opposide

One of my favorite quotes on civilization is from Anthropologist Margaret Mead when she was asked by a student what she considered to be the first sign of civilization in a culture. This is an excerpt from Ira Byock’s The Best Care Possible: A Physician’s Quest to Transform Care Through the End of Life:

Mead said that the first sign of civilization in an ancient culture was a femur (thighbone) that had been broken and then healed. Mead explained that in the animal kingdom, if you break your leg, you die. You cannot run from danger, get to the river for a drink or hunt for food. You are meat for prowling beasts. No animal survives a broken leg long enough for the bone to heal. A broken femur that has healed is evidence that someone has taken time to stay with the one who fell, has bound up the wound, has carried the person to safety and has tended the person through recovery. Helping someone else through difficulty is where civilization starts. We are at our best when we serve others.

A civilization does not exist to build riches, expand its domain, advance technologically, or enforce its will upon other civilizations. All of these are cultures within civilization, but not civilization itself. Civilization, at its core, is a method to care for others and ensure a better quality of life.

I’m very excited about Chile

Edit: We need to have a site wide Marxist geography study session with the amount of reactionary and outright fash opinions there are in this thread. If you are one of those opinions, I am absolutely not shitting on you AT ALL. There’s a reason Marxist geography isn’t widely taught unless you seek it out. It is an immensely powerful tool to apply dialectical materialism to issues that can easily turn people reactionary. Any other mods reading this we desperately need to figure out a weekend pinned post project for the topic or something. In the meantime please do not hesitate to ask me any questions and I’ll answer to the best of my ability.

Hello chapo dot chatters it is time for me to put on my geologist and climatologist hats to tell you that ANY freaking out about population now or in the foreseeable future needs to stop now, and here’s why:

You are thinking of earth and it’s resources in terms of what we currently produce and consume as a global capitalist society. It is our job as socialists to CHANGE THIS. Your doomposting about population vs consumption is inherently reactionary. There is technically a cap on earth’s carrying capacity for humans, but that cap is in the dozens of billions. A socialist society can not exist without sustainability as one of its main tenets for a plethora of reasons, but most importantly the equity in a universally habitable planet. High qualities of life under capitalism will inherently lead to environmental degradation and scarcity. We already live on a potentially post-scarcity planet in terms of necessities, and likely by a significant amount. When talking about achieving a certain quality of life under socialism, we have no frame of reference for the amount of production and renewable resources it would take because our only understanding of production and consumption in this world is influenced by and for capitalism.

Capitalism’s allocation of these resources and ability to fetishize commodities is what is destroying our planet, NOT growing population. There are immediate short term issues we face in regards to climate change that capitalism simply can not address, but very few demographics are significantly contributing to the climate crisis and all who do have massively disproportional numbers of people vs contribution to the crisis. This is in NO WAY A POPULATION ISSUE.

On a positive note, capitalism is becoming too heavy a burden for capitalism to continue supporting, because as quality of life increases, population growth tends to halt. As capitalism relies on infinite need for extraction and exploitation it will run into a wall as these societies no longer have growing numbers of people to exploit (which very much mirrors what produced the collapse of feudalism) and this will cause massive social and economic upheaval.

This is, in my opinion, the fruition of Marx’s prediction on capitalism outgrowing itself and collapsing. The pieces have been in place for a long time. Bourgeois democracies and corporations are already trying to fight this by desperately filling the holes in their modes of production with cheap labor from the global south or by directly importing literal human beings from the global south to fill the holes in their society and economic system.

Wow this is literally so pathetic lol

Funny enough most of the work was independent research from home.

Really makes you think

:thinkin-lenin:

The left wants to take away your rent and rent

Nice

Yes! I’ve actually written papers about China’s “Green Wall” initiative back when they were doing trials for it and watching it actually succeed feels amazing. These sorts of large scale projects are certainly possible but any large scale project will also have large scale impact. I know one thing that hasn’t happened with the green wall initiative that was predicted is that it HASNT increased rainfall, and as you’ve said this has had an impact on ground water. As for these projects elsewhere in the world, some will have water issues and some won’t. It really depends on where they are happening.

One very scary example, at least to me, is that many places in South America that used to be rainforest but were clear cut for farming simply no longer have the moisture or biodiversity to support a rainforest in the area. Many of these cycles are self-perpetuating, which is what China anticipated happening but unfortunately didn’t.

Think of it like this:

Let’s pretend the natural, completely free of human influence planet has 10 carbon units in the carbon cycle. If something were to burn down trees it does upset the natural balance of atmospheric carbon, but you are simply changing where the carbon is, not the total amount. This might upset the climate temporarily, but the total number of carbon units in circulation is still 10.

