Twelve unsustainable things

[Me-Ki-Gal]

Can you hear people? can you come across trash? can you see power lines? can you hear freeways? can you see jets overhead? Four-wheeler tracks? the smell of combusted petroleum?
Can you let wolves come back without someone trying to get them shot?

I seriously doubt it.

I want there to be large swathes of places that just don't exist for our convenience, but exist for their very own sake, and in the lower 48, there are very few places that are so.

But no, I don't make enough money to take vacations. I used to be able to get that vacation pay on a check, now I just lose it...it's not full pay-they only do minimum wage.
But I can't afford to go anywhere, so I might as well work.:shrug:

Wow, why do I suddenly feel like my life is a sea of broken things and dirt? Maybe I've been diving too many dumpsters lately.

No you can't hear people . No trash . You can see a few power lines but not many and not at all in the mountain range it self . Just down in the Great Plains . The Mountain wilderness exists for it self and the tree makes sounds whether you are their or not . You do see jets in the sky . Big no on four wheeler tracks and no smell of oil except the smell that might be on you and the wolves are back ( very hard to kill too) I don't hunt wolves personally . The wolves are allusive as can be seeing how they like to hunt at night. I saw one 2 years ago just as dawn was braking but my friend I built a house for saw a mountain lion take down a deer and kill it . Now that had to be a sight to see.
I can take you places in California like that too. The Rubicon River would be one of the places. Me and my friend hiked down to the bottom of the canyon one time and we looked across the river after 5 hours of rugged terrain and low and behold right across the river was 2 guys . My friend said " I thought you said we would not see anybody else down hear . I said " Shit I can't believe it . This is a first . So we hiked down river to get away from them . The next day I was fishing up stream and came on to there camp and to my surprise they had crashed there helicopter in the friggen river just up stream from were Me and my friend first popped out on when we first saw the 2 guys across the river. That was why they were there . It was the shits for the highway patrol flew them out and discovered my secret get away and would fly there helicopters in and fish and camp there . They left there friggen trash too !!! After that I would fish there and find coke cups from McDonald's. Burger bags and what have you . Can you believe that . What the hell is the matter with people anyway . Have they never heard of leave it like you found it. Pack in Pack out . How Stupid can humans be !!! There are other places on the river where no one has been though. Just my favorite spot was decimated by thoughtless humans. I must confess something . I changed the course of a river once so I am not all innocent of interference of nature . Oh except I forgot I am an Animal of the earth and I think that makes me part of nature

 

[Trippy]

Seeing as how Lightgigantic has been online, and posted in other threads, but chosen not to substantiate his claims in this thread, this thread has been moved.

 

[greenboy]

Well nope

When you get a small population you make this population to become Homozygous for whatever characteristic (s) among those resistant to a sickness or fertility, or adaptation to an environmental change ect here is an example with the cheetahs.

Genetic diversity among cheetahs is amazingly small. For instance, they're all genetically close enough so that skin transplants between unrelated animals take without rejection. And whereas all tigers have different patterns of stripes, and all leopards have different patterns of spots, all cheetahs have the same pattern of spots.

The assumption is that they suffered a nearly complete population collapse at some time in the past, possibly to as little as a single breeding pair, and then rebounded from it.

They have some serious health issues, especially related to breeding, and their poor genetic variability leaves them highly vulnerable to environmental changes, so they may well die out some time in future. (Ultimately, extinction awaits us all.) But for the moment they are doing OK.

A couple of thousand people is enough to maintain genetic diversty.

 

[Enmos]

When you get a small population you make this population to become Homozygous for whatever characteristic (s) among those resistant to a sickness or fertility, or adaptation to an environmental change ect here is an example with the cheetahs.

Genetic diversity among cheetahs is amazingly small. For instance, they're all genetically close enough so that skin transplants between unrelated animals take without rejection. And whereas all tigers have different patterns of stripes, and all leopards have different patterns of spots, all cheetahs have the same pattern of spots.

The assumption is that they suffered a nearly complete population collapse at some time in the past, possibly to as little as a single breeding pair, and then rebounded from it.

They have some serious health issues, especially related to breeding, and their poor genetic variability leaves them highly vulnerable to environmental changes, so they may well die out some time in future. (Ultimately, extinction awaits us all.) But for the moment they are doing OK.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_population

 

[Dywyddyr]

all cheetahs have the same pattern of spots.

