rolling my eyes:
In the spring of 2004, only a quarter of Americans in a Gallup Poll said they were worried "a great deal" by climate change; today, the number is over 40 percent. If you'd told me two years ago that in 2007 all my household's nice old incandescent lightbulbs would be replaced by weird little curlicue fluorescents - ten tons of CO2 emissions eliminated; check - I'd have rolled my eyes and snorted.So We're Green. Now What?
Kurt Andersen/NewYorkMagazine
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The unspoken being generally a pursuit of this space, we're drawn toward the conspicuous absence of any recognition whatsoever of the near knee-jerk reaction of sensible men and women everywhere when confronted with phenomena of this nature, where a problem is occurring because of the mass of by-product(B) being generated by the mass of activity(A) of the mass of population(M). Every sensible working man or woman out there today has done that computation:
Too much pollution? Too much gas getting burned?
[(M)-(x) = (A)-(x) = (B-x²)]
Well there's two ways you can head into it. Cut back on usage, sure that's one option(1). Cut back on users, that's two(2).
Constantly affirming the need for (1), and never once even beginning to mention (2), means the taboo gets outlined vividly, even if it's never filled in.
Still, scaling back the global population to the degree necessary to do anything substantial about anthropogenic climate forcing - i.e. "global warming", without creating destabilizing social chaos while you did it, would be an astounding task. This may be in part why it doesn't come up as a potential solution. There's also the specter of the Nazi Holocaust, in that trimming the population would mean some kind of evaluation, or metric, would need to be put into play - in the case of the Nazis it was the "Aryan" race and its imagined ideal prototypes, though there's a sort of consensus we may have got past all that, that it was parochial and incomplete, and pretty obviously not suitable for a diverse global culture such as we've become since the mid-20th century. On the other hand there are some ethnic populations around who still see themselves as more worthy than others, and who would gladly occupy that central position for purposes of population trimming.
Still the tension mounts, intensifying hourly. And lots of people out there, especially guys who are used to making these kinds of decisions on a local and more personal basis, are thinking along the same lines.
Too many cars on the road burning too much gas?
How about instead of cutting back on fuel consumption, we cut back on drivers? This would have positive effects as well on real estate, water consumption, and many other aspects of modern living, besides just cars and their damaging exhaust gases.
There are precedents.
What's needed for the process to begin, and be carried to completion successfully, is a solid and convincing model of the center of the human species, from which to measure outward toward appropriate population numbers, a fixing of what we are in significant miniature - the heart of humanity, representative man and woman, and their children.
The Nazis chose themselves, figures out of their own immediate past, and held that up to the future as template and guide.
We can't do that, at last not regionally, or ethnically, not anymore. Though working in its favor is the sense most of us have of being central, in a broad and vague way, to the human condition, all of us "everyman". Most of us would admit though, that the living center of the human, the heart of what we are as living thing, is somewhere adjacent but not exactly in us, personally. Since that would be the cull metric, the zero on the graph from which the determining scale would be measured out, it seems important to get to it, if we can.
Where would it be?
The emotional turmoil generated by the shootings at Virginia Tech, the violent deaths of a few dozen people unknown to almost everyone who's been horrified by them, would seem to point toward a youth axis, something in the young central to what we are.
Certainly if the shooter had rampaged through a so-called "convalescent home" or death warehouse, where the non-affluent elderly are bled dry of their last economic viability in return for minimum-wage "care" and generic mood stabilizing drugs, most of the shock and horror would have been much reduced in those outside the social and geographic reality of the event.
This makes sense biologically, and in its broadest parameters it's what the Nazis were working toward - the children, doing it for the children. Just as the horror of the Nazi Holocaust would have been greatly diminished if they had left the Jews alone, and to a lesser extent the Romany, and only concerned themselves with removing the physically deformed, the mentally aberrant and deficient, the homosexual and the criminal, and - for at least some observers - the communists. This would have been more in line with rudimentary concepts of Darwinian evolution, aided by human intention.
But before we try to narrow that metric down too precisely, let's pull back and look at a similar circumstance, whose outer surface makes it seem completely unrelated but whose real workings were parallel to a substantial degree. The steady attrition of indigenous people during the westward expansion across North America by European immigrants in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, while superficially being about geography and abstract things like religion and destiny, was all and only about resources, and who would get to use them, and who was in the way of that.
The superior white man's ways displaced the inferior red man's ways, as was appropriate according to the white man's conscience, which was shaped by his religion. The red man's conscience, shaped by his religion, was left to speak from the margins, in tones far nobler but not emphasized enough by superior weaponry, the ultimate sign of divine sanction.
How is this related? There's a sense that the elect, the chosen, those who have successfully maneuvered through the Ulyssean obstacles of the modern economy, should bear the rewards as well, in this case the clear conscience and bright prospects of right living, technologically speaking.
So that the center, the default center of humanity, in the sense of who should go on from here if there is to be a reduction in population numbers, should be those who've attained that center already, and their children.
The problem with that, morally, is that they should bear the responsibility for it, as well. That by gaining the rewards, they've helped create the circumstance. We should probably work that out pretty quickly, as it's likely to be pertinent, if not crucial, to our dilemma, in the near future.
On the other hand, if this is not the center of humanity, the successful and economically agile of the present moment, if in fact it lies elsewhere, if our loyalties should be cast further than toward the enterprising and successful of the way things are right now, where would that be?
The Kalahari, the Australian outback, the Arctic, the Amazon.
Anywhere people still live in ways that are molded to and by the real world, the one that shaped us from the beginning, the one we're damaging, the one we dominated until we began to break its harmony and balance.
Not to the exclusion of everyone else, but the center, the deepest part of what we are, who we are, the unbroken chain of our being that goes back through to the beginning.
Science in its wide abstract field of vision gives us no moral focus for this, seeing no difference between any of the players, only outcomes. Religion as it's devolved has become the excuse for selfishness that's needed to resolve the question. The Great Pig that wants to rule the world will take its refuge in any church or temple or mosque or synagogue it has to, and issue its demands from there, masked as fate and moral exigency.
And soon enough the call will come for the harsh necessity of population reduction.
Just you watch.
Maybe not from any official institution, not from any politician, but it will come. And it will make sense. Because there are too many of us - not numerically per se, but for how we live. And many people, after generations of grooming and breeding toward selfishness as a birthright, would rather see others die than change the way they live - if they're comfortable.
And many of us are comfortable living this way, even as the news comes in that it's terminal, selfish on a scale that's Blakean, Satanic, and completely unsustainable without massive, essential change.
The nature of that change is what the game's about.
