Bloggers and the Bali Climate Conference

Steve,

Thanks or posting. Totally agree with what you said. A good friend of mine once said “It comes as quite a disappointment when you finally realize the world is run by greedy assholes.” Businessmen, politicians and others have agendas and leverage their power to stop others questioning them.

Take Bali for instance. We have 20,000 hotel rooms, a ton of villas, thousands of restaurants, warungs, nightspots, but still some people ant to double, triple the number of foreign arrivals each year. When is enough enough? How close does Bali have to get to the Gold Coast / South Florida, before we stop trying to turn it into a tourist center?

If your priorities are the environment and local culture, the answer is ‘enough already’. But this doesn’t satisfy the little men who always need more money. More tourists, more power demands, more garbage, more strip malls, more land torn up, more locals leaving home to work at nightspots, more CO2, more unregulated villas.

There is an old saying, ‘the man with the money makes the rules’ and its still true.

Dear Bali Bloggers,

I like everything about what you are thinking and proposing. Let me add here, that your views and plans for action appear to be ones that many people will soon come to understand and appreciate.

What worries me is how much time it takes for the leaders of my not-so-great generation of leading elders to share LONG-RANGE views like yours and to adopt farsighted proposals like the ones you are putting forward because the necessary changes that are in store for “the masters of the universe” — the leaders who rule the global political economy in its current, patently unsustainable form — will find such changes categorically unacceptable. The masters of the universe among us have made it quite clear through their primary positive regard and relentless protection of unbridled global economic growth, now rampantly overspreading the surface of Earth, that they would rather see life as we know it obliterated than limit, as well as share, their wealth, power and privileges with others, I suppose.

Always,

Steve

Steven Earl Salmony, Ph.D., M.P.A.
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/

We have passed the line of no return. I have been an activist for many years. I remember when Ralph Tory, around 1986, came back to canada from a conference in washington, where there was a discussion on what to do about the environmental degradation. According to his reporting, people made the suggestion that business would have to cap growth. The members of the business communities were all against it. Nothing got done, in the mean time lots of environmental groups became co-opted. Lots of activists are paid to be activists. Poverty, wars and environmental degradation has achieved an all time high. Academic types took over the environmental movement completely. The token non-whites are rare and far in between (in North America). Voices are silenced, by death (Corbin Harney - Shundahai Network) or by disillusion (my own).
Actions are pathetically stupid (write letters of protest or fly to Bali to demonstrate about an agreement that will not be implemented (remember Kyoto?, Remeber the Waste Trade agreement done in Basel? ask Jim Vallette what happened to the Basel agreement?)
The environment news of record is the Rachel’s weekly has records of all the above.
So we can be saddened by the loss of opportunities, or we can try to re-bild community, but the main stuff is not touched with a ten or 1000 foot pole: consumption and corruption.
Now that the dollar is loosing its value sooner than we all might think, everyone slumbering will have to get up and do something that they never prepared themselves for: face reality and think up solutions for :
1 - water shortages - e.g. Tennessee, Georgia and California (invading canada for it or using NAFTA chapter 11 will not do);
2 - Storms, fires, floods, earthquakes;
3 - a huge population of uneducated by design; violence fed, by design; marginalized by design and exploited by design; not knowing or having experience in how to deal with lack of their favourite junk food joint (the only place where s/he can find a meal they can afford to pay for, with the meager wage they make.
4 - the backlash from all the lies that will be uncovered and how frustrations will be dealt with.

Do I need to go on?
So all of you that are writing in this discussion are having a 1980’s conversation, while the tanks are at the door, the drought is at the doors, the concentration camps inside of the us have been built, the floods and weather storms are at the door (World Watch predicted long time ago). Your conversation should not be intellectually driven. All of the above done in your name. Who cares about Rick Bass? Great he wrote. Well what have you all done with what he wrote? How his writing get us all off the shithole we find ourselves in?
Not happy to make a disaster of the us and north america, american military is making a mess out of other parts of the globe and destroying our home - the earth-.
What are you doing about stopping the obliteration of Gaia?
There are more than a million scientists, intellectuals, writers, philosophers, university educated people in the us alone; you all know about the problems. What keep you from working together in getting this mess clean up?
Pretty soon we will not have time for compassionate and productive living: survival will be the big stake.
My suggestion:
Call on citizens to design a plan of action to deal with the major issues in your community. Call it adhoc commission on surviving the crunch.
Place in the agenda all the problems.
Prioritize the ones that are most important e.g.
a- drink water (where does it comes from. Is it secure for the population.
2 - Food - where it comes from? Is it secure for the population? If it is not how do we make it secure? What actions do we need to put into place to secure food, water and heat for the winters. Who has the heirloom seeds, where are the orchards and the gardens?
3 - Community building: What are our assets? How inclusive? How much of the population is marginalized and how to change that? People that are included don’t steal from you.

