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climbrunride
Trad climber
Durango, CO
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Dec 12, 2007 - 11:40pm PT
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Excellent - that's my new favorite movie! I can't wait 'til it comes out on DVD. I'll even buy a new HDTV to watch it on. Then of course, throw it all away once I'm bored with it.
Seriously though, that is a seriously good video. It's worth 20 minutes of your time to see it.
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BrentA
Gym climber
Roca Rojo
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Dec 12, 2007 - 11:46pm PT
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Well worth the time. Thanks Peter
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Batrock
Trad climber
Burbank
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Dec 13, 2007 - 12:20am PT
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I somehow think the Amazon analogy has lost it's punch. 25 years ago when I was in high school we were destroying several thousand acres a day and the rain forest would be gone in a few years. It's still there, albeit smaller. What happened? I would like to here or see some true figures on this.
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L
climber
The Late Great Planet Earth
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Dec 13, 2007 - 12:24am PT
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Good film Peter. Thanks for helping me feel guilt-free about not shopping for junk this Christmas.
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T2
climber
Cardiff by the sea
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Dec 13, 2007 - 12:40am PT
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That was great. For anybody that liked that video you should read Collapse by Jarred Diamond.
Diamond is a phd professor at UCLA who also wrote the Pulitzer Prize winning "Guns, Germs, and Steel". Collapse explores many societies old and current (the Anasazi, the Vikings of Greenland, Easter Island and the state of Montana to name a few) that have failed due to enviromental miss management or succeeded from proper managment. It is stunning reading that out lines a pattern of enviromental catastrophe with warning signs that surround us, that most of us choose to ignore.
Check it out.
Thanks for the video link maysho
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Batrock
Trad climber
Burbank
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Dec 13, 2007 - 12:43am PT
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The rainforest comment got me thinking. Here is a very small sample of deforestation rates for the "worlds" rainforest. The sites did not specify any one area.
1.5 acres/sec
3 acres/sec
20 acres/minute
80 acres/minute
150 acres/minute
Total deforestation estimates ranged from 15 years to 80 years.
The truth is out there somewhere.
Deforestation bad, rainforest good.
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ng
Trad climber
southwest
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Dec 13, 2007 - 01:21am PT
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thanks for more depressing sh#t about our world - think i'll slit my wrists right now
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Kicking Cairns
climber
Dreamtime
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Dec 13, 2007 - 08:11am PT
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ng,
Keep that sense of humor, we need it more than ever now. We need the jesters and the ones willing to say the king has no clothes!
KC
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ng
Trad climber
southwest
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Dec 13, 2007 - 11:16am PT
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KC,
thanks for the note!
honestly, i cannot watch anymore documentaries or hear anymore about killing baby seals, cruelty to animals, global warming, Rwanda, the Balkans, the Holocaust, GWB, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Iraq, Iran, Israel, Palestine, Vietnam, pollution, tainted drinking water, consumerism, cancer, overpopulation, any of the Koyansqaasti trilogies, whale hunting, over fishing the seas, mercury contamination, PCBs, serial killers, or the like....
my roof starting leaking today, i have a cyst in my finger-pulley tendon that needs surgery, my car is a piece of sh#t, and i am 37 and still have 190,000$ in student loan debt -
i'm f*#ked and we're all f*#ked.
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TradIsGood
Recently unshackled climber
the Gunks end of the country
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Dec 13, 2007 - 11:28am PT
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In order from slowest to fastest, that's
20 acres/minute
80 acres/minute
1.5 acres/sec
150 acres/minute
3 acres/sec
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Maysho
climber
Truckee, CA
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Topic Author's Reply - Dec 13, 2007 - 11:45am PT
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Understandable to feel that way Ng, and so many do. I, however, perhaps like a grinning idiot, feel totally optimistic and enthusiastic about the creative opportunities and potential of redesigning all of our human built systems over the next 25 years.
The sense of mission I have in my work is that every student I interact with is going to be a consumer, a constituant, a worker or a designer of this rebuilt relationship between humans and the planet. Or maybe it is too late and at least my students will go down with more understanding of the systemic roots of the collapse they experience. Luckily I still have a lot of energy for the former hopeful world view.
