Site Presented By
Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
> Chikalada's got it absolutely right - the single underlying contributory factor to practically all of Planet Earth's problems is there are just too many human beings: we are the equivalent of a cancer on Earth, destroying the organism that sustains us.
It's amazing how willing well-fed, light-skinned Westerners are to vote other people off the planet (and I mean this generally -- I have no idea about the background of the person cited above).
If there's a cancer, it's not in the developing world -- it's in the resource-besotted West. And, very soon, China. We're the ones who gobble up the energy and raw materials. We're the biggest polluters. We're the ones who export our industrial needs overseas -- with all its nasty fallout -- then pay pennies on the dollar to foreign laborers. All in the name of cheap goods at home.
As an aside, most of the West is graying and underpopulated. This is why we must import so much labor.
What's the solution? Population planning, of course. But if we want to halt "overpopulation," we'll need to address its root cause: poverty, the bastard child of colonialism and predatory capitalism.
Good article. Moderation in all things -- that is a good rule to live by.
I have talked to the folks handing out anti-meat literature and when I point out that these animals would not lilkely survive in the wild, they require our care and that if we didn't eat them there would be no profit or incentive in their care, they say fine.
Let them go extinct.
No problem with that.
As for PETA, animals shouldn't eat meat either. If someone hands a pet snake over to them, they just let it starve to death. Heaven forbid that a mouse or rat die.
They do not understand nature or life. Probably because they are malnourished to the point of suffering cogntive difficulties. A vegan diet that provides the proper nutrition requires knowledge and effort far beyond that of most folks.
All animals die anyway. We are the only species that take great pains to make sure no other animal may partake of and recycle our precious bodily proteins, fat, bone and gristle. There are also far worse ways to die than becoming food for a predator.
We do eat far too much meat and we suffer the consequences of that, but extinction of domesticated food animals is not acceptable. That is what they are putting on the table.
I am less worried about people predating on domseticated animals than I am worried about corporations predating on domesticated primates - US. When cattle farmers want to make the cattle fat, they feed them corn. When corporations want to make people fat, they give them high fructose corn sweetners. At least the cattle get slaughtered before it make them sick. People don't get that consideration.
YO! Pepsi and Coca-Cola! My brain and body crave glucose, not fructose. No wonder people aren't thinking straight. What are they fattening US up for?
SOYLENT GREEN IS PEOPLE!
TO SERVE MAN.
Life is a banquet and we are all on the menu.
Now Thanksgiving is coming up so everyone eat that turkey, especially vegans. We all can use a little tryptophan once in a while. It sure beats the alternatives.
Does anyone else see the irony in the author spending the first few paragraphs ridiculing PETA for complaining about the affect livestock has on global warming, and then spending the rest of the article talking about how bad livestock is for global warming?
Another point I'd like to touch on is fanaticism. There are a lot of people in this country that have a fanatical hatred for PETA, calling them extremists that don't care about people, etc. However, the number of extremists members of PETA is dwarfed by the number of people who passionately hate them. It's like wingnuts like Sean Hannity complaining that the far left is destroying the U.S., when to find an actual far leftist you need to go to North Korea.
And saying that human overpopulation is the problem is as disingenuous as the NRA's "guns don't kill people, people kill people." Yeah, but the gun has just a *little* to do with it. Our high energy consumption has just a *little* to do with global warming, not just the 6+ billion people on this planet. If we all drove a Prius, carpooled, used the bus, ate more (free range) poultry and less stake, the planet would be a lot better off.
YOU just try pulling the "slowing down population" argument on a woman who feels entitled to have a(nother) child, and tell me how well you do. Oy.
I don't care how accurate your arguments are (and there's good reason to think that PETA's could use some intellectual fine tuning), you're not going to sway people to your cause by calling them a bunch of stupid hypocrites. My gut reaction to PETA is and always has been, 'Yeah? Well fuck you too.' It's a good strategy for remaining an maligned fringe group, but I rather suspect that they're too invested in being the Lone Voice of Reason in a world full of unevolved carnivores that they don't much care about making allies. Where's the hipster cred in going mainstream, eh?
But there are more important things on the table than slagging those moralizing popinjays. As for our environmental impact, I'm with those who say that, ultimately, there are just too many of us. Even assuming that, as one poster said, we all used public transportation and made more responsible eating decisions, that's really just a temporary fix. The idea that modest lifestyle changes on the part of first-worlders are going to fix all our environmental problems only holds true as long as no-one else joins our elite club; but if, say, China were to suddenly achieve a resource consumption rate comparable to what we have here in the U.S., even if we assume that by then everyone here is taking the bus, it's going to rapidly undo whatever gains we made by switching over to Priuses and locally grown veggies. Now imagine that scenario, but with the entire developing world becoming first-worlders. We better have discovered cold fusion and be driving hydrogen-powered cars by then or the whole planet's going to be in deep shit.
I'm not arguing that we shouldn't take steps to lessen our environmental impact; every little bit helps. But at the same time, it might be a good idea to at least entertain the possibility that, just maybe, we've gone and dug ourselves into a very deep hole, and that hybrid cars and vegetarianism aren't going to get us all the way back out. You can either have a large population and low resource consumption, or you can have a small population with high resource consumption; and right now we are working steadily towards a large, resource devouring population. Make of that what you will, but don't pretend that, barring the invention of some miracle technology, we can maintain our present way of life forever if we just knock half a dozen tons of greenhouse gases off our respective environmental foot prints: there are 5.5 billion people (and counting) waiting to more than make up the difference.
Maybe I'm a pessimist. Trust me, I'd be thrilled if I thought that I could maintain my present lifestyle for the cost of eating more chicken. It's just that I don't see that as being a long-term solution.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