So you get the drift.

If we don’t get back to basics and start building the future now, there will not be any time left for the organizing that is needed for the transition to be smooth.
PS: I read all the posts. When you find your well dry, your soil eroded and no shade to rest, all the above intellectual conversation is MEANINGLESS. Wake up !
Harris

Dear Harris and Friends,

From my vantage point, perhaps now is an occasion to momentarily discuss the human overpopulation of Earth and how a population of 6.63 billion people now can SUSTAINABLY GROW to a projected 9.2 billion people in 2050. That is a 40% increase in the global human population in the next 43 years.

Let’s look at what is happening now. We have millions of people who are conspicuously over-consuming Earth’s limited resources and becoming obese; on the other hand, billions of people do not have substantial sustenance, are going hungry, living in poverty and many are emaciated.

How on this good Earth are we going to manage properly 2 1/2 billion additional people to our current numbers by 2050 and improve life for the family of humanity? Is such a goal realistic? If so, how? If not, then what can be done to move forward in a humane, more reality-oriented way, thereby preserving life as we know it and the integrity of Earth? Skyrocketing absolute global human population numbers could soon threaten life as we know it; and obscence per human over-consumption of resources, at a reckless rate that dissipates Earth’s resources faster than they can be restored for human benefit, could irreversibly degrade our planetary home.

Scientific research, reason and common sense fail to provide good evidence of how “proper management” and “improvement in human wellbeing and environmental health” are realistically accomplished between now and 2050. I am supposing that we cannot keep doing what we are doing now: that is, over-consuming and overpopulating the planet we inhabit. Ideas of “staying the current course” remind me of magical thinking and such a strategy looks like a prescription for disaster.

For example, the seemingly endless growth of cities, or of any other human construction, for that matter, is bound to become patently unsustainable at some point in time in a finite world, will it not? Whatsoever is is, is it not…..regardless of human wishes and intentions to the contrary?

Is it reasonable and sensible to consider alternatives? Let us examine the probability that in 2050, we will have millions more people over-consuming resources, just as we are doing now. We will also have billions more people going without substantial sustenance by 2050.

If such an unsustainable situation was somehow likely to occur in first half of Century XXI, then we could begin now to protectively and ably respond by putting forward a humane and more reality-oriented “action plan” both for limiting per-capita over-consumption of finite resources and rapidly reducing absolute global human population numbers.

Always,

Steve

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population

The “powers that be” are evidently in denial of reality and unwilling to openly and honorably express their understanding of what 2000 IPCC Nobel Laureate scientists are reporting with regard to the ominous, distinctly human-induced predicament that is looming before the human community. That many too many politicians and economic powerbrokers adamantly support the soon to become unsustainable global enterprise of endless big-business expansion, does not favor our children’s well-being or safety, I believe. These leaders appear to have pledged their primary allegiance and reverent devotion to the short-term ‘successes’ of unbridled economic globalization, regardless of the long-term potential for catastrophe that such a recklessly unrestrained and unrealistic pursuit portends. For leaders of the political economy to conspicuously ignore the carefully and skillfully obtained scientific evidence on climate change, and global warming in particular, is an incomprehensible failure with potentially profound implications for the future of our children.

Plainly, what is necessary now is clarity of vision, intellectual honesty and courage as well as a willingness among leaders to begin “centering” their attention on the probability of threat(s) to humanity that could soon be posed by the gigantic scale and patently unsustainable growth rate of the over consumption, overproduction and overpopulation activities of the human population worldwide in our time.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/

Nick, I know you are a busy guy, but do you know anything or could you maybe post an article about the possibilities of Geo-thermal power in Bali.. I have heard that it is possible?!?!