Now let’s add human activity to the equation. We are taking carbon that was in long term storage (oil, coal, natural gas) and adding it to the 10 carbon units we had before. So now instead of a total of 10 carbon units either in trees, the atmosphere, etc, we have a total of 13. Ignoring the fact that we can’t just plant or expect lush forests everywhere, the maximum impact they could potentially have us not actually all that great.

If we wanted to biologically sequester carbon, we would have better luck using fertilizers directly into the oceans to force algal blooms which then die and sink. Of course, this has other consequences unfortunately

As current tech stands, it is pretty much always better to plant trees than worry about this. One of these capture systems does the work of less than 10 trees before maturity (plus trees serve other great purposes). Granted, this system will continue to sequester carbon while a tree will no longer effectively do so once it is full grown.

In the longer term though, systems like these will ideally be what is used to accelerate the process I was speaking of in my original comment.

Also I have not see the show/movie but we will, at least in my opinion, NEVER have an overpopulation problem in any foreseeable future, and I’m talking thousands of years. I do think it’s fairly obvious, especially when living western lifestyles, that the issue is overconsumption and production, as well as commodifying necessities like housing and healthy foods

Well actually this is the first time I’ve ever been asked this and it’s a hilarious question (BUT NOT BECAUSE IT IS BAD OR DUMB) so let’s undress the question a bit:

Is plastic sequestration? Short answer is yes. There are ways to lock the carbon in plastic out of the carbon cycle for a very VERY long time.

Long answer is no, because as far as Im aware nobody is making plastics out of atmospheric carbon, like you said. If they could this is still a good idea on paper, but any long term storage that I can think of for plastic will result in its eventual decay back into carbon.

It is a great question though, because in theory if we could add plastic to deposition environments and make sure it remains contained that could definitely be a form of sequestration but I don’t see it being feasible at current rates of consumption.

Edit: sorry for the giant fucking wall of text. I do hope this helps some of you guys though. Cheers

Hello it’s your Chapo climatologist here:

None of you are wrong for doomposting about this. We are legit so fucked. We need to SEQUESTER carbon at this point. Emission reduction is obviously good but if we went carbon neutral TOMORROW I don’t think (in my professional opinion) it would be enough on its own to achieve what people think it would. Things will not be fine. We have already baked in several feet of sea level rise at current atmospheric carbon concentrations. We’ve been saying that we had that several feet of sea level rise baked in since pretty much 2000 and literally nobody listened or cared because they just assumed we would have improved by now.

I’ve addressed questions about this before on Chapo and figured I’d answer the most asked few of, “Well what can we do?” And “What can be done?”

You personally? Nothing basically. As we are all likely in agreement here, capitalism and overconsumption are the root of this problem. Without a massive class uprising to overthrow this, I doubt the global consciousness will be coherent enough to have an impact of the powers that be.

On the, “What can be done?” side, luckily you have some of the smartest and most dedicated scientists in the world working on ways to sequester carbon, and the most promising method is accelerating the silicate weathering process which is the most effective tool to combat man made climate change.

For those who don’t want to read or don’t understand, I’ll briefly summarize why this method is important and the most likely candidate:

You may be thinking “oh let’s plant trees” which is good, sure, but consider that we are re-adding carbon which was not actively in the carbon cycle back into it. A mature forest is most times carbon neutral, as carbon output from decaying biological matter is roughly equal to carbon uptake (think about the following: how could forests continue to exist in the first place if they sucked out more carbon from the air than was added to it?)

Now think where we are getting our carbon that we add back to the atmosphere from. We pull it from underground deposits. The beauty of silicate weathering is that it incorporates carbon into rocks, and thus acts as a long term storage vessel when removing carbon from the atmosphere. The big problem though is that this process happens naturally over the course of tens of millions of years as a result of plate tectonics uplifting mountain ranges and these ranges getting weathered (as implied by the name “silicate weathering”).

So now geologists and climatologists are trying to figure out ways to massively accelerate that process, which has only become a remote possibility over the last 15 years.

Of all fields in science, people often don’t realize how young climate science and geology are. We didn’t even know the earth had other layers until less than 100 years ago. We didn’t take our first deep ice core samples until the 1960s. We couldn’t model climates effectively until the 80s. Think of how far we have come in just 60 years. There is a lot to be afraid of, but also a lot of hope to be had. There are tons of people far more intelligent than myself who realize just how dire our situation is and have dedicated their lives to solving these pressing issues.

Jen Bush voice: “Please ignore the 9 million who die globally every year of starvation”