Arctic Updates

[Penguin]

Satellites dont give reliable evaluations of the MASS of the ice, just the extent. To a satellite, 20 cm of ice looks pretty much the same as 200 meters of ice.

Dear Penguin, these were sea ice cover studies, not ice mass!

Ice mass is all that matters. According to the spanish research vessel, the Wilkins shelf collapsed already, into a large amount of 200 meter thick ice sheets now floating free and melting. (linked to before)

[Penguin]

Ben D, stickdog99:
What do you think will happen when we have no forests left, none at all?
What happens to that feedback loop then, when trees arent in the loop anymore? Can you shed some light on that question for a change?

[Penguin]

I'm not saying that we shouldn't be extremely concerned about all this.

Before we started messing with the environment on this scale, we had a very nice, very stable ecosystem for humans to enjoy for long period of time. So it's far safer not to be actively doing anything to upset the balance.

What I don't understand, though, is all this pretending we know for certain what the control systems of Gaia are. We don't. Nobody knows. Science isn't there yet, isn't even close to being there and may never get there, especially if we quasi-exterminate ourselves within the 21st or 22nd century.

What Im saying is that we should actively be cutting down our upsetting of the balance. Which we are not doing, we are still increasing all activity that is destroying forests, for example. Continuing to burn fossil fuels too, is meddling. Science tells us that something is awry, and deducing what that something is is not rocket science.. "Doing something" in this context means "doing a helluva lot less than we are currently doing"!

We dont know how it all works, and we never will. We do know that we are fucking it all up.

I stopped driving a car about 10 years ago since I felt so bad about contributing to all the problems that private car traffic causes. Now I try to get along with vegetables and bicycle, and public transport, and maybe once a year I rent a van for a day if I need to move stuff (not many of my friends have a car either). Stopped eating meat for the same reason (and not wanting to cause needless suffering to other animals) - meat production is one of the largest causes of soil depletion, forest loss and CO2 and methane emissions..

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/01/27/ ... s/meat.php

A sea change in the consumption of a resource that people take for granted may be in store: something cheap, plentiful, widely enjoyed and a part of daily life. And it isn't oil.

It's meat.

The two commodities have a great deal in common: Like oil, meat receives government subsidies in the U.S. marketplace. Like oil, meat is subject to accelerating demand as nations become wealthier, and this, in turn, sends prices higher. Finally, like oil, meat is something people are encouraged to consume less of, as the toll exacted by industrial production increases and becomes increasingly visible.

Global demand for meat has multiplied in recent years, encouraged by growing affluence and nourished by the proliferation of huge, confined animal feeding operations. These assembly-line meat factories consume enormous amounts of energy, pollute water supplies, generate significant greenhouse gases and require ever-increasing amounts of corn, soy and other grains, a dependency that has led to the destruction of vast swaths of the world's tropical rain forests.

Last week, the president of Brazil announced emergency measures to halt the burning and cutting of the rain forests for crop and grazing land. In the last five months alone, the government says, 1,250 square miles, or 320,000 hectares, were lost.

The world's total meat supply was 71 million tons in 1961. In 2007, it was estimated to be 284 million tons. Per capita consumption has more than doubled over that period. (In the developing world, it rose twice as fast, doubling in the past 20 years.) World meat consumption is expected to double again by 2050, a projection that one expert, Henning Steinfeld of the United Nations, said was resulting in a "relentless growth in livestock production."

Americans eat about the same amount of meat daily as they have for some time, about 8 ounces, or 230 grams, roughly twice the global average. At about 5 percent of the world's population, Americans grow and kill nearly 10 billion animals a year, more than 15 percent of the world's total.

Growing meat uses so many resources that it is a challenge to enumerate them all. But consider: An estimated 30 percent of the earth's ice-free land is directly or indirectly involved in livestock production, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, which also estimates that livestock production generates nearly a fifth of the world's greenhouse gases - more than transportation does.

To put the energy-using demand of meat production into easy-to-understand terms, Gidon Eshel, a geophysicist at Bard College at Simon's Rock in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and Pamela Martin, an assistant professor of geophysics at the University of Chicago, calculated that if Americans were to reduce meat consumption by just 20 percent, it would be as if they all switched from a standard sedan - a Camry, say - to the ultra-efficient Prius.

