How To Eat Your Landbase 101

New Scientist, stating the bloody obvious nevertheless performs a valuable service by bringing a whole lot of factors together.

Check the graph, especially, for those of us visually biased - brings it home.

However, if you read some of the comments at the article be warned - it's not easy to tell whether the commentators are radically poking fun at the consumerist worldview or are just run of the mill jerks. The latter would be my best bet.

How did we breed these growth-is-good-science-is-Lord-shut-the-fuck-up-and-let-us-get-on-with-the-destruction types, anyway?

I have no idea, and I used to be one of them.

On the more positive side, it's in the dying phases of a developmental stage that we often see the most vitriolic kicking and screaming.

Orange materialism is on the way out, and it knows it.
In time to save human and nonhuman life from its ravages? I doubt it.

As temporarily incarnate humans, we each have what seems to us a natural sphere of vision – an area which includes all that we hold dear, all that we consider important, and all that we concern our little selves with.

As we grow, this sphere seems to expand, and includes more and more of what we consider to be important stuff – while leaving the unimportant stuff beyond the circle’s boundaries, often tagged in demeaning ways – loony left, wingnut right, feminazi, ecomentalist. As if tagging these points of view in such a way renders them safely unimportant, or more properly invisible. I can’t see them, therefore they don’t exist. Or exist only to radically insane people. It’s the same thing.

So, I’ve been thinking – how much vision is enough? How much of the trap should we/must we be able to see?

Is it enough to see through religion as manmade structures to entrench and retain power-over?

Is it enough to recognise the ravenous, destructive nature of consumerism?

Enough to see that civilization is eating away at the very ground it is built upon, until eventually we are left like some mythical Kilkenny cat colony, devouring each other?

As the Integral folks know, when we grow into new developmental spaces, we include the vision space of our previous spheres, and include them in our new vista.
It seems a bit of a joke on the Integral practitioners that people undergoing growth – in their terms, no less – get to a point where they have outgrown the Integral worldview itself. But we see it. We transcend and include that paradigm along with all the others.

Is it enough then, to recognise that humans are the disease-carrying vectors of a sickness which threatens the very fabric of life itself? To see the trap that civilisation – with its institutionalised education, infinite capacity for resource consumption and its necessity for keeping its prisoners blind, deaf and dumb –has us all caught in?

The trap, you see, is not just laid for us. It has us. All.

Seeing the trap for what it is can only be a first step; a totter in the direction of the exit. I see the trap. How difficult should it be to understand that we are seemingly requiring endless resources for endless material growth and that we patently don’t have them?

By the definition of life, we cannot have infinite supply of resource. But that is exactly what we are wanting, and – roping in science, technology and human ingenuity – we are praying with our eyes squeezed shut that we will find our way out of this logical dilemma.

Time to open the eyes, people.

Stop that praying. No magical being is coming to our rescue.
As Life, we are It.

And we will cease our existence upon this material plane – taking with us all other life forms and the plane itself – if we don’t cut this denialist crap very, very soon.