At this moment our communal evolution needs those who, like new spring seedlings push inexorably up through the muck into the sun and spread their energy to help others grow, rather than those who surrender to despondency and let darkness cloud their hearts and minds.
Rock on,
Peter
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ng
Trad climber
southwest
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Dec 13, 2007 - 11:51am PT
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Maysho,
can i get some of what you're drinking or smoking?
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tarek
climber
berkeley
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Dec 13, 2007 - 12:02pm PT
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thanks for posting that, Peter.
Best simple explanation of externalizing costs of production that I've seen. She ends with optimism, but could do a whole second piece on all of the amazing things people are doing to change the line into a circle. See the Interface corporation, for example.
Batrock, I think that you are right in questioning the "punch" of the "Amazon analogy." Rates of deforestation in the tropics vary enormously, so extrapolating to years of tropical forest remaining makes little sense. Rates can be extremely fast, for example in Indonesian Borneo, where staggeringly large tracts of forest have been burned to plant oil palms. Where I work, people may take 10 days to clear one hectare of rain forest with machetes and axes, wait 2 months for it to dry out, and then burn it. (Roughly 100 of these slash and burn plots are being cleared per year in a basin of 45,000 sq. km. is how it scales up to that particular landscape.) Giant soybean operations in Brazil can wipe rain forest out orders of magnitude faster, etc., etc.
There are enormous expanses of forest left in the New World Tropics. In Asia, the picture is very grim, and in Africa, somewhere in between.
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Maysho
climber
Truckee, CA
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Topic Author's Reply - Dec 13, 2007 - 12:13pm PT
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Yeah, I just recently realized the tragedy of some of my friends who work for Amazon Watch/Rainforest Action Network/Greenpeace, who converted to bio-diesel, only to find soon after that what was coming out of the pumps was palm oil from mowed down rainforest lands! f*cked up! There is promise in efficient sustainable bio-fuels production, rainforest destruction can no longer be an externalized cost if we want the planet to have lungs.
Peter
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WBraun
climber
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Dec 13, 2007 - 12:18pm PT
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I was deep in the Amazon for 2 months. I was in places that white man is not even allowed to go.
You wouldn't believe what really goes on there.
I've seen the slash and burn both in the Amazon and Borneo.
Our world is run by very materialistically contaminated souls.
Good luck in this age of Kali. It will only get worst of which you have not even begun to witness yet. I guarantee it.
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tarek
climber
berkeley
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Dec 13, 2007 - 12:35pm PT
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Werner,
Chances are, where you were in the deep Amazon, the slash and burn is sustainable (a vague concept used for brevity). The more we learn about humans in the Amazon Basin (e.g., what is summarized in C. Mann's 1491), the more we see that the forest we might regard as "pristine" has been altered by humans. The key has been the shifting nature of it, and not trying to use the rain forest to feed the world, provide its energy needs and fried foods fix.
Industrial scale operations in tropical forests can't be compared to the effects of low density rain forest peoples.
To bring it back to Yosemite, as Kauk said once, paraphrasing, if it comes to removing a bunch of bolts on the cliffs, we can do it. Removing the roads and everything else--now that's a challenge.
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Mustang
climber
From the wild, not the ranch
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Dec 13, 2007 - 04:18pm PT
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Well done, and simple for school-aged children to understand.
Unfortuneately, the mechanisms that drive the engine are far more complex(eg,shareholders, p/e ratios and share prices, to name a few),and the overall scale is beyond mind boggling.
Human beings at best, are flawed to a great degree, and until fundamental, human behavior is changed, we will sadly continue on at an exponential rate of consumption.
The planet reached a level of unsustainability for the human species about 1985, yet people still to continue to have children, so where is the genetic logic in that? As a species, we have proven our success at reproductivity and I am afraid that is the 'best' as a whole, we as a species, have to offer.
If you believe in some of the existing fringe theories, war, disease, famine and even engineered biogens, are the mechanisms that are and will continue to be used to limit the population, eventually reducing the number to an overall goal of around 500 milllion, a sustainable number for sure. Kind of the antithesis of naive optimism.
Throw in some rising sea levels due to climate change, and that should finish some things off quite nicely.
The only saving grace I see, is that the planet will eventually take care of itself in due time, and the bacteria called the human race, will succumb to forces that will make it the next carbon layer.
"I see your consumerism, and raise you a capitalism."
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