The growing population is a huge concern for many agriculturists or ecologists.
For the world market on the other hand, unlimited growth is their ideal. But in a finite world, we have finite resources.
So planning for the population growth, only further deteriorates the earths ecological functions which support human health.
The question is, are we willing to allow the demise of the quality of water, air, cultural spirit, forests and other natural systems for more food, more clothes and more stuff?
Time seems to go so fast, and we all racing towards some unknown destination, we are all essentially in survival mode. With limited resources, in order to have adequate access to those, either 1. you have to be living in a very protected forest or other productive land system with adequate access to clean fresh water. 2. You have to have earning potential to buy resources by means of the skills you have.
It's unfortunate that much of our education in our younger years, under represents the natural world and the beauty of working with nature. At least in my education, we were taught the value of money and business endeavors, less so about maintaining ecological harmony. I stumbled across those concepts later, in college.. in a biology class. Thank goodness for required general electives! I never really considered myself a science person, until I realized that my favorite thing in the world-- nature -- was on the brink of catastrophe.
Our business models currently are set up to provide services to people that will keep people coming back for more. That's how most people make money.
Is there another way we can do things?
What if we started producing goods that were easy to dissemble, easy to create into something else once broken, easy to recycle, easy to re-use, multifunctional, durable, beautiful.
What if we were only to create high quality items. Where people had to think long and hard before buying something new, and perhaps needed to save up for a while. What if we created an online sharing resources service. Where items no longer used, can be put into a collective, virtual world where others have access to them. Is it possible to stop producing throw aways?
Can we only produce products that after a long life.. and perhaps are totally unusable.. will then recycle back into the earth easily and in a non toxic kind of a way.
Agriculturists are concerned over feeding the growing populations. Their current model of thinking.. is creating more, creating bigger on 'less' space as possible. But this idea hasn't really kept us from taking away more forests and wilderness. In fact 80% of the Amazon destruction is due to agriculture. And it's ongoing.
The more we focus on bigger, 'better' more voluminous varieties.. the less we pay attention to the actual quality of the food we are getting. Perhaps stripped of many micro-nutrients, being grown with 3 nutrients, NPK and on often times leached soils from the irrigation and no trees or other plants with long enough tap roots to recycle any of those nutrients. Those nutrients end up leaching away.. into the ocean.
Actually eating sea vegetables could be the best thing we ever do for our health! It's where all of the nutrients have ended up!
If we can create diverse landscapes concentrating our food production on super foods and action nutrient packed quality fruits and vegetables, I think we will have a much easier time of supporting the people on earth we currently have. At the end of the day.. we have no idea how many people are going to be here tomorrow or the day after. But if we can focus on providing a high quality life to those we have now, maybe we can start to circumvent this pattern of thinking of more and more and more and continued growth forever.
It's common that the more education families have, the less kids they also tend to have. If we learn to take care of the people we have right now adequately, we may not have to address a doubling of our population.
Let's bring back the value of communities and backyard gardeners, saving seeds and green space-- where ever we can make room for it. We have already harvested so much land for human habitat. Let's stop. Let's use what we have, and make it full and high quality. Let's make the land we currently have beautiful from left to right, let's fill every pocket and corner with beautiful plants and food stuffs. Can we all incorporate environmental factors in a our day to day jobs, there is something we can all do. Start choosing quality over quantity. We can do this, we can live with less stuff yet have the stuff we do have be multifunctional, beautiful and purposeful. We can live with more nutritional foods, and use sparingly the foods in which we often like to consume in mass quantity :)
We can do this.
For the world market on the other hand, unlimited growth is their ideal. But in a finite world, we have finite resources.
So planning for the population growth, only further deteriorates the earths ecological functions which support human health.
The question is, are we willing to allow the demise of the quality of water, air, cultural spirit, forests and other natural systems for more food, more clothes and more stuff?
Time seems to go so fast, and we all racing towards some unknown destination, we are all essentially in survival mode. With limited resources, in order to have adequate access to those, either 1. you have to be living in a very protected forest or other productive land system with adequate access to clean fresh water. 2. You have to have earning potential to buy resources by means of the skills you have.
It's unfortunate that much of our education in our younger years, under represents the natural world and the beauty of working with nature. At least in my education, we were taught the value of money and business endeavors, less so about maintaining ecological harmony. I stumbled across those concepts later, in college.. in a biology class. Thank goodness for required general electives! I never really considered myself a science person, until I realized that my favorite thing in the world-- nature -- was on the brink of catastrophe.
Our business models currently are set up to provide services to people that will keep people coming back for more. That's how most people make money.
Is there another way we can do things?
What if we started producing goods that were easy to dissemble, easy to create into something else once broken, easy to recycle, easy to re-use, multifunctional, durable, beautiful.
What if we were only to create high quality items. Where people had to think long and hard before buying something new, and perhaps needed to save up for a while. What if we created an online sharing resources service. Where items no longer used, can be put into a collective, virtual world where others have access to them. Is it possible to stop producing throw aways?
Can we only produce products that after a long life.. and perhaps are totally unusable.. will then recycle back into the earth easily and in a non toxic kind of a way.
Agriculturists are concerned over feeding the growing populations. Their current model of thinking.. is creating more, creating bigger on 'less' space as possible. But this idea hasn't really kept us from taking away more forests and wilderness. In fact 80% of the Amazon destruction is due to agriculture. And it's ongoing.
The more we focus on bigger, 'better' more voluminous varieties.. the less we pay attention to the actual quality of the food we are getting. Perhaps stripped of many micro-nutrients, being grown with 3 nutrients, NPK and on often times leached soils from the irrigation and no trees or other plants with long enough tap roots to recycle any of those nutrients. Those nutrients end up leaching away.. into the ocean.
Actually eating sea vegetables could be the best thing we ever do for our health! It's where all of the nutrients have ended up!
If we can create diverse landscapes concentrating our food production on super foods and action nutrient packed quality fruits and vegetables, I think we will have a much easier time of supporting the people on earth we currently have. At the end of the day.. we have no idea how many people are going to be here tomorrow or the day after. But if we can focus on providing a high quality life to those we have now, maybe we can start to circumvent this pattern of thinking of more and more and more and continued growth forever.
It's common that the more education families have, the less kids they also tend to have. If we learn to take care of the people we have right now adequately, we may not have to address a doubling of our population.
Let's bring back the value of communities and backyard gardeners, saving seeds and green space-- where ever we can make room for it. We have already harvested so much land for human habitat. Let's stop. Let's use what we have, and make it full and high quality. Let's make the land we currently have beautiful from left to right, let's fill every pocket and corner with beautiful plants and food stuffs. Can we all incorporate environmental factors in a our day to day jobs, there is something we can all do. Start choosing quality over quantity. We can do this, we can live with less stuff yet have the stuff we do have be multifunctional, beautiful and purposeful. We can live with more nutritional foods, and use sparingly the foods in which we often like to consume in mass quantity :)
We can do this.
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