Environment & Energy
Related: About this forum"Normal" Is The Problem: So Is Its Bastard Spawn "The New Normal"
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Since 1970, an outpouring of normality has just about destroyed the Earth: It has created an abnormal economic machine, blind to energy spending, that doubled the global population and boosted per capita consumption by 45 per cent. At the same time the so-called value of global economic activity grew by 300 per cent. Meanwhile global trade has exploded like a coronavirus by 900 per cent. To support all this consumption and trade, the extraction of living materials from nature has jumped by 200 per cent.
Now heres just a partial list of the cost of all this exponential normality: Humans have appropriated or altered 70 per cent of the worlds lands with mines, roads, industrial farms, cities and airports. We have engineered more than 75 per cent of the worlds longest rivers. We have filled the ocean with plastics and slaughtered coral reefs. Anyone who calls that kind of behaviour normal is crackers. Its ecological imperialism, and nothing more than a full-scale assault on the dignity of local life.
The list goes on, and scientists now think its normal to publish papers on the pervasive human decline of life. Humans, for example, have destroyed 85 per cent of the wetlands. Thats like eating your kidneys for dinner, and I cant think of anybody who would consider that normal except Hannibal Lecter. We have eliminated 40 per cent of the worlds original forests. We have extirpated (and theres a word for these normal times) most of the worlds large mammals. An estimated one million species of animals and plants stand on the brink of extinction.
Homo sapiens, another mammal, are on that list, and we pretend thats normal. As these species disappear, our ever-expanding artificial intelligence probably wont wave goodbye because replacing the natural with artificial is what normal is all about.
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https://thetyee.ca/Culture/2020/05/30/New-Normal-Problem/
MLAA
(17,289 posts)One thing that will help (if we arent too late) is to all go to a plant based diet.
appalachiablue
(41,132 posts)..."So I dont want to go back to normal.
I dont want to go back to a world where its okay to industrialize and then globalize the care of old people as though they are just another resource to be mined before they die.
I dont want to go back to the digital contagion uprooting our minds and souls where authoritarian males justify the mining of our computers for data to improve their ability to engineer our behaviours.
Thats just predation.
I dont want to go back to a world where lawyers and judges dont understand the difference between a legal system and a justice system. I dont want to go back to a world where governments think it is okay to sacrifice agricultural communities with disruptive fracking technologies that cause earthquakes, pollute groundwater and consistently lose money.
Thats just white-collar crime with a high-pressure water pump.
I dont want to go back to a world where a few foreign-owned meat-packing corporations control the slaughter and distribution of so-called "cheap meat."...
progree
(10,907 posts)* sacrifice agricultural communities
* cause earthquakes
* pollute groundwater, and
* consistently lose money