4 posts tagged “k”
The research on the reasons for population growth shows that human populations under conditions of regional limits of sustainability have the ability to limit breeding rates. Thus there are potential conditions for limiting the biological breeding rates through governmental rules.
There is however in the long view a deficiency in the limiting process, presumably due to cognitive deficiencies and societal factors influenced thereby. Indications therefore are:
- delay in accommodating the rules of the society to the real development of the society
- maintaining the intraspecific competition, e.g. between different “nations”
- comprehensive, at least latent refusal in the society of family planning by contraception
- enduring development for solving population growth/limits of sustainability by extending the limits of sustainability, instead of attacking global population growth.
Helmut M Knoflacher in Bevölkerungswachstum (Population Growth) – zwischen Erbe und Erkenntnis (German), in Rupert Riedl et al (Ed.): Die Ursachen des Wachstums (The Reasons for Growth) 1996.
Natural resources are the building blocks of civilization and an essential requirement of daily existence. The inhabitants of planet Earth have been blessed with a vast supply of most basic materials. But we are placing increased pressures on these supplies, and in some cases we face, in our lifetimes, or those of our children, the prospect of severe resource depletion. If we rely on warfare to settle these disputes over raw materials, the human toll will be great. To avoid this fate, and to ensure an adequate supply of essential materials, we must work now to establish a global system of resource conservation and collaboration.
Michael T Klare in Resource Wars, 2001
Struggle causes us to reflect, to fortify our faith, and to see beyond our narrow slots of existence.
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True peace and security, of course, are impossible, and that may be to the good. Robert Lowell, in his poem “For the Union Dead” about the monument on the Boston Common dedicated to the African-American Civil War heroes killed in South Carolina in 1863, upholds “man’s lovely, peculiar power to choose life and die,” while condemning the “savage servility” of Ortega y Gasset’s mass man.
We must seek a compromise between that monument on Bostons Commons, honouring humankind’s willingness to fight for whatever it believes in, and the monument outside the U.N. building, recommending that beat our swords into plowshares. For to use only the latter monument as a compass point would be to head into oblivion.
Robert D Kaplan in The Coming Anarchy, 2001
We must choose, and choose soon, either for or against the further evolution of the human spirit. It is for us, in the generation that turns the corner of the millennium, to apply whatever knowledge we have, in all humility but with all due speed, and to try to learn more as quickly as possible. It is for us, much more than for any previous generation, to become serious about the human future, and to make choices that will be weighed not in a decade or a century but in the balance of geological time. It is for us, with all our stumbling, and in the midst of our dreadful confusion, to try to disengage the tangled wing.
Melvin Konner: The Tangled Wing, Biological Restraints on Human Spirit, 1982
