The Planet of the Humans
I have just finished watching the Michael Moore documentary and I am still in shock. Before looking at it, I have scanned some of the criticisms accusing Moore of inaccuracies, contradictions, misleading claims, so I decided to watch it with the sound turned off. I wanted to make up my mind based on the images the documentary was going to show me.
My conclusion: we live on a royally fucked up planet. Simple if a little bit crude. When I watched it again, with the sound turned back up again, three comments made by one of the people interviewed summed it up for me.
- Unless we give up our obsession with infinite growth on a finite planet;
- bring our exploding population under control and
- drastically reduce our consumption, we are screwed.
I couldn't disagree with any of these three. I have to add one of my own: The only solution I see for the energy crisis is to abandon our religious beliefs in BIG solutions and BIG technology and change our emphasis on small and distributed solutions. It's BIG that got us into trouble in the first place and only small can dig us out of it.
"Small is Beautiful" as the title of E. F. Schumacher's book published in 1973 tried to tell us - so far in vain.
My conclusion: we live on a royally fucked up planet. Simple if a little bit crude. When I watched it again, with the sound turned back up again, three comments made by one of the people interviewed summed it up for me.
- Unless we give up our obsession with infinite growth on a finite planet;
- bring our exploding population under control and
- drastically reduce our consumption, we are screwed.
I couldn't disagree with any of these three. I have to add one of my own: The only solution I see for the energy crisis is to abandon our religious beliefs in BIG solutions and BIG technology and change our emphasis on small and distributed solutions. It's BIG that got us into trouble in the first place and only small can dig us out of it.
"Small is Beautiful" as the title of E. F. Schumacher's book published in 1973 tried to tell us - so far in vain.
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Leonide
(new)
May 07, 2020 11:49AM
Francis, I'm in total agreement with your assessment and the three points. What is so great about BIG? Some serious economic thinkers have been advising no-growth economics for a while (Herman Daly, Steady State Economics). Rampaging populations are disastrous to any species. Consumption is the modern religion, balm to deep internal dissatisfaction but never truly fulfilling. Yech! We are a seriously flawed and screwed species heading toward extinction if we don't change our ways. BTW, small is wonderful to me as one of the smaller persons.
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