(no subject)
"I believe that the general outlines of humankind's immediate future (200 years or so) are clear. Experts can and do argue about predictions and trends, but at the end of the day, most of them agree on these broad points:
Earth's population will peak in the next 100 years somewhere around eight to 10 billion people (as of 1999, there are about six billion human beings). The figure of eight to 10 billion takes into account current and projected trends toward smaller families, longer life spans and mass die-offs from war.(15)
All of these people will continue to want "the good life", an expectation that seems to be hard-wired into our genetic code (a persistent dream of more things for me, better status for me, longer life for me, a place of my own). The unavoidable truth is that this adds up to biological death and ecological damage on a planetary scale-even if we reduce our consumption of resources dramatically.(16)
The poorest of those billions (the largest percentage, estimates vary) will destroy the biosphere in a hands-on kind of way for immediate survival needs (habitat destruction for firewood, subsistence farming and animals for food).
The richest of those billions (a smaller percentage) will destroy the biosphere in a hands-on way (running over endangered manatees with power boats, chopping down redwood forests, poisoning the Gulf of Mexico with toxic chemical runoff, etc.) but also in a hands-off kind of way (through a rich standard of living that degrades the biosphere with pollution that crosses national borders, and that needs cheap resources, goods and labor from places that are "out of sight and out of mind").
Entire species (mammals, fish, trees, plants) and entire natural systems of life (fresh water, atmosphere, soil, oceanic) are going to be stressed or destroyed under the impact of The Monkey Tribe. Scientists already are describing this narrow period of human history as the time of the sixth largest mass extinction that the Earth has gone through (the fossil record reveals five previous mass die-offs of biological diversity). Just like the asteroid that took several seconds to collide with planet Earth and caused a planetary disaster that killed off the dinosaurs, The Monkey Tribe will obliterate a large number of species and change the natural ecology of the planet on a worldwide scale in these several hundred years of human history (on the geological and evolutionary time scales, several hundred years is a mere instant of time).
The Next Earth will be biologically poorer than this Earth. There will be life, of course, but gone will be whole bioregions of exotic plants, trees and animals that we now take for granted. New human beings decades from now will not even know what they are missing-their lives will be emptier and they will experience that as normal. If you had lived in the mountains of the Eastern United States before the Europeans arrived, you would have shared the forest with a species of buffalo. That type of buffalo-along with the native mountain lion and wolf-was hunted out of existence. What evolution herself would accomplish gradually, over many millions of years, by natural selection, The Monkey Tribe did in several decades.
Maybe The Monkey Tribe will do a U-turn in the road and we will decide to make sure that all forms of life continue to live. If we do so, it would represent a vast and almost simultaneous change in the mass mentality of The Monkey Tribe. We would have to see our lives in terms of harmony with nature rather than triumphant over it. I do not think that this will happen in time, on a large enough scale-because I think that individual people will continue to want to become wealthier, have children, and live as long as possible. I think that the destructive imperatives of humanity are so strong as to be unstoppable. But certainly we should work hard to keep the Earthly web of life as alive as possible (measured in individual species, which also means healthy habitat, which in turn means stopping the spread of humanity into the natural world that remains). More life is better than less life.
This change will be hard to accomplish because there is a pronounced human tendency to escape from difficulty rather than to deal with it (especially when it is a dilemma that is not external but internal). The Monkey Tribe has deeply ingrained beliefs that are so unexamined that we label them as "reality" or "normal" (religious belief in a "new, improved" afterlife, economic belief that we can "grow our way out", political beliefs that every constituency can be satisfied at once)."
-Rob Conrad
Reflection on an aspect of his experience after taking Ibogaine
Earth's population will peak in the next 100 years somewhere around eight to 10 billion people (as of 1999, there are about six billion human beings). The figure of eight to 10 billion takes into account current and projected trends toward smaller families, longer life spans and mass die-offs from war.(15)
All of these people will continue to want "the good life", an expectation that seems to be hard-wired into our genetic code (a persistent dream of more things for me, better status for me, longer life for me, a place of my own). The unavoidable truth is that this adds up to biological death and ecological damage on a planetary scale-even if we reduce our consumption of resources dramatically.(16)
The poorest of those billions (the largest percentage, estimates vary) will destroy the biosphere in a hands-on kind of way for immediate survival needs (habitat destruction for firewood, subsistence farming and animals for food).
The richest of those billions (a smaller percentage) will destroy the biosphere in a hands-on way (running over endangered manatees with power boats, chopping down redwood forests, poisoning the Gulf of Mexico with toxic chemical runoff, etc.) but also in a hands-off kind of way (through a rich standard of living that degrades the biosphere with pollution that crosses national borders, and that needs cheap resources, goods and labor from places that are "out of sight and out of mind").
Entire species (mammals, fish, trees, plants) and entire natural systems of life (fresh water, atmosphere, soil, oceanic) are going to be stressed or destroyed under the impact of The Monkey Tribe. Scientists already are describing this narrow period of human history as the time of the sixth largest mass extinction that the Earth has gone through (the fossil record reveals five previous mass die-offs of biological diversity). Just like the asteroid that took several seconds to collide with planet Earth and caused a planetary disaster that killed off the dinosaurs, The Monkey Tribe will obliterate a large number of species and change the natural ecology of the planet on a worldwide scale in these several hundred years of human history (on the geological and evolutionary time scales, several hundred years is a mere instant of time).
The Next Earth will be biologically poorer than this Earth. There will be life, of course, but gone will be whole bioregions of exotic plants, trees and animals that we now take for granted. New human beings decades from now will not even know what they are missing-their lives will be emptier and they will experience that as normal. If you had lived in the mountains of the Eastern United States before the Europeans arrived, you would have shared the forest with a species of buffalo. That type of buffalo-along with the native mountain lion and wolf-was hunted out of existence. What evolution herself would accomplish gradually, over many millions of years, by natural selection, The Monkey Tribe did in several decades.
Maybe The Monkey Tribe will do a U-turn in the road and we will decide to make sure that all forms of life continue to live. If we do so, it would represent a vast and almost simultaneous change in the mass mentality of The Monkey Tribe. We would have to see our lives in terms of harmony with nature rather than triumphant over it. I do not think that this will happen in time, on a large enough scale-because I think that individual people will continue to want to become wealthier, have children, and live as long as possible. I think that the destructive imperatives of humanity are so strong as to be unstoppable. But certainly we should work hard to keep the Earthly web of life as alive as possible (measured in individual species, which also means healthy habitat, which in turn means stopping the spread of humanity into the natural world that remains). More life is better than less life.
This change will be hard to accomplish because there is a pronounced human tendency to escape from difficulty rather than to deal with it (especially when it is a dilemma that is not external but internal). The Monkey Tribe has deeply ingrained beliefs that are so unexamined that we label them as "reality" or "normal" (religious belief in a "new, improved" afterlife, economic belief that we can "grow our way out", political beliefs that every constituency can be satisfied at once)."
-Rob Conrad
Reflection on an aspect of his experience after taking Ibogaine