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Yet another hammering on that ecological drum that a lot of the btl denizens at Off-G just can't seem to hear

Posted as a btl comment on Matthew Ehret’s latest piece, published at Off-G today: ‘The Misanthropic Bankers Behind COP 26’:

SELFQUOTE:

Both Matthew and a tranche of the Off-G btls here just can’t get it right about population and eugenics.

Let’s have another weary go:

Yes, there’s a eugenicist attitude amongst the TPTshouldn’tB, where they really seem to hallucinate that they’re somehow ‘superior’ to the rest of us, and they are right to ‘manage’, and when they see fit to reduce the numbers of we untermenschen cattle; preferably to restrict breeding only to their own ‘superior’ kind - LOL!. And yes, that attitude - coming from idiots with a laughable, ludicrous idea of their own 'superiority (hah! what a complete bloody joke!) - stinks like a cess-pit. Strictly for dummkopf psychopaths.

But yes, there’s also a natural ecological process, seen repeatedly and widely throughout the natural world, forever, where a species finds itself, by mere chance, in a situation conducive to rapid build-up of its numbers: a brief bloom of plenty of available food; comfortable climate, temporary absence or dearth of predators, and so on. (In our case, it was breaking into the stash of stored ancient Sun energy in the fossil-hydrocarbon pools sequestered just below the surface in the Earth’s crust.) Automatically, the fated species finds itself in a population-overshoot episode. No choice. It just happens.

They’ve been happening forever in the Gaian life-web of Planet Earth, and they always go the same doleful way: Numbers follow the lower part of an exponential growth curve; the extra food and other conducive conditions are consumed rapidly, and the species numbers then depart the exponential curve, crash down precipitately to well below the original stable carrying capacity, and then - if they’re lucky - climb slowly back up to that level. Rinse and repeat, as conditions allow. Locusts do it every few years; lemmings also; and many others.

We idiotically self-inflating humans believe - too many of us - that we’re somehow exempt from these iron rules of ecology; because of our blindingly god-like brilliance, apparently. As with so many other things, we’re right up Shit Creek without a paddle in that utterly-ridiculous delusion.

It needs to be said, yet again: The Club of Rome was a bunch of standard-issue big-biz crooks; but the Meadows team whom they funded and set on to do ‘The Limits To Growth’ study were real, honest scientists, who - in the late-'60s/early-'70s - were still able to do honest, un-bribed science; which they did. ‘TLTG’ and ‘TLTG - The Thirty-Year Update’ are still the most reliably-accurate account of how trends have gone since publication, and are still reliably on-track to indicate where they will go for the rest of this century. And btw, the Meadowses and their colleagues never said anything about humankind as a cancer. They just selected five widely-seen processes, in human society, including population. and projected them forwards on current trends; nothing more tendentious than that.

The current human population-overshoot episode will most probably have resolved itself automatically, in the time-honoured natural way, whatever ineffectual human interventions do or fail to do, by some time in the 2100-2150 time-frame. The already-happening steady reduction of human fertility is one clear herald of that natural process. No eugenics bastardies are required, and would turn out to be damp-squibs anyway. And the delusional myth of techie-techie-GROWTH’N’PROGRESSFOREVER!!! will be pretty much of a permanently dead horse too, by then.

This is because of the Long Descent which is already taking away right now our ability to run the current brief, mad interlude of techie-techie industrial ‘civilisation’, as the natural commodities which are its absolutely-essential, non-substitutable sine qua non begin to get less and less available, and more and more expensive, in both capital and energy, to produce. EROEI (qv) will be the undoing of our megalomanic delusions of grandeur.

These eco-geophysical processes are well beyond any - hallucinated - capabilities of the Naked Ape to control, and so they will remain. They’re happening to us, and will continue to happen, as fate. And their playing out will administer a serious slap-down to our utterly comical delusions of god-like techie-techie power.

Meanwhile, there’s no need to think of homo ‘sapiens-sapiens’ (hah!!) as either a cancer or a semi-divine blessing to the Earth. We’re just another member of the multitude of Mam Gaia’s roster of children: Currently drunk on our own hallucinated ‘specialness’ (ffs! we plebs are as deluded as the gangsters-in-charge in this), and riding for a big, sobering fall, fools that we are.

Those of us who are going to survive this Single Giant Pulse Event of industrial-civ will be obliged to recognise the non-negotiable truths sketched here, and get ourselves back into a suitably respectful posture towards the great Earth Creature - Mam Gaia or Pachamama, as our much wiser forebears called her - as we learn painfully what’s good for us.

UNQUOTE.

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I do miss the upvote feature on OffG as it could be useful to sort comments by ‘Best’ and sail past some of the crud. I also miss the comments by BigB, though probably (s)he still posts from time to time. Always submitted wise counsel on this particular issue, free of rose-tinted XR specs, and far more worth reading than solipsistic drivel by Ed Curtin.

I see that Greta is adopting a fairly aggressive staged antagonism to the GICs nowadays, all the better to project a faked debate on the Green New Deal. Now that’s a Deceived Influencer.

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And an Abused Vulnerable to boot. Dmitry Orlov or John Greer were speaking recently about a similar figure - name misremembered - of an earlier period in our lifetimes who also had a brief meteorite blaze as a Jeanne D’Arc type wunderkind, fell into obscurity after her quarter-hour of fame, and resurfaced in adulthood as a perfectly unremarkable face-in-the-crowd. Pray that Greta is so lucky!