Similarly, a study last year by the National Institute of Livestock and Grassland Science in Japan estimated that 1 kilogram of beef, or 2.2 pounds, is responsible for the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the average European car every 250 kilometers, or 155 miles, and burns enough energy to light a 100-watt bulb for nearly 20 days.
---------------

Will you do your part by not eating meat?
Or is not doing something too much of meddling too?
Or is meat too tasty, too big a pleasure?

[Ben D]

Ben D, stickdog99:
What do you think will happen when we have no forests left, none at all?

Dear Penguin, you do indeed are a frightened soul, personally I don't waste my life thinking about hypothetical doom and gloom scenarios.

[Penguin]

Ben D, stickdog99:
What do you think will happen when we have no forests left, none at all?

Dear Penguin, you do indeed are a frightened soul, personally I don't waste my life thinking about hypothetical doom and gloom scenarios.

Then think about the real ones.

Or fuck off and shut up since you have nothing worthwhile to say.
Ive heard all of your crap several times already.
You sad, blind fool. Afraid? Why would I be afraid of anything?

And no, Im not harsh. You get what you ask for, thats a universal law.
Buddha said so. Or did he?

[Ben D]

Hi friend Penguin, I get the impression that by raising this old issue again on another thread, you imagine that you proved your point that I was misunderstanding a quote and that you are waiting for an apology.

Actually the reason that I didn't respond directly to your post was that before I was able to, brainpanhandler, who had been taking the same stance as you, finally understood what I was saying and humbly admitted to having misunderstood and that indeed Crowley had erected a 'strawman', so I assumed you would get it also,..you know ..the 100th monkey effect or something!

"There's no excuse for saying 'we've got to keep pumping carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere," he told Reuters by telephone, adding that the cooling was projected to start in 10,000 to 100,000 years.

Well there is breathing for a start!

Nice comeback, but Penguin didn't write that. Thomas Crowley, from one of the articles you cite, wrote that.

Understood bph, but he emphasized the statement in 'bold' to presumably make a point.

I could have also pointed out that there is no identification as to who is saying "We've got to keep pumping blah blah etc.",....maybe some strawman somewhere?

In the context of the interview it seems that the "he" referred to in the quote is Crowley. No? Who else could the author be referring to?

Really not sure where you are coming from bph, in my read of the quote, it does not appear to be Thomas Crowley who is claiming that we've got to keep pumping carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere, rather he seems to be implying that someone else is saying that, and that he is disagreement with them... so there must be a third party he is referring to, or perhaps just a strawman, yes?

Now this was your response to the above post...

No.

It was him who said it. Did you lose your reading glasses?

""Climate skeptics could look at this and say, CO2 is good for us," said study leader Thomas Crowley of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.

But the idea that global warming may be staving off an ice age is "not cause for relaxing, because we're actually moving into a highly unusual climate state," Crowley added.""

Say what you will, but at least quote your own sources correctly and dont call strawmen when I quote what you posted!

Now compare your obtuseness with this relevant statement from brainpanhandler's response,....

Yes. You are correct. Crowley erected a strawman. I really don't know anyone who is saying, "We've got to keep pumping CO2 into the atmosphere", nor do I imagine he does.

[stickdog99]

Ben D, stickdog99:
What do you think will happen when we have no forests left, none at all?
What happens to that feedback loop then, when trees arent in the loop anymore? Can you shed some light on that question for a change?

IMHO, life will go on. Mammalian life may not, but microbial life will adjust as it has no doubt adjusted in the clouds and below the surface of Venus.

What is completely dumbfounding to me is that the same people who would have us believe that the unintended causes of our technologically driven society are currently dooming us to a quick and inevitable extinction put their full faith in the exalted Church of Science to both diagnose and rectify this situation.

[Penguin]

Ben D:

No longer will the fool be called noble, Or the rogue be spoken of as generous. For a fool speaks nonsense, And his heart inclines toward wickedness, To practice ungodliness and to speak error against the LORD, To keep the hungry person unsatisfied And to withhold drink from the thirsty. (Isaiah 32.5-6).

stickdog99:
What would you suggest to rectify the situation?
Im open for solutions.

