BKM said:
Not to romanticize village life in any way, one could argue that world population growth and the industrial economy/globalization has resulted in more misery for more people (while benefiting Westerners, native elites, and certain countries-like China, Southeast Asia, etc.) In some ways, hasn't life gotten far worse in most of Africa and a lot of South America? I don't KNOW this, so forgive my speculation.
Maybe on an even wierder segue from Michelle Zone's post: Couldn't Gay Rights be part of "nature's plan" to reduce population?
Thou art way behind the times: they already have the research showing that rat colonies in a limited lab space begin having increasing numbers of homosexuals after a certain degree of overcrowding is reached. (Good thing, too: what else are Chinese men of the future going to do when they so horribly outnumber the Babes??? :-D 8-! )
What few Die-Hard Optimist environmental writings I have run across essentially say this: Human Life Expectancy has sky rocketed in the past 100 years, globally. Everywhere -- it didn't go down in all these less developed countries, it just didn't go up as much as in more developed countries. Sounds like "quality of life" must have gone up that folks are SURVIVING longer, doesn't it???
With all due respect BKM, when people say the kind of thing you just said about quality of life "going down", I figure you really don't know much about history. For one thing, many of the issues that get painted as "low quality of life" and " a huge crisis" are things that humans couldn't be bothered to even think about, much less measure, 100 years ago. When what's-his-face wrote "Wealth of Nations", it was a radical idea that GNP was a kind of "wealth". Prior to that, the "wealth" of a nation was measured in how many gold bar were in the King's coffer. The idea that 'the masses' quality of life should even be measured as having any value at all or was worthy of study, etc, was revolutionary.
Until 100 years or so ago, HALF of all children born to human kind died before their 5th birthday. We now have sayings, like in LOTR, that "no parent should have to bury their child", lol. Parents used to routinely bury their children. They didn't bother to invest in their kids or get terribly attached because they couldn't afford to: odds were incredibly good that it would only "waste" what limited resources they had and cause them enormus heartache when the kid died.
In WWII -- which is NOT that long ago and my dad fought in it -- it was so common for flour to have either weevils or some other bug in it that soldiers could tell you which bug they preferred their biscuits and bread to be contaminated with. One of them was bitter. The other was not. We have people freaking out about bio-engineering. Yeah, well, most of those morons wouldn't be alive to freak out if we weren't doing "god only knows what" to our crops. You have to survive first before you can find the time to worry about sh*t like that.
Both my parents have known REAL hunger. My dad grew up in The Great Depression in a dirt-poor share-cropping family, in a log cabin with a dirt floor where snow drifts came in between the logs because they didn't have the money for fancy things like chinking. My mother is blind in one eye because she grew up in Germany during WWII and its aftermath and there were no doctors available.
We live in a country where everyone is on a "diet" and we spend our time fretting about going to the gym, disciplining our sweet tooth, and whether or not our alcohol consumption of caffiene consumption is "excessive". I roll my eyes at all these "problems" and I can't be bothered to spend the time to argue with idiots who try to "improve" my diet. Whatever food I can force my defective gullet to accept is a Success. I know that there is a link between sugar substitutes and brain cancer. I don't happen to CARE. I have serious blood sugar issues and sugar substitutes make eating and drinking TOLERABLE. If I live long enough to wind up with a brain tumor, I will worry about that then. In the mean time, I have get through my damn day now.
We have problems with "alcoholism" in part because it is coded into our genes to have a taste for alcohol. Alcohol kills germs and I had a daily nightcap for a year when I was being denied medical treatment and called "crazy" by the medical establishment. A hundred years or so ago, we didn't have aspirin, tylenol, motrin and so on. And people had physically hard jobs that took a serious physical toll. A few pints at the pub after back breaking labor all day was the ONLY pain killer and sleep inducer they had access to. I used to have Fantasies that I was so much more Virtuous and Self-Disciplined than most folks because I don't drink or do drugs, never really have and I am not tempted. Then I was diagnosed with a genetic disorder. I don't have self discipline. I have a defective body that can't tolerate that stuff. I no longer judge the actions of others. I wouldn't have lived through the year if I hadn't gotten over my prissy fantasy that I was Too Good to drink alcohol. I loathe the stuff. Who the hell am I to judge those who are healthier than I am???
People used to have "beer soup" for breakfast. They drink beer and wine all over Europe because drinking the well water would have killed you: the alcohol made these liquids SAFE to drink. And most people were low-grade drunk 24/7. Then we discovered caffeine, after we discovered things like pasteurization. A professor of mine once gave the class a link to a fascinating article about the cultural changes and political revolution fostered by chain-smoking, coffee-guzzling folks in coffee houses in Europe. The nicotine makes the body metabolize the caffeine twice as fast. These dens of iniquity resulted in hyped up, non-stop talking, highly alert individuals hankering to have a revolution -- and the hours they spent doped up on nicotine and caffeine instead of alcohol allowed for lengthy discussions in which ideas were explore, bonds of friendship and loyalty were forged, and plots were devised.
I could go on. This is all fascinating stuff to me. And most folks I meet are utterly clueless. But I need to shower and get lunch. I seriously suspect that I haven't even gotten to a few of the points/anecdotes I wanted to make. Perhaps I will burn up more of Dan's money on Bandwidth later. (Sorry that this has kind of turned into a rant. It is a topic I am passionate about.)
Later.