Source please.

so no two cheetahs have the exact same spots or stripes.

http://www.bigcats.com/cheetahsworkshop.php?C=1

And I'll question this too, since the above contention appears to be incorrect:

they're all genetically close enough so that skin transplants between unrelated animals take without rejection

Source please.

 

[Enmos]

That last one is true, if I remember correctly.

 

[greenboy]

go and read
http://ask.metafilter.com/146045/Minimum-species-population-to-ensure-adequate-genetic-diversity

 

[Read-Only]

go and read
http://ask.metafilter.com/146045/Minimum-species-population-to-ensure-adequate-genetic-diversity

Phooey! That link does nothing at all to back up you claims - and besides, it's just the opinions of laymen. Nothing there is close to being reliable.:bugeye:

 

[Enmos]

Phooey! That link does nothing at all to back up you claims - and besides, it's just the opinions of laymen. Nothing there is close to being reliable.:bugeye:

And they suggest an even smaller MVP than I did!

 

[Read-Only]

And they suggest an even smaller MVP than I did!

Heh-heh-heh! Yeah.

And it's pretty sad what *some* people will consider to be reference material. Ugh!!

 

[The Esotericist]

Seeing as how Lightgigantic has been online, and posted in other threads, but chosen not to substantiate his claims in this thread, this thread has been moved.

Here, let me oblige you.

1) Debt-based banking and economic systems
FRAUD: Federal Reserve Is Selling Put Options On Treasury Bonds To Drive Down Yields (Courtesy of Market Skeptic)

For a less dry, straight forward easy to understand presentation, for those of you who are less sticklers for references. . .
Dear America, Your Taxes Are Going Up 20%, Food and Gas Prices Will Skyrocket, Fed Drops Bomb On Us (Courtesy of Amped Status
In this lecture, Professor Brownell of Yale, asks whether modern agriculture is environmentally, culturally, and morally sustainable.

2) Conventional agriculture and "rape the planet" farming
Nor entirely accurate, but mostly so.
Farmer in Chief

3) Mass-consumption economies based on buy-it-and-trash-it behavior
Wonderful piece. I make my son watch it ever six months, or when ever he whine about not getting a new piece of plastic shit (a toy) from the local big box store in a while. Go to their site if you wish to get reference material for the facts cited.
The Story of Stuff
http://www.storyofstuff.org/index.php

4) The accelerating loss of farming soils
Covered in number 2)
I think as unemployment rates rise, more people will start farming small plots. They will become less dependent on commercially available food supplies. I believe people in charge have foreseen this, and it is part of the reason they passed H.R. 2751: FDA Food Safety Modernization Act, or the agribusiness cartel law. It makes saving seeds difficult to impossible by outlawing the machinery that accomplishes this, and makes growing and trading one's own food a crime.

5) The mass poisoning of the oceans and aggressive over-fishing
Who doesn't know this? Oceanic Dead Zones Continue to Spread

6) Mass genetic pollution of the planet through GMOs
This is a pretty dry lecture, but it is pretty relevant. A lot of this Yale lecture series is.
The Psychology, Biology and Politics of Food - Lecture 11

7) The drugs-and-surgery conventional medical system
Any body that was living in the U.S. during the last presidential election would know that the current POTUS won on a platform to reform the current death care system. The pharmaceutical companies have Americans and the world so convinced that they need costly produced "drugs" to help them though, few have yet tried alternatives. Notice they don't heal them? Logic dictates that there isn't enough productive capacity to keep producing high tech med treatments for everyone to poison themselves with. This may cause a break down in the system, it might not. I see people waking up to the lie all the time. Glenn Beck? Who would have thought. Don Imus? Get out. lol

People are tired of toxins that just treat symptoms of diseases which are created by the poisons that are allowed to be put in the water, the air, and the food in the first place. Eventually, people will realize it is just cheaper to eat, breath and drink cleaner and not get sick.

8) Widespread pharmaceutical contamination of the human population and the environment
This one I can neither confirm nor deny. It seems that the government has pulled the report. http://deainfo.nci.nih.gov/advisory/pcp/pcp08-09rpt/PCP_Report_08-09_508.pdf

9) Runaway human population growth
I have to cede this point. It's been proven to be under control. Either through poisoned water, poisoned air, poisoned food, disease, or just a general lack of happiness and loss of joy in will to live, yes, people have quit making families. The state is doing a fairly good job in destroying families, communities, social groups, neighborhoods, etc.

Even if I didn't cede this point, I don't really care about it. Human population will only get as large as the environment that can sustain it. Every life affects every other. It is an interconnected web. This talk of, "we could do with less people." Is creepy and exactly the attitude the elites want. The less people, the easier it is to maintain a tight control over society.