And did I say somewhere that science has the answers to this?
It does not. Common sense and a good heart have the solutions, not science.
Life has the solutions, and observing and mimicking lifes processes, have the solution. Acting in accordance with the rest of life on this planet, is the solution.

Science means just "observing what is happening". The empirical method.
Humans lived in balance with the Earth for some couple million years. We have lived off balance (the civilization, city building phase, pyramid culture, hierarchy) for only 8000-10000 years. Thats an anomaly even in the time humans have existed!

For 8000 years, humans have acted like out-of-control bacterial infection on a host species.

The Fool -- CANTO V

60. Long is the night to a sleepless person; long is the distance of a league to a tired person; long is the circle of rebirths to a fool who does not know the true Law.

61. If a genuine seeker, who sets forth in search of a superior friend, does not come in contact with such a one or at least an equal, then he should resolutely choose the solitary course, for there can be no companionship with the ignorant.

62. "I have children, I have wealth," thinking thus, the fool torments himself. But, when he is not the possessor of his own self, how then of children? How then of wealth?

63. The fool who knows of his ignorance, indeed, through that very consideration becomes a wise man. But that conceited fool who considers himself learned is, in fact, called a fool.

64. A fool who associates with a wise man throughout his life may not know the Dhamma any more than the ladle the taste of soup.

65. As the tongue detects the taste of the broth, so the intelligent person who associates with a wise man even for a moment comes to realize the essence of the Law.

66. The unwise, fools who are enemies to themselves, go about committing sinful deeds which produce bitter fruits.

67. Not well done is that deed which one, having performed, has to repent; whose consequence one has to face with tears and lamentation.

68. Well done is that deed which one, having performed, does not repent, and whose consequence one experiences with delight and contentment.

69. So long as an evil deed does not mature (bring disastrous results), the fool thinks his deed to be sweet as honey. But, when his evil deed matures, he falls into untold misery.

70. Though a fool (practicing austerity) may eat his food from the tip of a blade of kusa grass for months and months, he is not worth one-sixteenth part of those who have realized the Good Law.

71. As fresh-drawn milk from the cow does not soon curdle, so an evil deed does not produce immediate fruits. It follows the wrongdoer like a smoldering spark that burns throughout and then suddenly blazes up.

72. Whatever knowledge a fool acquires causes him only harm. It cleaves his head and destroys his good nature (through conceit).

73, 74. Unwise is the monk who desires undue adoration from others, lordship over other monks, authority among the monastic dwellings and homage even from outside groups. Moreover, he thinks, "May both laymen and monks highly esteem my action! May they be subject to me in all actions, great or small." Such is the grasping desire of a worldly monk whose haughtiness and conceit ever increase.

75. One path leads to worldly gain and honor; quite another path leads to nirvana. Having realized this truth, let not the monk, the true follower of the Enlightened One, yearn for homage from others, but let him cultivate serenity of mind and dispassion.

[Penguin]

http://www.erica.demon.co.uk/EV/EV1402.html

Are We at War with Nature?
Derek D. Turner

Environmental Values 14(2005): 21-36. doi: 10.3197/0963271053306122

A number of people, from William James to Dave Foreman and Vandana Shiva, have suggested that humans are at war with nature. Moreover, the analogy with warfare figures in at least one important argument for strategic monkeywrenching. In general, an analogy can be used for purposes of (1) justification; (2) persuasion; or (3) as a tool for generating novel hypotheses and recommendations. This paper argues that the analogy with warfare should not be used for justificatory or rhetorical purposes, but that it may nevertheless have a legitimate heuristic role to play in environmental philosophy.

This article is available online (PDF format) from Ingenta Journals. Access is free if your institution subscribes to Environmental Values. Reprints of this article can be ordered from ingenta or the British Library
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/whp/ev

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/jour ... 1&SRETRY=0
Agriculture. A War on Nature?
JOHN SURGEY
ABSTRACT

ABSTRACT Agriculture, in the ubiquitous debate concerning the environment, is often accused of being environmentally destructive as if farmers are waging a war on nature. The article discusses the role of aggression, competition and killing in agriculture and concludes that those warlike characteristics are a necessary part of agricultural practice. The article stresses, however, that agriculture is not literally a war on nature and points to a number of unwarlike characteristics that also belong to agriculture.

http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol6/iss2/art1/

Russell, E. 2001. War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals from World War I to Silent Spring.

