Why It's Urgent To Get Our Values Straight


In this video David Suzuki, who brings science to millions of people across Canada and beyond, describes the impact of anything that is growing exponentially.  Basically, exponential growth means any upward graph that doubles in a predictable time frame.

What issues are expanding exponentially, and why is understanding this video so important?  Here are the graphs of factors currently growing exponentially as listed by Larry Rasmussen in the graphs section of his book, Earth Honoring Faith: Religious Ethics in a New Key (Oxford University Press: 2013).



Note that two others not listed include ocean acidification and combined land-ocean temperatures word wide.  Note that since I got the following two graphs from different sources, they are more up-to-date than the ones from Rasmussen, thought the trend should be clear in all cases.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Gardening with a gun on my hip

Image
Yesterday really felt strange to me.   On the one hand it was a great afternoon to be outside.   The snow is gone, the ground is drying out, and the mosquitoes are not biting…much.   I found myself reveling in the work of cutting out some dead wood and making room for the new growth we are planning this year.   I almost never get to do brush-work when there is no snow and no mosquitoes.   What a day! On the other hand, I was doing this work with my Smith-and-Wesson .44 magnum handgun hanging on my hip.   You see, the day before yesterday our neighbor was attacked by an 800 lb grizzly bear .   The bears are particularly hungry this time of year, given that they haven’t had much to eat in six months, and that the salmon won’t be in our river for another six weeks.   The bear chased our neighbor down, clawed him up a bit and the, mercifully, left him alone.   As I enjoyed being outside preparing ground for permaculture-style ga...
Read more

06 02 11 Rediscovering Enjoyment

Image
We hadn’t lived in our bioshelter home very long before Cindee began teaching me about permaculture. In brief, permaculture is about a way of life where the land feeds the people, the people tend the garden in a way where gardening feeds the land without chemical fertilizers (more on this later—but some plants actually build up and feed t he soil, even while producing food), and where the waste from each process of life on the land becomes the resource for feeding something else. In short, it becomes a more-or-less self-sustaining system t hat cares for itself with relatively little labor on the part of the people. From my perspec tive the problem of permaculture is that it takes time to develop the plants and the land. This is especially true for us, because we had more than pure permaculture in mind. We are both allergic to cottonwoods, and our whole 1.9 acres is a cottonwood grove. Why not replace the cottonwoods with berries and fruit trees? We need some paths to go...
Read more

01 08 09 Buffalo Killers and Planet Cookers

Today I heard an interview on NPR (Fresh Air), where the guest described the near extinction of bison in North America by hunters. After the interview I began to see that time as something of a metaphor for today. The truth is, the hunters didn’t think much about causing an extinction. They were just hunting for their own purposes—meat or profit. In their view nature was so expansive and so huge--and belonged to God and not to them, after all--how could they be concerned. Surely, small human beings couldn’t have that much impact on something as massive as these wondrous herds of bison that stretched clear across the continent. Today, I hear thinking much the same. So what if methane and CO2 contribute to global warming? Nature produces more methane and CO2 from rotting vegetation and volcanic eruptions than humans can imagine. What are human beings that we should consider ourselves powerful enough to have any impact in the face of these? And of course there was a time when th...
Read more