starve people, deny them healthcare. protect the fetus, fuck the family. yup.

Why do we have family planning? To give people more options.

Why not just grow less rice? Because then we couldn't grow more and larger rice through genetic modification, which is also a limit reducing process. We will not be limited by random genetics! We will take control of it dammit.

If revolutionizing the food supply was the answer to our problems, we wouldn't be in this situation today.

We are caught in a web of positive feedback loops. Recommended reading: Too Smart for our Own Good: The Ecological Predicament of Humankind by Craig Dilworth.

There is no way out until both our numbers and our activity levels begin to drop. But there is no way we can do that voluntarily.

picking off large numbers w catastrophic events.

> Exactly. We already had the Green Revolution FFS.
> If revolutionizing the food supply was the answer to our problems, we wouldn't be in this situation today.

Last edited Fri Jul 24, 2015, 10:26 AM - Edit history (1)

It appears that human ability to impact the planet through reproduction and technology can always outstrip the planet's ability to accommodate it. This ability results in the repeating cycles of intensification, growth, depletion and technological change (in both socio-cultural and instrumental technologies) that have been recognized by archaeologists and anthropologists for decades now. On each cycle the degree of intensification and depletion increases, as does our impact on the biosphere.

Given the current condition of the biosphere, we may be approaching an absolute limit to that process. Another technological shift in food and energy production will just kick the can down the road a few more years at this point, it won't change the outcome.

We can now see what we're doing, but a wide variety of interlocking factors prevent us from getting off the merry-go-round altogether - which is what it would take to "solve" the problem of human beings.

Companies like Monsanto have been tacit members of the anti-evolution crowd, BTW. And in a way that's far more insidious than a bible-thumper would recognize: They simply refused to consider it as relevant to their work where biological reproduction was at work on a massive scale.

And there is at least one other scientific blind spot they still cherish that could lead to big problems down the road.

As for the for-profit business aspect, there are logical reasons to consider that business may be fundamentally incompatible with this class of engineering. One is that since patents are limited in time, the GE firms are interested in engineering strains that are not viable for long. There is a need to keep farmers moving onto new products. Patents could be extended like copyright was, but the two are not the same and longer patents would intensify monopolization.