War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals from World War I to Silent Spring (2001), by Edmund Russell, breaks new ground in environmental history. Compared with such well-established subjects in the field as conservation and wilderness, few environmental historians have focused on warfare. Even fewer have examined environmental change from a chemical perspective; an ecological viewpoint is much more typical. Yet, both warfare and the chemical industry have shaped our environmental history in powerful ways, on both national and global scales. Military combat has transformed ecosystems, with concomitant social, political, and economic consequences. Chemical introductions and manipulations have altered ecological webs, often in obscure, latent ways. As a new addition to Cambridge University Press’s Studies in Environment and History series, Russell’s book broadens the field and contributes to our understanding of the relationships between humans and their environment in an important, but little-studied research area.

Scholarly and cultural traditions have commonly depicted warfare and human control over nature as unrelated. Edmund Russell disputes this assumption, arguing that the two spheres coevolved. He asserts: “The control of nature expanded the scale of war, and war expanded the scale on which people controlled nature” (p. 2). To test his hypothesis, Russell employs a case study of the histories of chemical warfare and of pest control during the period between World War I and 1962, the publication date of Rachel Carson’s classic, Silent Spring. He builds upon this focused case study to give readers insight to much larger questions: Why did governments shift away from contained warfare to “total war”? What are the roots of the early environmental movement? Did America unwittingly wage environmental war upon itself?

Russell develops this history in a logical, well-organized, and illuminating manner. Chapter Two, “The Long Reach of War (1914–1917),” discusses the foundation of the synergistic alliance between the U. S. military and the chemical industry. Subsequent chapters explain how the chemical industry grew into an increasingly powerful military and social force during the interval between World Wars I and II. Institutionally, technologically, and ideologically, the chemical industry and the U. S. military have coevolved, he argues. For example, the creation and development of two institutions, the Chemical Warfare Service and the Bureau of Entomology, constituted a way in which knowledge generated by the military contributed to the growth of the chemical industry, and vice versa. As institutional, technological, and ideological factors coalesced, periods of “Total War (1936–1943)” (Chapter 6) and of “Annihilation (1943–1945)” (Chapter 7) ensued. The last part of the book discusses the unanticipated consequences of the cooperation between chemical warfare and pest control institutions, which culminated in a period of “Backfires (1958–1963)” (Chapter 11), and the gradual unraveling of this alliance. By examining the rise and fall of this military–scientific relationship, Russell explains the roots and consequences of complex turns in our environmental history, such as how the U. S. came to institutionalize practices to control insect populations with chemical toxins, such as DDT and dieldrin, and to treat humans—enemy soldiers—in a similar manner.

The quality of the research is first rate. It is thorough and wide ranging, and is the product of a sound research design. Russell draws upon an expansive range of archival material, including technical and scholarly articles, correspondence, histories, newspaper accounts, advertisements, biographies, and records from Congress, the Army, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Bureau of Entomology. Although he does not investigate an important archival source, chemical company records, this is an understandable omission given their general inaccessibility. This study’s research design, an examination of his hypothesis from ideological, institutional, and technological perspectives, enables Russell to weigh his argument carefully. For example, his examination of ideological history revealed that, during World War II, the Office of War Information tapped into popular, negative ideas about insect pests, that were simultaneously promoted by the chemical industry, to heighten the public’s military resolve. Poster propaganda claimed that enemy troops must be “eliminated” like disease-carrying insects (p. 133). This department portrayed “war as pest control [and]... pest control as war” (p. 99). After making preliminary conclusions based on a study of ideology, Russell cross-checks his findings with an investigation from institutional and technological perspectives. Through the process of testing his hypothesis from multiple viewpoints, he develops balanced, carefully considered conclusions.

There is one shortcoming in the execution of Russell’s research, however. At times, the reader must labor to distinguish the overarching story line from the detail. To an extent, I feel that Russell sacrifices some degree of clarity for complexity. At points, the reader must wade through extensive detail to find Russell's core message. For the most part, however, he uses detail effectively to provide the reader with a nuanced understanding of the book’s subject matter.

