The Physical Limits To Growth
If there's one thing the current pandemic shows us is that we're in some kind of weird hiatus from civilisation as we struggle to find a way back to business-as-usual. The very pandemic and its murky origins tells us that we've reached some limit to our economic growth, but there are the usual insane Murdoch-media-influence denials of this very simple fact.
The Coronavirus has been around for many a millennia. It has been living in the part of the ecosystem involving either bats or pangolins, which is distant to the part of the ecosystem involving homo sapiens. It is only through our unnecessary intrusion into the bat/pangolin inhabited parts of the ecosystem that has brought about this massive invasion from this virus.
The virus for its part has been involved with whatever host animal for a long time, as it seems to have evolved interesting mechanisms to bypass the immune system mammals. This is in turn limiting the effectiveness of our vaccine as the virus evolves further means to evade our immune systems. We may never know from which group this virus emerged because the communist party leadership in China will continue to resist any probe to determine its origins, but one thing is certain - we wouldn't have come across this thing if we didn't push into places we didn't need to go. We just can't be eating bat soup and pangolin pies.
And that in a nutshell of our modern global economy hitting a physical limit. Global Warming is another. If we keep on digging up fossil fuels to be burnt for energy, we will fuck up the atmosphere so much it will be like we moved to Venus. Heck, maybe there used to be Venusians. And the Venusians had their own civilisation and culture and industries and entertainment and diversions, only for it to produce too much greenhouse gasses. Maybe they even had a Venusian Murdoch Press that tried to deny it all. In any case the way Venus is today is exactly where we're headed if we don't change how we go about things with our civilisation. You can stick that into your objectivity pipe and smoke it.
It's daft to be opening up a coal mine in this part of world history.
No comments:
Post a Comment