Post for OFW

We can't do without Industrial civilization. For one of perhaps many reasons, we have a bunch of nuclear crap all over that will wipe out living systems unless they are managed by technology for the foreseeable future. Managing disease through antibiotics is crucial, as is a high degree of industrial food production. But the list of IC-dependent systems is surely much longer.

- I would agree that leaving stone age and HG people alone would be a fine plan.

- We have the miracle of FFs, but have very poor ways of managing it. I don't see why indefinite deployment of FFs has to be suicidal--more and more pollution for more and more people; more drawdown of life support like air, forestry, topsoils and oceans...

- As far as I can tell, it's the economic system that is largely to blame. It works well for managing how energy is distributed...until it doesn't. It sees the world only in terms of money, which doesn't work past a certain point.

- While there are millions of indicators of adjustment to make the economic system work better, they don't seem to be anywhere close to the level and effectiveness of management that is required to avert global suicide.

- We can live with a great deal less (as in a wabi sabi culture) and still have civilization. In which case, third world shanty towns would probably provide the basic model for global society. But we in the west can live at a much, much higher level of material wealth than that, while living with much, much less. Counter-intuitive and paradoxical though it sounds.

- There is unlikely to be any "sensible," materialist, secular way beyond this conundrum, which seems to require a healthy serving of "religion/spirit/revelation" to succeed. It's easy enough to refute (the idea of there being) any way out that isn't purely physical and measurable (and there is none).