Readers who approach this book hoping to gain insight into the ecological dimension of this story may come away somewhat disappointed. Surely ecological responses to chemical applications influenced attitudes about the wisdom of their use, and ultimately the persistence of these practices. Whether people applied chemicals to wage war against enemy troops or undesired insects, the side effects of these compounds rippled through food chains and habitats. Public and expert reactions to these unanticipated ecological consequences played a role in this environmental history. Although Russell's scope of investigation does encompass scientific and political debate over biological responses to pesticide application to some extent (e.g., Chapter 11, "Backfires"), he does not methodically trace the ways in which toxic chemicals moved through food chains, nor does he apply an ecological framework. For example, he writes that, in 1958, experts found dead songbirds, rabbits, and quail in response to dieldrin aerial spraying in Alabama (pp. 214–215). Yet, his research does not explain how conservationists tried to make sense of the ways in which chemical effects on these animals' prey species subsequently contributed to their deaths, or what the loss of these birds and mammals might mean to other populations within their ecological communities. In contrast, a writer like Rachel Carson helps readers to see how some scientists understood chemical effects on ecological communities and processes. An ecological perspective would have deepened the explanation this environmental history provides its readers.

War and Nature should interest a wide audience, including scientists, policy makers, industry employees, conservationists, and environmental activists. Russell’s historical, distanced, integrative perspective enables him to write a history that compels the reader to reflect on the often tightly connected relationship between the ways that societies treat both nature and human beings. In this environmental history, institutionalized practices brought about effects dramatically unlike those promised. The very chemicals that experts labored to develop to combat disease, crop loss, and military enemies created new environmental and social problems. And yet, out of blind faith, proponents were unable to acknowledge or respond to the harmful consequences these chemicals brought in their wake. Russell’s book untangles the historical reasons why this unexpected turn of events occurred. Similarly, members of the conservation ecology community are likely to search for explanations to comparably complex environmental surprises, such those related to genetically modified organisms, mercury contamination, or introduced species, to name a few. The ability to understand these complex topics from chemical and historical perspectives is important, and promises to become more so in the future. War and Nature compels its readers to reflect on ways that scientists, politicians, and industry interact to make the world both a better and a worse place, in both anticipated and unanticipated ways.

Book Information

Russell, E. 2001. War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals from World War I to Silent Spring. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK and New York, New York, USA. 315 pp., hardcover, U. S. $54.95, ISBN 0-521-79003-4, paperback, U. S. $19.95, ISBN 0-521-79937-6.

http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-20314642.html

Science at war with itself: after centuries, learning the value of humility.(Column)

In Greek mythology, Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to humankind. This makes him a hero to scientists who pride themselves on their ability to transform and "conquer" nature, and who consider the natural world the rightful laboratory for their experiments. The apotheosis of Promethean science was the atomic bomb, which once again stole the gods' fire for mortal use.

But science has a powerful, competing tradition. In medieval times the scientific enterprise was rescued from stagnation in alchemy by measurement, not conquest. Advances in optics and navigational instruments helped launch the age of discovery and helped astronomers understand and explain ...

Read all of this article with a FREE trial

Laters, gotta go out...

PS.
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Vandana_Shiva/Vandana_Shiva_page.html

[Joe Hillshoist]

Yes. You are correct. Crowley erected a strawman. I really don't know anyone who is saying, "We've got to keep pumping CO2 into the atmosphere", nor do I imagine he does.

Maybe not in as many words.

[stickdog99]

Science means just "observing what is happening".

That would be very nice if it were true.

Humans lived in balance with the Earth for some couple million years. We have lived off balance (the civilization, city building phase, pyramid culture, hierarchy) for only 8000-10000 years. Thats an anomaly even in the time humans have existed!

For 8000 years, humans have acted like out-of-control bacterial infection on a host species.

Hubris. Humans never made more than the tiniest dent into the very topmost surface of Gaia -- a dent comparable to that of bears and boars -- until the last 200 years at most. It's a blink of an eye. It's taken longer for Gaia to clear the air of its own supervolcanoes than the entire period of humanity's ecologically destructive activity.

