by Alpaca 29 Replies latest jw friends
The United Nations warned yesterday that it no longer has enough money to keep global malnutrition at bay....
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/feb/26/food.unitednations
This is a changed world. We are living in very historic times. We all need to slow down and pay attention to what is going on. If this is not sending a chill up your spine you need to sit up and pay attention.
Cheers (as cheery as that can be under the circumstances),
Alex
I am planting a garden, berries, etc and fertilizing my fruit trees.
belbab
I am sure that Bill Gates can help if he wants to!
To be somewhat blunt I think they need to start sending some form of birth control along with the food shipments. There are too many people living in areas that are already marginal, and unable to support the population sizes we've artificially propped up.
Seeing as lot of the lands they are sending the aid to are to religious or forbid it, why waist the money on birth control.
Okay, Sacrificial Loon,
Let's talk about artificially propping up an unsustainable situation.
Here we are in the U.S., with 4 to 5 % of the earth's population and we use something like 60+ % of global energy resources. If aliens stopped by to take a look, we are not very good global neighbors, here in the U.S. Furthermore, food, energy, and water are inextricably linked and we are in for one helluva rough ride in the days ahead.
I am not trying to exonerate the responsibility that India and China, or the rest of the world, have to bear on this issue, but the bottom line is that we are facing a changed world (forever changed).
Alex
It's more like 25%, and China is now the largest consumer of raw materials. I agree that our current way of doing things in the US is not sustainable, and part of the problem is that people in China and India want to be like us, and the world simply doesn't have enough resources for it.
Back to the food issue, we have created our own monster. We have several choices, we can:
- Stop feeding the third world and let nature run its course. Populations will return to something that the local areas can sustain.
- Keep feeding the third world as is and the population will continue to grow requiring more food. Which will further impoverish the world as a whole by putting more demands on food resources.
- Keep feeding the third world, and somehow get the birth rates more in line with those of the devloped world, and things will eventually stabilize.
No choice is perfect, but to keep throwing more and more food at the problem will just make it worse, and cause more suffering in the long term.
Ahh for those of us with a little patch of land time to start reading Jean Pain
SL,
Thanks for the comments. I agree with you that there are no good solutions to this problem.The core issue for the world is sustainability. Unfortunately, humans have not developed the collective forethought to practice restraint.
The days of cheap abundant petroleum, food, and water are behind us. The events that lie ahead, over the coming years, are going to momentous by anyone's standards.
Alex
There is a little part of me that longs for such Anarchy. I blame A childhood listening to the sex pistols, Crass and the clash, then falling for an apocalypse hungry religion.
