SUBTITLE: The Amish survive
Humans are an invasive virus, he says:
| Today, escalating human populations have vastly exceeded global carrying capacity and now produce massive quantities of solid, liquid, and gaseous waste. Biological diversity is being threatened by over-exploitation, toxic pollution, agricultural mono-culture, invasive species, competition, habitat destruction, urban sprawl, oceanic acidification, ozone depletion, global warming, and climate change. It’s a runaway train of ecological calamities.
It’s a train that carries all the earth’s species as unwilling passengers with humans as the manically insane engineers unwilling to use the brake pedal. |
Whenever I read stuff like this, I (sorta, but not really) marvel that the writer is still alive.
But he is (or was anyway), and continued writing:
| Humans are presently acting upon this body in the same manner as an invasive virus with the result that we are eroding the ecological immune system.
A virus kills its host and that is exactly what we are doing with our planet’s life support system. We are killing our host the planet Earth. I was once severely criticized for describing human beings as being the “AIDS of the Earth.†I make no apologies for that statement. Our viral like behaviour can be terminal both to the present biosphere and ourselves. We are both the pathogen and the vector. But we also have the capability of being the anti-virus if only we can recognize the symptoms and address the disease with effective measures of control. |
Amazing. Or maybe I mean weird. No, deceived and deluded is better.
| We need to re-wild the planet.
[…] We should not be living in human communities that enclose tiny preserved ecosystems within them. Human communities should be maintained in small population enclaves within linked wilderness ecosystems. No human community should be larger than 20,000 people and separated from other communities by wilderness areas. Communication systems can link the communities. […] We need to radically and intelligently reduce human populations to fewer than one billion. We need to eliminate nationalism and tribalism and become Earthlings. And as Earthlings, we need to recognize that all the other species that live on this planet are also fellow citizens and also Earthlings. |
In addition to the wild stuff, he does say some things that sound sane (at least to me). 😉
| Who should have children? Those who are responsible and completely dedicated to the responsibility which is actually a very small percentage of humans. Being a parent should be a career. Whereas some people are engineers, musicians, or lawyers, others with the desire and the skills can be fathers and mothers. Schools can be eliminated if the professional parent is also the educator of the child. |
Responsible, dedicated, career parents. Home schooling parents. All of them shoes of a perfect fit. (For somebody else?)
However, I don’t think anyone has the right or authority to impose any of that on others.
Oh, and he brings some of my fellow-Anabaptists into the picture:
| We need to stop flying, stop driving cars, and jetting around on marine recreational vehicles. The Amish survive without cars and so can the rest of us. |
So there you are.
8)
PS: I’ve seen some folks quoting him as saying Mennonites instead of Amish. So let me clear up some confusion for them: Amish and Mennonites are different. 😀