[wintler2]

Is Ben D now answering questions on his past fabrications? Miraculous. It would be cruel to list them all, even just on this thread.. maybe lets start with an early one, from pg3:

All I know is that sea temperature go up and sea temperature go down

Where is your data for arctic sea temp trending up?

p.s. irrelevant copynpastes from Western Fuels Association or similar fossil fuel corp front groups won't suffice.

[wintler2]

..Hubris. Humans never made more than the tiniest dent into the very topmost surface of Gaia -- a dent comparable to that of bears and boars -- until the last 200 years at most.

Never heard of mesopotamia then. What about England, apparently it used to be forested. and so did Greece, and Turkey and southern Italy. Must have been those bears eh?

[Penguin]

Science means just "observing what is happening".

That would be very nice if it were true.

Humans lived in balance with the Earth for some couple million years. We have lived off balance (the civilization, city building phase, pyramid culture, hierarchy) for only 8000-10000 years. Thats an anomaly even in the time humans have existed!

For 8000 years, humans have acted like out-of-control bacterial infection on a host species.

Hubris. Humans never made more than the tiniest dent into the very topmost surface of Gaia -- a dent comparable to that of bears and boars -- until the last 200 years at most. It's a blink of an eye. It's taken longer for Gaia to clear the air of its own supervolcanoes than the entire period of humanity's ecologically destructive activity.

Bullshit. Absolute bullshit. What matters for all plant life is just that thin layer of fertile soil. Trees dont grow on rock. Your own hubris and speciecism (like racism against other species) is staggering. You think just because volcanoes have killed lots of species, its perfectly ok for us to do the same? And did you know that we have already caused a larger number of extinctions than whatever killed off the dinosaurs? Do you realize that? Its quite something.

A free book for you to enlighten yourself -
Read William Kötke - The Final Empire - it has great history on all the empires that have risen and collapsed due to exhausting their ecological resources, in the last 8000 years. Every empire that has existed has followed the same trajectory - overuse ecological resources, deplete topsoil, erosion follows, and collapse follows (or expansion into new areas). In places like Mediterranean the forests have never grown back (think Greece), same goes for Mideast - its all been forest originally - same goes for Northern Africa that the Roman Empire used for agriculture and wood for its ships of war. Same happened in Iran/Iraq area, and Egypt - large areas of land are still unusable due to mistakes thousands of years ago.

http://www.rainbowbody.net/Finalempire/ Whole book for free

Pt. 1: THE HISTORY OF DISINTEGRATION

Chapter 1: The Pattern of the Crisis (Live Link)
Collapse on the Periphery 1
Collapse From the Center 9
The Record of Empire 12

Chapter 2. The End of Civilization 17
An Inheritance of Destruction 19
China 20
Indus River Valley 21
The Indo-Europeans of Central Asia 21
The Empires of Greece and Rome 22

Pt. 2:THE COLLAPSE OF THE ECOSYSTEM

Chapter 3. Soil: The Basis of Life

The Organic Rights
The Soil 26
The Process of Soil Collapse 28
Exhaustion 29
Soil Compaction 31
Soil Erosion 33
Soil Abuse by Grazing: Herding, The Hooved Locusts 35
Desertification 40
Irrigation Projects: Green Today, Gone Tomorrow 41
The Damn Dams 44

Chapter 4. The Forest 49

How the Forests Went Down 51
Deforestation Follows the March of Empire 54
The Poison Air, The Poison Rain 54
The Vanishing Tropical Rainforest 55
The Planetary Greenhouse 56
The Failing Ozone Layer 57

Chapter 5. The Phantom Agriculture 59

Industrial Agriculture 62
Living on Oil-The Green Revolution 66
The Monocultural Instability 67
The Seeds of Monoculture 69
The Starvation that is Called Progress 71
The Inventory 76

Chapter 6. The Dying Oceans 79

Ocean Pollution 80
Ecological Sinks are the Sores of the Earth 83



Chapter 7. Extinction of Life by Species Increment 85

Pt. 3: THE EXHAUSTION OF THE INDUSTRIAL EMPIRE

Chapter 8. Population, Poisons, and Resources 91

The Human Population Disaster 91
The European Population Explosion 93
The Industrial Poisons 94
The Case of Poland 98
Modern Living Environments are Toxic 100
Municipal Waste 101
Toxic Industrial Waste 102
Radioactive Waste 103
The Profits and Losses of Empire 106
Poison and the Morality of Empire 107
The Fuels of Empire 108
The Minerals of Empire 111
Elite Control of the Industrial Process 112

