"[The Indigenous Australians] were, Cook noted in
his journal, entirely inoffensive. But a few actions of Cook's men
did enrage them. They were scandalized by the sight of birds being
caught and placed in cages, and demanded their immediate release.
Imprisoning anyone, animal or person, was to them taboo. They were
even more incensed when they saw Cook's men catch not just one, but
several turtles. Turtles are slow-breeding, and it is easy to wipe
out their local population by indiscriminate poaching, which is why
they only allowed the turtles to be taken one at a time, and only by
a specially designated person who bore responsibility for the
turtles' welfare. Cook thought them
primitive, but he was ignorant of their situation. Knowing what we
know, they seem quite advanced. Living on a huge but arid and mostly
barren island with few native agriculturally useful plants and no
domesticable animals, they understood that their survival was
strictly by the grace of the surrounding natural realm. To them, the
birds and the turtles were more important than they were, because
these animals could survive without them, but they could not survive
without these animals ... If we take
natural wealth into account when looking at economic activity, it
turns out that we consistently destroy much more wealth than we
create: the economy is mostly a negative-sum game. Next, it turns out
that we don't really understand how these “ecosystem services”
are maintained, beyond realizing that it's all very complicated and
highly interconnected in surprising and unexpected ways ... In addition, it bears
remembering that we are, in fact, sacrificing our species, and have
been for centuries, for the sake of something we call “progress.”
Aforementioned Captain Cook sailed around the Pacific “discovering”
islands that the Polynesians had discovered many centuries earlier,
his randy, drunken, greedy sailors spreading venereal disease, alcoholism and corruption, and leaving ruin in their wake wherever they went ... It seems like letting global industrial civilization collapse and all the nuclear power plants cook off is not such a good option, because it will seal our fate. But the alternative is to “extend and pretend” and “kick the can down the road” while resorting to a variety of environmentally destructive, increasingly desperate means to keep industry running: hydraulic fracturing, mining tar sands, drilling in the Arctic and so on. And this isn't such a good option either because it will seal our fate in other ways. And so it seems that there may not be a happy end to my story of The Five Stages of Collapse, the first three of which (financial, commercial, political) are inevitable, while the last two (social, cultural) are entirely optional but have, alas, already run their course in many parts of the world. Because, you see, there is also the sixth stage which I have previously neglected to mention—environmental collapse—at the end of which we are left without a home, having rendered Earth (our home planet) uninhabitable."
Zum Artikel von Dmitry Orlov, erschienen auf Club Orlov (22. Oktober 2013) »
Zum Artikel von Dmitry Orlov, erschienen auf Club Orlov (22. Oktober 2013) »