10) Fossil water consumption for agriculture

This is dated '03, but I can't imagine the situation has gotten a whole lot better. The biggest drag on water supplies are modern farming techniques and choice of crops I would hazard to guess? Ground-Water Depletion Across the Nation

11) Fossil fuel consumption
Sorry. . . couldn't find anything on this. Possibly it's a conspiracy theory.

12) The widespread destruction of animal habitat
Global ecosystems 'face collapse'

 

[The Esotericist]

Alternatively

Someone who supports the idea that we as a species are important to the history of the earth, and not that "sustainability" is only a human issue. . .
We Speak for Gaia, Deal with It
And an opposing view point. We're us. Nature is nature.
George Carlin on The Environment

 

[Trippy]

5) The mass poisoning of the oceans and aggressive over-fishing
Who doesn't know this? Oceanic Dead Zones Continue to Spread

Dead zones have nothing to do with 'poisoning' our oceans, or aggressive over-fishing. They're cause by a combination of nutrtient rich water (from a combination of sources ranging from poor farming practices to poor management of onsite effluent disposal systems - depending on which specific dead zone you're looking at), in combination with boring mundane things such as vertical stratification, and lack of vertical mixing.

6) Mass genetic pollution of the planet through GMOs
This is a pretty dry lecture, but it is pretty relevant. A lot of this Yale lecture series is.
The Psychology, Biology and Politics of Food - Lecture 11

I seem to recall a time when the scientists said "And as a saftey feature to preserve biodiversity, and prevent genepool pollution, we shall include a suicide gene in all GM crops so that they will be rendered infertile, and any F1 Hybrids shall likewise be rendered infertile." And the response, from people like yourself, was "No, you can't do that, all you're really doing is forcing poor people to buy new seed stock every year as a profit making exercise. You're forcing them into a life of servitude to and dependence on you so that they can put enough food on their tables".

Well, 'you' got 'your' wish, and now you've found something else to complain about.

7) The drugs-and-surgery conventional medical system
Any body that was living in the U.S. during the last presidential election would know that the current POTUS won on a platform to reform the current death care system. The pharmaceutical companies have Americans and the world so convinced that they need costly produced "drugs" to help them though, few have yet tried alternatives. Notice they don't heal them? Logic dictates that there isn't enough productive capacity to keep producing high tech med treatments for everyone to poison themselves with. This may cause a break down in the system, it might not. I see people waking up to the lie all the time. Glenn Beck? Who would have thought. Don Imus? Get out. lol

People are tired of toxins that just treat symptoms of diseases which are created by the poisons that are allowed to be put in the water, the air, and the food in the first place. Eventually, people will realize it is just cheaper to eat, breath and drink cleaner and not get sick.

I'm going to quote a few lines from a 9 minute beat poem that I've recently taken a shine to.
"By definition, I continued,
Alternative medicine is medicine that has not been proven to work,
Or been proven not to work.
Do you know what they call alternative medicine that has been proven to work?
Medicine."

The only other thing that I really have to say on the matter is that I take, on a daily basis a compound derived from the venom of the Gila monster, but it's made available to me in a pill format, but without the other chemicals responsible for the symptoms such as internal hemorrhaging, exopthalmos, lethargy, partial paralysis, and hypothermia.

The same venom, incidentally, has also shown promising results for the inhibition of the growth of lung cancer, and the management of Type 2 diabetes.

8) Widespread pharmaceutical contamination of the human population and the environment
This one I can neither confirm nor deny. It seems that the government has pulled the report. http://deainfo.nci.nih.gov/advisory/pcp/pcp08-09rpt/PCP_Report_08-09_508.pdf

Just as what goes up, must come down, what goes in, must come out. Interestingly enough, without getting into things such as factory discharges, many drugs are purged from the body by the addition of phosphate (or was it glucose/glucophosphate) groups, however, in environments such as Oxidation ponds, bacteria and protozoa have become that adept at extracting the available energy (IE Phosphat or glucose - whichever it is, I've mentioned it in a previous post or two somewhere, and CBF looking it up) that some drugs actually have a higher concentration coming out of the oxidation pond, than they did going into it.

And at this point, I'm going to borrow another line from the previously mentioned beat poem.
If, perchance, I have offended,
Think but this and all is mended,
We'd as well be ten minutes back in time,
For all the chance I'd change your mind.

Tim Minchin, Storm (animated, rather than live) <- Link to previously mentioned nine minute beat poem.