Sunday, March 18, 2012

The Failed Doctrine of Infinite Growth

The Crisis of Civilization is a documentary feature film investigating how global crises like ecological disaster, financial meltdown, dwindling oil reserves, terrorism and food shortages are converging symptoms of a single, failed global system.

...featuring clowns, car crashes, explosions, acrobats, super heroes, xylophones and much, much more!


Watch it in YouTube (above) or Vimeo (below)...but watch it!  Update:  Lest you think we in America are a little further from 1984 that the UK after watching this film, take a look at Obama's new Executive Order.

The Crisis of Civilization: Full Film from thecrisisofcivilization on Vimeo.

8 comments:

  1. If faith in the goodness of science --- a great gift to humankind from God --- is ever lost, then the future of children everywhere, life as we know it, and Earth as a fit place for habitation by coming generations, that we think we are preserving and protecting on our watch, will probably be ruined utterly. Somehow science must come to prevail over the pernicious silence of too many of 'the brightest and the best' on one hand and the specious, intellectually dishonest, willfully deceitful, cascading ideological chatter by clever 'talking heads', overly educated sycophants or other minions in the mainstream media who serve the selfish interests of the self-proclaimed masters of the universe among us on the other. It appears that we have a lot work to do fast, and many necessary behavioral changes to make. Endless growth of the immense 'artificial reality' will end either as a function of intelligent human thought, the best available science and morally courageous action or else the colossal artificial reality(aka economic colossus, aka global political economy) will somehow expand until it implodes because an endlessly growing, gigantic global economy in a finite world like the one we inhabit cannot be sustained much longer on a planet of the size, composition and frangible ecology of Earth. To put this situation in another way, if we keep up our reckless overconsuming, relentless overproducing and unbridled overpopulation activities, then there can be no functional global economy, no life as we know it, no future human well being, no planet as a fit place of human habitation because the human species is polluting Earth's fragile environs and plundering its limited resources faster than the planet can restore itself for human benefit. Allow me to deploy words from A. Schweitzer. We need a new ethics based upon "reverence for life". To revere an ethical system based upon idea that 'greed is good', the one we see dominating human activity on our watch, needs to be appropriately criminalized rather than ubiquitously legitimized, socially sanctioned and made lawful.

    Steve Salmony

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  2. Thank you Steve, your comments are always prescient and poignant.

    I left these thoughts on the youtube channel (having learned so much from you and your circle of friends about the under-appreciated role of overpopulation!):

    Brilliant! Reposted and shared.
    Note though, despite the study cited saying we can feed 11 billion, that is nonsense, especially because it flies in the face of 2 facts - sea levels are rising and will inundate the most productive land and the ocean is acidifying & food chain collapsing - bye bye primary source of protein for many people in the world. Human overpopulation must be solved along with the other crisis discussed in the video.

    The other point lacking in an otherwise astoundingly excellent film, although alluded to here and there, is the overall degradation of the ecosystem upon which it it was accurately mentioned, the economy and everything else depend. Few people realize just how badly degraded the soil is, and even worse, the atmosphere is so polluted that it is killing trees and diminishing crop yields around the globe.

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  3. Hi Gail,

    temperature 22 celsius today (normal should be around 5, it is not even spring yet!). and it will be this warm (and warmer) all week. I am going through some days in a haze under the deflected light of the sun (deflected by the veil of airplanes fuel) and some other days in intense fog (more and more very dark and foggy days).
    go for walk from time to time to talk and sing with the thousands of dying trees around my apartment since I still have voice. watching, waiting.

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  4. Michele, it's so unnatural, it is unnerving.

    Some more of the crazies, why the hell not? Word now is that the Kone film (and George Clooney's arrest!) was a wag-the-dog conspiracy to get the US to start a resource grab in Africa! First the spoof:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=68GbzIkYdc8

    Then the rant:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qem-fA17210&feature=g-all-u&context=G2989e65FAAAAAAAALAA

    ReplyDelete
  5. This is an excellent film for people that still can't grasp the holistic nature of our predicament, thanks for posting, everyone needs to email this link and post to other sites, if only this got the attention of the Kony video. Thanks for your continued excellent work Gail. - ThreeEs http://3es.weebly.com/

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  6. There's some implication here and there that Kony is nothing but a planted wag-the-dog type excuse for military adventures in Africa for more resource exploitation...who knows?

    this at least is funny!

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=68GbzIkYdc8

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  7. HAARP was originally conceived and patented by Bernard Eastlund to replace our dependence on fossil fuels with the infinite energy of our magnetosphere.

    TPTB decided to stay with oil, gas, and coal.

    Eastlund bought the farm while DOD weaponized his technology.

    The energy shortage is total bullshit.

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  8. ENDLESS GROWTH: A TELLTALE SIGN OF MADNESS

    If scientists will choose to speak truth to the powerful, perhaps they will encourage other stonewalling leaders to do the right thing. At the moment many too many elders are remaining electively mute and appear unwilling to confront 'the powers that be' with the best science available regarding either the 'placement' of the human species within the order of living things on Earth or the most adequate understandings of the way the world we inhabit actually works. Such willful refusals by so many knowledgeable elders to assume their individual responsiblities to science and fulfill their well-established, collective duties to humanity are indefensible. Before it is too late for human action to change the perilous, human-induced course of unfolding and fulminating ecological events in our planetary home, perhaps enough people will speak out loudly and clearly in 'one voice' about what they believe to be real (according to the knowledge and the ‘lights’ they possess) regarding clear and imminent dangers to future human well being and environmental health that are visible on our watch. By so doing a global, internet-driven transformation of consciousness could literally spring up, as if out of nowhere, among human beings with feet of clay. Because the finite and frangible 'reality' of the natural world we inhabit has got to become more evident to people everywhere, day by day, and because the biological and physical limitations of the natural world will become obvious to people everywhere during the timeframe when humanity will face 'peak everything', humankind could sooner rather than later reach a point in space-time when a critical mass of people see and agree that ‘the endless growth’ paradigm that is so powerful and prominent in the human world in our time is, in fact, the telltale mark of insanity. Then the human (not the natural) world will have to change, the seemingly unassailable force of self-proclaimed masters of the universe, their global political/economic endless growth regime and mass media notwithstanding. Human overpopulation, overproduction and overconsumption activities would be reasonably, sensibly and humanely regulated worldwide. Human beings with feet of clay would not even be able to think in good faith of ourselves as Homo sapiens, much less behave as if there were no limits to growth on a planet with the size, composition and ecology of Earth. Such circumstances would compel all of us at least to try and change behavior that can be seen readily as distinctly human and patently unsustainable lunacy. With regard to the construction of an ‘economic colossus’ we call a global political economy, the outrageous per capita overconsumption of limited resources and skyrocketing increase of absolute global human population numbers, changes toward population regulation, sustainable lifestyles and right-sized corporate enterprises would begin to occur ubiquitously. After all, there have got to be limits to the insanity of constructing or engaging in anything evidently unsustainable by a species calling itself Homo sapiens sapiens. Somehow, somewhere, at some moment the leading elders in the human community must agree to limit something, some human activity. Any activity at all will work well. By so doing we change the endless growth paradigm and choose a new path, 'a road less traveled by', to the future. Until at least one human activity is meaningfully restrained, if not altogether halted from growing (at least momentarily), the unsustainable game of Ponzi we are recklessly and relentlessly playing will eventually lead to global destruction and degradation of a colossal, incalculable sort, I suppose.

    Steve Salmony

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