Sustainability

[Eater of Clowns]

It's the eco-friendly buzz word just after green became cliche.  It's the new earth hipster way of saying green is fine for the general public, but sustainability is where it's at.  It's for people who know organic isn't necessarily the answer, who make conscious decisions to lessen their impact.  It's the management of people, economy, and environment in order to live on this earth forever, to undo what we've done and begin healing the scar tissue we live in on a daily basis.

Adam is this guy who's always been big on the trends, a discoverer personality that markets hope to catch the attention of because they know this motherfucker will spread the good word.  But there's no market in this one, Adam knows too well food marketing and its effect.  He's a vegan, not because he's against killing animals but because Adam knows factory farming them is bad for the environment and he has no access to healthy grass-finished beef.  He lives in the city and rides a bicycle to work, public transportation if it's really bad.  No cars, nope, that shit's a dead American dream where Sunday rides were the tradition and Route 66 was pure romance.  His clothes are from hemp and organic cotton, his electricity is from wind power, and he cooks like a mad motherfucker.

You see there's this test Adam took online, a sustainability test that was just for kicks at first but really got him thinking.  How many earths would it take to support human life if everyone on the planet lived like him?  The average American was 8.8.  Adam was a 5 at first (young people without many resources tend to score higher) and through all this sacrifice and hard work he's got himself down to a 2.3.  He's been doing all that brain work lately about how to lessen his impact and finally he's got the message, the real message.

He's really that discoverer personality like I said and on this one he'll be the first.  Adam goes out and gets himself a gun license and a high powered rifle.  Hunting is big in his parts so that's easy, God (or Gaia, or Whoeverthefuck) bless the USA.  He finds himself a nice little perch out of view and he waits for his prey to come out.  Finally the answer to sustainability!  After a little while he's got one in his sights and he waits calmly, remembering that he used to be pretty good at Boy Scout camp, keeps steady and fires at the big bastard.  He hits it dead on.  It's got to be at least...

Thirty-five years old.

Sustainability is the management of economic, environmental, and societal needs in hopes of finding an equilibrium that will let humanity live on this earth forever.  Current thinking is to curb economic gain and develop environmental practices without hurting people.  But that's a trade off, it's ignoring the whole idea.  On that online test Adam took it's impossible to get 1 or less than one and damned difficult to get less than 1.8.  It's got nothing to do with how we live.  It's that we live.  Or more appropriately, how many of us do.

So remember Adam's lesson.  If you want mankind to survive, kill at least three people.  It's the Sustainable thing to do.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Actually, you'll need to kill 2 people each.

There are some other words people should learn:

1.  Carrying capacity
2.  Die back
3.  Thomas Malthus

[Eater of Clowns]

I know it's not terribly original in concept, but I wanted to apply it to the term Sustainability just as a little deconstruction.  If people really believe in it, they need to accept the consequences of that mode of thought.

I just wish I'd written about it during my 9 college credits in sustainability.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

I know it's not terribly original in concept, but I wanted to apply it to the term Sustainability just as a little deconstruction.  If people really believe in it, they need to accept the consequences of that mode of thought.

I just wish I'd written about it during my 9 college credits in sustainability.

Well, the population IS going to be reduced, in one of two ways:

1.  The monkeys suddenly wake up, and start having a birth rate lower than 2, or

2.  Die back.

Guess which one it's going to be?   

[Eater of Clowns]

I know it's not terribly original in concept, but I wanted to apply it to the term Sustainability just as a little deconstruction.  If people really believe in it, they need to accept the consequences of that mode of thought.

I just wish I'd written about it during my 9 college credits in sustainability.

Well, the population IS going to be reduced, in one of two ways:

1.  The monkeys suddenly wake up, and start having a birth rate lower than 2, or

2.  Die back.

Guess which one it's going to be?   

I'm of the belief that eventually we'll wake up and accept an enlighte-BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

[The Good Reverend Roger]

I know it's not terribly original in concept, but I wanted to apply it to the term Sustainability just as a little deconstruction.  If people really believe in it, they need to accept the consequences of that mode of thought.

I just wish I'd written about it during my 9 college credits in sustainability.

Well, the population IS going to be reduced, in one of two ways:

1.  The monkeys suddenly wake up, and start having a birth rate lower than 2, or

2.  Die back.

Guess which one it's going to be?   

I'm of the belief that eventually we'll wake up and accept an enlighte-BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

I'm going to start eating people NOW, to beat the rush.

[Elder Iptuous]

I like how it's presented...

TGRR, remember: the noble savage eats every part!
Hey, I thought I recalled you bagging on Malthus at one point?
Was that somebody else?

[Jasper]

I've always bought the Bucky Fuller line:  Malthus wasn't right, what we need is smarter farming, not more.  The failure of the agricultural "green revolution" of the mid-20th Century didn't necessarily vindicate Malthus, it showed that intensive farming isn't sustainable.  Right now we could be sustainably  making enough food to more or less solve world hunger, but there's some dirty business with the agro industry these days that makes it infeasible.  If Monsanto and others hadn't screwed all our farmers, and if there were some kind of program that paid farmers to send their excess crops to 3rd world countries (instead of just farming less), we could feed everybody relatively easily, at least long enough to educate them and allow population growth to naturally decline with gentrification.

That said, sustainability is necessarily limited, due to entropy. 

[The Good Reverend Roger]

I like how it's presented...

TGRR, remember: the noble savage eats every part!
Hey, I thought I recalled you bagging on Malthus at one point?
Was that somebody else?

I bagged on him because he didn't - couldn't - foresee the technological innovations that changed his otherwise-perfect calculations.

I bag on modern Americans for just assuming those innovations will continue.  They probably won't, because we don't teach engineering and agricultural sciences anymore, we "teach the controversy", where religious fuckbags spend all damn day talking about "alternate, equally valid theories", with the result that students are now full of mushy-headed bullshit, with not a critical-thinking skill to their names.

The only people who ARE thinking have all been sidetracked into whimpering about left vs right, yada yada yada (and yeah, I am ESPECIALLY talking about the fucking "geniuses" in the Libertarian Party and other 3rd party nitwits).  Goddamn, how I hate you all.

Stupid fucking monkeys.  Get the fuck off my planet.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Right now we could be sustainably  making enough food to more or less solve world hunger,

Great.  Now transport it.

And do it again in 2050, when there will be 10-11 billion monkeys to feed.

[Jasper]

Right now we could be sustainably  making enough food to more or less solve world hunger,

Great.  Now transport it.

And do it again in 2050, when there will be 10-11 billion monkeys to feed.

The best idea I've ever heard for staunching population growth is to educate women.  I think the ideal solution would be a combined education/food aid program for women with a focus on vocational skills.  In conjunction with a sizeable donation of infrastructure building resources, I think any willing country could industrialize and become self-sufficient in twenty years.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

The best idea I've ever heard for staunching population growth is to educate women. 

Great.  I'll let the Pope, the Mullahs of Iran, and the Southern Baptists know you want to talk to them about it.

(Hint:  At the "Earth Summit" back in the 80s, they weren't even allowed to SAY "overpopulation" for religious reasons.)

[Jasper]

Yeah, I recognize that I'm just talking about human potential, not political actuality.

[Triple Zero]

all I can find about "die back" is that it's some kind of plant disease, but I get the feeling you're using it in a different fashion, what do you mean with it?

[Jasper]

all I can find about "die back" is that it's some kind of plant disease, but I get the feeling you're using it in a different fashion, what do you mean with it?

Die back:  Wherein a substantial proportion of a population dies.