Well well well I started the day in a bit of a funk but then got to journaling, and decided, hey, I've got some ideas that might be good alternatives for sustainable economic development in Nova Scotia. Maybe I'll start a blog series listing them off. Maybe they are crap, but, they're just ideas conjured up from my 40 years of living in this world. I've traveled a lot and lived in various Canadian cities. Maybe instead of staring out the window feeling depressed at the thought of fracking coming to NS I will post these ideas on line. People are free to love them or hate them or suggest alternatives. My intention is finding solutions for better lifestyles for more people, I think everyone could get on board with that, even Bill Black! Unless they are greedy overlords I guess, who depend on humans to exploit.
I did hear back from Bill Black (referring to my post yesterday) who doesn't think we'd find common ground, doesn't think solar or microhydro are economically viable (though farmed mink and salmon are). Maybe he's right. But maybe what is fundamentally flawed is our model of the economy in the first place. I'll refer back to my post on Sacred Economics.
In thinking about a preamble, and thinking more about oil and gas, I came up with this:
What child, when asked what he/she wants to be when they grow up says, "oooo, I'd like to have a job for a multinational petrochemical company, draining a watershed to pump carcinogens into the earth to make natural gas"? I think kids want to help others and animals, create, invent, make things, perform, play, communicate ... and somehow along the way they all get drafted into a school system that doesn't help them listen to and realize their hearts desires. Instead, for the most part, it grooms them to be good employees and good followers. Not so much freethinkers or creators, as this TED talk by Ken Robinson describes: (fyi I've watched a lot of documentaries while working on art and lying around waiting for my back to heal after breaking it in 2007. Some are fantastic so I'll be linking to them)
So all this thinking about solutions has prompted me to symbolically dig my biology degrees out of the trash. I think the biggest issue human beings have is that we've somehow forgotten that we're also animals and are subjected to environmental constraints.
One concept from ecology I can share is the notion of "carrying capacity". Carrying Capacity is the maximum population of a given species that can survive indefinitely in a given environment.
The term was taught to me to describe things like how many deer can live in an area etc etc, but if we're going to keep increasing the population, or even hold it steady as we deplete and pollute our current resources, we need to come up with more creative, sustainable ways to use resources to meet our needs.
The following is an excellent lecture I've watched many times, on resources, arithmetic and the exponential function. I wish everyone in the world would watch this.
"Arithmetic, Population and Energy" by Dr. Albert Bartlett
here is a link to it on Documentary Heaven
http://documentaryheaven.com/arithmetic-population-and-energy/
and I found it on youtube too so I could embed it here:
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