepster at google mail dot com) on Wed Jan 10th, 2007 at 06:12:13 PM EST
[ Parent ]

For a movement to defend the right to live off of the land (repost from DailyKos) | 30 comments (30 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)

Top Diaries

Of Childless Cat Ladies and other matters...

Lest we forget: How extreme violence and division have been...

A blog policeman's lot is not a happy one

The Amazing thing that's happening in the US Presidential...

Hoover's FBI: Patriotism, Nationalism, MAGA, Fascism

Net Zero Energy - August 24, 2024

Recent Diaries

EU War Hawks Competing w US Congress

Seals Special Operations Mali

Dissuader l'Iran? | par Le Monde |

Post WWII: Building a Terror State Inside Europe

Tampered AP-900 Pagers Explode Across Lebanon

Of Childless Cat Ladies and other matters...

Hasbara Content U.S. State Dep't Briefing

Trump's Loomer Agent Provocateur

Dominique De Villepin Se Rend Immortel

Al Jazeera Documentary Egyptian Icon Inji

Jewish Terror and Genocide - Israel Firster

Impunity the New Judeo-Evangelical Coalition

Lest we forget: How extreme violence and division have been...

The EU In Inevitable Economic Backslide

Incoherent On Morals and Law & Order

Dutch Cabinet and Israeli Threats to ICC Prosecutors

Alan Dershowitz the Closet Republican

Israel Murders Peace Activists

GS: MAGA Policy Hits EU Economy Hard

Hoover's FBI: Patriotism, Nationalism, MAGA, Fascism

Occasional Series