Pt. 4:THE ANALYSIS OF EMPIRE CULTURE

Chapter 9. The Cultural Dynamics of Empire 120

The Cultural Inversion 122
The Dynamic Cultural Factors 124
The Cosmology of Empire 127

Chapter 10. The Psychology of Empire 133
Human Life is Severed From its Source 134
Disorder in the Society of Cells 134
The Failure of Bonding 139
Free Floating Anxiety: The Negative Psychological State of "Civilization" 141
The Crisis of Identity 144
The Anguish of Sexual Love in the Empire 146
A Culture of Violence 148
Institutionalizing the Masses 149
The Social Isolate Becomes An "Individualist" 152
The End of Empire 154

Chapter 11. The History of Modern Colonialism 159

The Invasion of The Americas 160
The Onset of Machine Culture 164
The End of Peasant Subsistence Culture 165
The Conquest of Rationalism 168
Europe Explodes Across the Earth 170
Slavery and Empire 174
The World-Wide Extermination of Natural Culture 178
Opium and Empire 179
The Rubber Boom 183


Chapter 12. Colonialism In the Modern World 189
Zaire: The Congo Atrocity Evolves 189
Antarctica: Empire at the End of the World 191
Empire in the Modern World: Managed Opinion 193
Controlling the Colony 194
Creation of the "Internationalist" Empire 196

[Penguin]

Stickdog99, Ben D...
Since your historical knowledge seems to be on the level of 12-year olds,
Ill take a hike now. Its no use discussing anything with you if your history is from comic books and US schoolbooks. Educate yourself, please.

Also read some Jared Diamond -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_Diamond

Diamond is the author of a number of popular science works that combine anthropology, biology, ecology, linguistics, genetics, and history.

His best-known work is the non-fiction, Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), which asserts that the main international issues of our time are legacies of processes that began during the early-modern period, in which civilizations that had experienced an extensive amount of "human development" began to intrude upon technologically less advanced civilizations around the world. Diamond's quest is to explain why Eurasian civilizations, as a whole, have survived and conquered others, while refuting the belief that Eurasian hegemony is due to any form of Eurasian intellectual, genetic, or moral superiority. Diamond argues that the gaps in power and technology between human societies do not reflect cultural or racial differences, but rather originate in environmental differences powerfully amplified by various positive feedback loops, and fills the book with examples throughout history. He identifies the main processes and factors of civilizational development that were present in Eurasia, from the origin of human beings in Africa to the proliferation of agriculture and technology.

In his following book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005), Diamond examines a range of past civilizations and societies, attempting to identify why they collapsed into ruins or survived only in a massively reduced form. He considers what contemporary societies can learn from these societal collapses. As in Guns, Germs, and Steel, he argues against ethnocentric explanations for the collapses which he discusses, and focuses instead on ecological factors. He pays particular attention to the Norse settlements in Greenland, which vanished as the climate got colder, while the surrounding Inuit culture thrived.

He also has chapters on the collapse of the Maya, Anasazi, and Easter Island civilizations, among others. He cites five factors that often contribute to a collapse, but shows how the one factor that all had in common was mismanagement of natural resources. He follows this with chapters on prospering civilizations that managed their resources very well, such as Tikopia Island and Japan under the Tokugawa Shogunate.

In Collapse, Diamond distances himself from the charges of "ecological or environmental determinism" that were leveled against him in Guns, Germs, and Steel [1]. This is particularly evident in his chapter comparing Haiti and the Dominican Republic, two nations that share the same island (and similar environments) but which pursued notably different futures, primarily on the strength of their differing histories, cultures, and leaders.

Diamond's books rely on fields as diverse as molecular biology, linguistics, physiology, and archeology, as well as knowledge about typewriter design and feudal Japan. Because of his broad expertise and the large number of articles credited to him, Mark Ridley has suggested jokingly that Jared Diamond is not a single person, but instead "is really a committee."