Would you care about the future?
The Natural Way
I stayed in a condo in Florida. The neighbour left her beloved little dog inside a screened-in back porch backing on an undeveloped trail area in a wetland. When she came home there was a big hole in the screen and her dog was gone, eaten by a hungry alligator. It was at once the evolution of the perfect predator and the misguidance of human judgment of designing a good and prosperous life.
When I started working it was in the Department of Tourism and Recreation, with Parks and Historic Resources included. It had a sense of the importance of human history and the need to protect the environment. Then the department was reorganized. Parks was plucked out and placed in a department of Natural Resources, where the common objective was killing off the resource:
Fisheries Branch was to manage licenses to kill fish by over harvesting species for example, in Lake Winnipeg.
Wildlife Branch’s objective was to hunt and trap wildlife.
Forestry Branch managed only the harvest of forests.
In this atmosphere it was impossible for Parks to meet the preservation objective of parks. Despite the 24 years of effort (I originally had responsibility for wildlife) to attempt to protect wildlife we now have a collapsed duck population, in the Whiteshell, no woodland caribou and almost no moose in Whiteshell Provincial Park. To harvest and kill off totally his is what our management is teaching our children through Program Wild, a Wildlife Branch program and Envirothon a Forestry Branch program, at a time when the earth environment is under heavy attack and degradation. It is time for a change.
WE NEED TO GET THE FUNDAMENTALS RIGHT.
1. Need to know what the disaster is.
2. Need to be able to see that we can restructure how our lives are lived,
What the control systems are and what are the limitation systems.
3. Need to know how we can shift to correct where the major problems are? How we get our leaders to shift the system so we don’t harm the intrinsic livability of our spheres of life? How do we adapt to what is the real condition of life? What is the future of biological productivity and how to improve it? How can all groups of people become involved in the solutions?
THE PROBLEM DEFINED
If one defines a problem in fine enough and narrow enough terms one can justify any action no matter how destructive the broad sweep of it is. This is how much of conservative narrow self serving politics and economy is run.
Because of this we recognize that we are in a terrible state of chaos, millions are forecast to die of starvation, and we destroy species and degrade the livability of the earth. We cannot say, “We need to change .” We have to say, “This, exactly, is how we get our politicians to change, our corporations to change, our mass media to change, our education systems to change and ourselves to change and we are ALL doing it today.”
There is now a host of environmental problems on the earth that in practice the politicians and corporate bosses are taking very little any action on. The result is they get worse each year. Generally we have extremely poor management of our cities, countries and planet.
Scientific forecasts are that there will be ten million people die from starvation, others say there will be a food shortage for 1 billion. The GMO protagonists say we can correct that. But food is only a small part of the problem. The problem is over consumption of all global resources: forests over cut, global fisheries to collapse by 2050, species loss due to over hunting, trapping and fishing and habitat loss to farms, cities and roadways. Fresh water in short supply, aquifers near the end of their capacity, more drought, and global warming, increasing amounts of CO2 July 08, 278 ppm, Dec. 08, 292 ppm and there are thresholds to very severe consequences, We have already passed some according got G. Dyer ‘s Climate Wars. We have overpopulated the planet and expect an increase to 9 billion. Biologists say the carrying capacity was met at one billion about 1900. We need serious population reduction policies and actions. One report climate warming causes 140 million deaths a year. Who do we look to for change?
It has become evident that the politician answer is, “I won’t do it till the guy next door does it”, and business just totally disregards the problem. A few have made changes but they have not affected the outcome. CO 2 increases and conditions are worsening.
Claudine Cohen says,”Extinction is not determined by senescence, hyper specialization, or mysterious predestination, but only by the relations among living beings and their environment. P 239” “Scenarios can be explanatory hypotheses, we might very well be able to test ….which force us to stretch our imaginations ….As a heuristic device they are very useful.” ibid Cohen p220. They can directly assist in problem solving.
We have to make the people who control power responsible. This may mean litigation, threat, media campaigns, and demonstrations. These people are now doing violence to the people of the planet. This future threat Suzuki calls the “cross generational crime”. The offenders have to be dealt with. What needs to be addressed?