Chicken FB group question: “What can I feed one of my girls who has always been under weight and small …”
How about “… into the stockpot?” Stop wasting time trying to keep the weakest of your flock alive, concentrate on making your flock stronger.
Here’s a few thoughts regarding the world:
- On any given day there’s always at least one war or conflict going on.
- On any given day there’s always at least one group of people experiencing famine, war, or natural disaster.
- On any given day there’s always at least one group of people fleeing from one of the above events.
And on any given day, there’s a potential for most of those events to stop happening to people. Forever.
We’re thinking of climate as a distant future kind of thing – but perhaps it isn’t … We’re thinking of coronavirus novel 2019 as a Bad Thing but perhaps it isn’t. We’re thinking of coronavirus novel 2019 as a one – off thing, but perhaps it isn’t.
People are suddenly infected by the far more serious “Prepper Virus” and its dangerous relative “Hoarder’s Disease.” And (a nod to the preppers out there) most of them are what the preppers refer to as “zombies,” that is, people who have not prepared for anything in their lives and are now suddenly scared shitless at the turns of events, and reacting badly.
So where’s that potential I hear you ask. How can anything good come of this? And I’m going to be a bit controversial and hard – assed about it but it has to be said. 99% of the people on this world are nothing, they contribute nothing other than to feed the wheels of an economy. That economy drives everything, no mater what particular “ism” you subscribe to. No matter even what species of creature or plant you are. Everything has an economic system and everything’s driven by it and chained to it.
We’ve never EVER actually had a situation of plenty. Where there’s been plenty for us (as in my particular group of humans) that means that another larger group of humans are doing with less, whole ecosystems are depleted and the creatures and plants in that ecosystem are impoverished and deprived of their lives. No species has ever had that, right from the first proto-organisms.
They had to contend with the fact that they required energy to live, and had to consume part of their environment to provide the structure of their selves. By doing so they sowed the seeds of their own demise, as they created niches for their slightly better adapted cousins to exploit and thus out-compete them for resources.
In terms of creating order for entropy to consume, this was a good arrangement. In terms of creating a good work / life / survival / plentitude for the organisms, well, there are some roguh edges that need to be addressed …
Wherever I say the word “economy” in future, you can mentally substitute the term “order / entropy dynamic” and it’ll mean the same thing either way. Our “economy” is just the dynamic between order and chaos made physical.
So we can’t get away from that. Everything has a cost, that cost has to be borne, and since the matter / energy total of the Universe can’t be increased or decreased, it can only change form.
Which has nothing to do with what I’m typing. Except sort of.
The idea of creating plentitude is a human construct. Animals have intelligence, they know the difference between feast and famine, but they don’t go around planning to turn their corner of the savannah into a springbok farm so all the lions can get a decent feed. Only a very few species do that, and – oddly enough, and I’ve just realised this – the species that mostly DO farm are collaborative hivemind species like ants. And us …
So imagine if 1) coronavirus ISN’T the only pandemic we’re abotu to have. We’ve created a new niche environment to exploit, the nine billion humans on the planet. And bacteria and visuses with their speedy lifecycles have sat up and taken note. That they’d first exploit humans that are more stressed by overpopulation (such as Chinese people with their millions crammed into cities like Wuhan) seems like a fair plan. That they’d mutate to accommodate healthier less stressed humans as they encountered them, is also a given. What’s novel coronavirus 19 done? Apparently mutated a bit to give it a better chance in less stressed populations.
So we’re treating COVID19 as though it’s a one-off and we just need to get through however long it lasts, hence panic – buying and knee – jerk work arrangements and business adapting poorly to it. But the businesses that realise NOW that this is going to be an ongoing state of affairs, they are going to succeed.
We’re treating the effects of climate change as though they’re manageable and temporary and we’ll just recover from them any day now. Again, this isn’t the way to think about this because this is the way it is now, and won’t “recover” if at all, then not for several thousand years, and even then, it will NOT be much like the world was before we buggered it up.