Belo Monte Dam approved :(

[auroraglacialis]

Originally Posted by applejuice

We all agree that nobody should face the fact of being forced to live their home. We also agree the fact that we should protect our environment.

Yes, we agree on that.

I think we also agree that people needs water and electricity nowadays to live an ordinary life (one which is above poverty levels). Unfortunately, most of the times, to fight against poverty is not always compatible with protecting the environment. Most industry requires the exploitation and manufacture of natural resources. Countries then have to decide whether they will allow to preserve their natural resources or to use them to get out of the poverty cycle.

And this is where the problem lies. Indeed most industry requires what you mentioned and thus are only doing one thing - transforming nature/environment/living ecosystems into "wealth" (money and "stuff"). That is a problem in itself, because wealth is not staying - things degrade and turn to waste slowly, so more welath has to be generated at more expenses until its all gone and the problem is that the regeneration of the resources, ecosystems, nature is a lot slower than people draw from it. So it is like burning the furniture to keep warm in the house or drawing down a bank account. This is the economic example - imagine a bank account with something like a million $$ on it and you give that to the bank at an interest rate of a couple of %, so you get some thousands of $$ every year and can live on that. You could of course improve your lifestyle by just taking some of that million $$ that is just sitting there and double or triple your yearly income, but after some years you will have nothing and your children will have nothing. Do you think that is a wise idea?
Anyways - wealth and poverty are also products of the economy - usually some people are poor because others have become rich and it is also something relative - somone is only poor if he compares himself to someone who is rich.

Filling the basic needs is something different - if you talk about access to water, food, a safe home - that is definitely something everyone should have but I think to get out of this by "selling off" the things that keep this world alive does not make any sense at all, especially as I said that in the long run, it will not be able to keep up. Look at the USA - they were the wealthies nation in the world probably and now they have even trouble keeping up their infrastructure because they are reaching the limits of growth and welath as we ususally perceive it depends on growth, not on stability.

Wealth is a dynamic thing, it is something that has to increase to make people feel good. Few people are content with something they have. If someone previously had not electricity and only a cardboard home, a concrete home with a light bulb will be great, but after a year or two and looking at the wealth of other people, he will want to have more or be unhappy. And then more and more and more...

Most people knows that without electricity, there's no industry, no employment, more poverty (can anyone here writing conceive life without electricity?).

Yes, I can - and all these things, industry, employment, electricity make only sense in the context of this culture of industrialism. We now think that people who have none of that are poor or even think that these things are essential, fundamental and the bare necessities of life. But that is not really true - it is only our own industrialized culture that makes that distinction. Just like the christian missionaries thought of the heathens as poor lost souls that do not even know about Jesus and have to be told and preached about him (even with the sword and whip if needed), today industrial civilization goes all over the place telling people that they "need" electricity, TVs, jobs, factories, roads, "bluejeans and light beer". But I would not call the Hadza or the people in the Amazon or for that matter of fact the NA'Vi "poor" in general. In fact these are rich cultures often with a lot of happiness. So the question is what is "poverty" - from a purely materialistic view, certainly these peoples are as poor as it gets, but is that a good measure of deciding what people should strive for?

I do not want to downplay the suffering of people living in slums or in very bad situations and for them certainly somethng has to change, but I object to the only way or the only path to do that is to give them jobs, electricity and sell of the environment around them to other countries, corporations or simply to degrade it in favour of industrialization. I guess that is one way to at least temporarily fill the hole in these peoples lives, but it is not sustainable and I would say that other things are well suited to fill some of these holes. For humans, community, family, safety, social activity are very important - more than electricity or cellphones. And in fact that electricity and the cellphones are mostly used to get to that feeling. I use electricity and a computer to participate in some form of community and social activity here in the forum for example, but not only does that cost a lot more in ecological terms than direct contact to people in front of me, it is also extremely mediated and inadequate in many ways. So it is filling in for a need to communicate and be social at immense costs.

So the goal is to give people a life worth living, a life that is happy and fulfilled. And I do not think that there is only "one way" to do this - especially not if that way destroys the planet for the future and our (and their) descendents...

[applejuice]

Originally Posted by auroraglacialis

So the goal is to give people a life worth living, a life that is happy and fulfilled. And I do not think that there is only "one way" to do this - especially not if that way destroys the planet for the future and our (and their) descendents...

We all want that. I am more than sure that for the second half of this century we will be able to restore everything we had to take away from nature.

[auroraglacialis]

That is a noble goal, applejuice, to restore, but I have serious problems with that idea in this context on several levels.
First of all it is always easier, more successful and viable to preserve than to restore.
Secondly restoration is always inadequate, as the compexity of a natural system cannot simply be replaced by a human made restoration effort. All that humans usually do is to allow for natural restoration to occur and maybe help it along - if systems are too degraded, they will not repair to their former state.
Thirdly to put this task to our children and childrens children at the end of this century is unspeakable. This goes against all ideas of human care. It sounds quite mad to think that we living now can rightfully destroy much of this world for personal gains, comforts and fun and justify this by possibly providing our descendants with some of the tools to restore some of the damage.

