SATURDAY, OCT 1, 2016: NOTE TO FILE
Transition Now
Live an exemplary life
Eric Lee, A-SOCIATED PRESS
TOPICS: ENOUGH IS ENOUGH, FROM THE WIRES, LIVING THE SUSTAINABLE LIFE
Abstract: There is a global sustainability Transistion Movement that sort of recogizes issues of concern and imagines a prosperous post-transistion world or even a prosperous transistion period that is as good or better than life as they know it now. They may come to live in communities with solar panels on their roofs where they live the Green life when not flying about the world to enjoy it while they still can. They are mostly upper-middle class (or higher) with university educations who know enough science to have heard about issues of concern to those who listen to Nature. But they don't know enough to realize what a real transistion would look like or where it leads.
TUCSON (A-P) — Transition to prosperous descent (rapid negative growth of population, per capita consumption, and the economy) and zero fossil fuel use in five years (or now, sooner being better). Work to provide universal birth control without cost or other restriction by universally empowering woman to educate and be educated. Births by permit, i.e. birth certificate required and number limited to achieve negative population growth by attrition (natural death). To degrow population, require two natural death certificates per one birth.
In transitioning to solar-based agriculture assume a 90% reduction in agricultural output and that 90% of population will be farmworkers/small farmers who, during the transition period of negative population growth via attrition, will farm using human power and not animal power. An animal powered farm might use 40% of the farm's primary productivity to support the farm animals. During the transition, human die-off may be avoided by using human power and minimizing meat production and use of animal power—by not feeding farm animals/pets food humans could eat. Assume an initial target global population of 500 million humans to be adjusted as the World Model is improved.
Transition to a per capita level of consumption that provides enough. Enough is enough. Those not having enough will increase consumption as needed to avoid premature death (starvation, illness secondary to malnutrition, hypothermia/hyperthermia secondary to lack of shelter/clothes, dehydration, lack of basic health care, exposure to toxins/infection, preventable trauma) provided they willingly live within limits. Those having more than enough will transition to ever less, over the five year transition, until they have no more than 1.2 times more than enough.
Social status will depend on transitioning to a lower than average level of consumption, hence elites (social elites: leaders, writers, celebrities, entertainers, artists, scientists, teachers, the famous, the merely eloquent) will live lives of below average consumption of planetary resources. Normal humans will work to increase their social status. Only the criminally inclined will work for material reward (money). Consuming more than 1.2 times what is needed would be grounds for re-education/imprisonment, hence social order would be near egalitarian in terms of material consumption with those seeking higher social status consuming no more than enough (1.0). It may be possible to work for more, but those motivated by MORE would be of lower social statue. If per capita consumption is 1.0 and 0.8 is marginal, then the over consumers would receive up to 1.2 times the average and those seeking to take more would be provided therapy for criminal over consumption.
In today's world elites may consume 10,000 times more (in money/material/energy) than they need and economists serve the SYSTEM by normalizing elite excess. Today's consumer elites will have the greatest distance to transition, and 99% of Americans are currently elite consumers by world/historical standards and reality-based standards of enough (enough health care as distinct from sick care, education, leisure, maintenance of homeostasis: food, water, oxygen, clothing/shelter).
An egalitarian society that minimizes preventable trauma (e.g. war) would have to transition from a band dominated by chest beating brothers in service to the alpha male, real or imagined, to bands of sisters serving the Mother, aka Earth's ecosystem, whose males serve them and Aluna, the environment, as Earth Agents. Mothers actually know best (in terms of social/environmental IQ) and former empire builders need to transition back to the evolving matriarchal norm of our species because that is what works in the long-run.
Enough is enough, transition now. Why? Species extinction (our own) is not unthinkable. Transitioning is alternative to die-off wherein some may survive by eating others. Having enough, transitioning to a materially equitable system to allow those having enough to die a good death instead of by chaotic die-off, may be preferred by those who think about life, the universe, and whatever may be that has nothing to do with what they want to believe. Alternative is to believe nothing—but think it through. There is no life [sustainable] without [ecolate] thought. To think is to listen. Listen [to our Mother].
It is intellectually dishonest to talk about sustainability without stressing the obvious fact that stopping population growth is a necessary condition for sustainability!.... Can you think of any problem on any scale, from microscopic to global, whose long-term solution is in any demonstrable way aided, assisted or advanced by having larger populations at the local level, the state level, the national level, or globally? —Dr. Albert Bartlett
Unlike plagues of the dark ages or contemporary diseases (which) we do not yet understand, the modern plague of overpopulation is soluble by means we have discovered and with resources we possess. What is lacking is not sufficient knowledge of the solution, but universal consciousness of the gravity of the problem and the education of the billions who are its victims. —Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason and intellect, has intended us to forgo their use. —Galileo
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. —Aldous Huxley
The core of Mencken's social philosophy was relatively simple. He believed it is the nature of the human species to reject what is true but unpleasant and to embrace what is obviously false but comforting.
Eric Sevareid's Law: The chief source of problems is solutions.
What happens to the idea of the dignity of the human species if this population growth continues at its present rate? It will be completely destroyed. I like to use what I call my bathroom metaphor; if two people live in a apartment, and there are two bathrooms, then both have freedom of the bathroom. You can go to the bathroom anytime you want to and stay as long as you want to for whatever you need. And everyone believes in the freedom of the bathroom. It should be right there in the constitution. But, if you have twenty people in the same apartment and two bathrooms, no matter how much every person believes in freedom of the bathroom, there is no such thing. You have to set up times for each person, you have to bang at the door: "Aren't you through yet?" And so on. —Issac Asimov