This is not acceptable to me - it is US living NOW that have to put an end to the destruction and that have to start restoring, not some distant generation at the end of the century. On the track this civilization is on now, we cannot wait any longer until the ship hits the reef. We alreday see the reef clearly in front of us - WE have to steer away from it and not smash right into it, hoping that by then surely someone will be able to repair the leaks.

[auroraglacialis]

ON TOPIC:
It seems that a single judge (how the fvck is it that a single person has more power than hundreds of thousands of people?) managed to stop the plans for now:

Brazilian judge orders construction of Amazon dam to stop | Environment | The Guardian

Of course the companies will appleal and they will go and drag out some corporate financed studies that show that there is no environmental damage and all that, but at least the struggle is not lost yet. The last news I heard was that it got approved but people were still trying to protest...
I hope this is at least putting this on hold long enough to allow more resistance to build up. I guess the only way to stop this project that is "needed for the booming economy" is if the hassles and costs involved rise so high due to resistance against it, that it becomes uneconomic to build it (this is what happened in Germany with nuclear power - if every transport of fuel rods costs some millions in expenses for police force and guards and repairs to railway tracks and roads - at some point it just does not pay off )

[Clarke]

Originally Posted by auroraglacialis

That is a noble goal, applejuice, to restore, but I have serious problems with that idea in this context on several levels.
First of all it is always easier, more successful and viable to preserve than to restore.

Of course, you can spin that around into an argument about preserving current society.

Thirdly to put this task to our children and childrens children at the end of this century is unspeakable. This goes against all ideas of human care. It sounds quite mad to think that we living now can rightfully destroy much of this world for personal gains, comforts and fun and justify this by possibly providing our descendants with some of the tools to restore some of the damage.

It's hardly "comfort." You will notice that no non-industrialized culture can support more than a hundred thousand people or so? Human needs, and the resources to fufill those needs, don't scale linearly, and since there's only a finiet amount of land to go around, we run into problems.

This is not acceptable to me - it is US living NOW that have to put an end to the destruction and that have to start restoring, not some distant generation at the end of the century.

The people of the end of this century will be far more capable of that than you can ever hope to be.

[auroraglacialis]

Originally Posted by Clarke

Of course, you can spin that around into an argument about preserving current society.

Well I guess then it would come to the question of what is worth preserving. I doubt you will find many people who would say that an old growth forest is not worth preserving - or that the continued existence of polar bears is not worth preserving. But I bet you find plenty of people who say that the current society is not worth preserving. Some elements yes, but the whole thing as it is now - I think most people are aware that this is something that has to change.

It's hardly "comfort." You will notice that no non-industrialized culture can support more than a hundred thousand people or so? Human needs, and the resources to fufill those needs, don't scale linearly

Erm - I dont really get that - for once most of these actually do scale linearly (more people - more need for food, no change in the need of food per person -> linear). If anything, then a larger population uses a bit less than their linear share because you can share shelter and some resources.
And re population - in precolumbian America there were living about 100 million people. The estimates vary, some say it was only 50, some say it was even more than the 100 mil. The civilizations of South America had several million people each, Canada had some 6-10 million people.
And certainly a lot is about comfort. Think of India. It has four times the population on 1/3 of the area compared to the USA. They all live, many are having basic needs met. Most do not have the comforts of the US lifestyle though. Of course India is industrialized to a viable degree, but my point was that a lot of the "needs" are actually comforts. With industrialization, you could probably cram 2 billion people or so into the USA. So there is a lot of potential - either to increase population or to reduce industrialization (or at least the most destructive parts of it)

The people of the end of this century will be far more capable of that than you can ever hope to be.

That may be or may not be. Maybe they are all poor and starving because the financial crisis became a great depression, leaving the country unable to cope with the ill effects of the climate catastrophe or maybe there are wars against the immigration from countries that failed. So that they are more capable than we now is a prediction based on the assumption that all will be running smoothly and progress at an exponential rate. I think that is a dangerous assumption to make, especially when the result of it being incorrect is that the suffering would be great.
I think no one has really the right to load problems of our times onto future generations. Then they do the same and of course our fathers did the same and so every generation inherits a bigger burden than before, trying to solve the problems of the past while creating new ones. I think that is unfair and ethically questionable. The native american rule of treating the land in a way that the seventh generation after yourself will find it in a state that is enjoyable and that supports that generation is a much better concept to strive for.
Maybe they should be honored that you trust so much in their abilities, but I have the suspicion they would see this differently if you could ask them

[Moco Loco]

Originally Posted by auroraglacialis

Thirdly to put this task to our children and childrens children at the end of this century is unspeakable.

Idea: Let's not have children

[auroraglacialis]

Indeed, I will not have children, Moco Loco, though I would love to be a teacher or guide or storyteller to children because I think it is important that they hear other stories than that of success measured in dollars, large houses and multiple cars, that of perpetual growth and everlasting unforgiving progress, that of a human nature that has to be controlled by a machine society...