MAYA-GAIA INTRODUCTION & SITEMAP       This Page created 04 30 2018

Note:My Anthropic Trilogy web-book, evolving since 1997, is a chronicle of my passing all considered opinion through the lens of my Nirvikalpa Samadhi with both an open-mind and healthy skepticism.

Climate Change and the Population Bomb
Existential Threat to All Life on Earth

Perhaps another synchronicity in that today 04/30/2018, is my 90th birthday and I’m creating another webpage to feature an update to the Gaian Realization Webpage I published six years ago.

In the intervening time, my personal commitment to the gaian ethos has vacillated (coincidently starting with my quitting our local Audubon Society when a number of senior administrators suspected me of swiping some petty cash) and later as a result of the threats to our national security due to conservationist policy curtailing our fossil fuel production.

The current maturation of the existential threat to all life on Earth by man-caused climate change and overpopulation has reawakened an urgency for my coming to terms with that reality – in the context of my advanced old age. My instinctive, personal strategy is to simply detach from this looming crises and try to maintain a sense of equanimity, as I won’t be around to experience the worst effects. As an early pioneer of skin and scuba diving in the Florida Keys in the early 1950s, I’ve already a unique perspective as witness to the formally pristine, luxuriant coral reefs – teaming with an endless array of sealife – that have become mounds of lifeless rubble caused by rising sea temperatures in just the past half-century.

Still, for present and future generations who will increasingly face this grim reality, I’m presenting a list of resources that helped me understand the inevitability of this debilitating evolutionary process. Even in the unlikely event of a spontaneous global awakening arising in the next few years to try to stop the effects – the inertia of Earth is a gazillion times greater than the Titanic trying to steer clear of the iceberg.

Decoding The Weather Machine NOVA video – aired April 18, in commemoration of Earth Day, 2018 – Presents hard, scientific evidence for the greatest threat already underway to all life on planet Earth – caused by human industry. Disastrous hurricanes. Widespread droughts and wildfires. Withering heat. Extreme rainfall. It is hard not to conclude that something’s up with the weather, and many scientists agree. It’s the result of the weather machine itself – our climate-changing, becoming hotter and more erratic. In this two-hour documentary, NOVA will cut through the confusion around climate change. Why do scientists overwhelmingly agree that our climate is changing, and that human activity is causing it? How and when will it affect us through the weather we experience? And what will it take to bend the trajectory of planetary warming toward more benign outcomes? Join scientists around the world on a quest to better understand the workings of the weather and climate machine we call Earth, and discover how we can be resilient – even thrive – in the face of enormous change.

Thomas Robert Malthus (13 February 1766 – 23 December 1834) was an English cleric and scholar, influential in the fields of political economy and demography. In his 1798 book An Essay on the Principle of Population, Malthus observed that an increase in a nation’s food production improved the well-being of the populace, but the improvement was temporary because it led to population growth, which in turn restored the original per capita production level. In other words, mankind had a propensity to utilize abundance for population growth rather than for maintaining a high standard of living, a view that has become known as the “Malthusian trap” or the “Malthusian spectre”. Populations had a tendency to grow until the lower class suffered hardship and want and greater susceptibility to famine and disease, a view that is sometimes referred to as a Malthusian catastrophe. Malthus wrote in opposition to the popular view in 18th-century Europe that saw society as improving and in principle as perfectible.[4] He saw population growth as being inevitable whenever conditions improved, thereby precluding real progress towards a utopian society: “The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man”

The Dark Mountain Project This is a network of writers, artists and thinkers who have stopped believing the stories our civilization tells itself. We see that the world is entering an age of ecological collapse, material contraction and social and political unraveling, and we want our cultural responses to reflect this reality rather than denying it. The Earth is currently undergoing what has been called, accurately, an ecocide. Industrial humanity is in the process of destroying much of life on Earth in order to feed its ever-advancing appetites. As it does so, it also destroys itself. We don’t believe that responses to this global reality can be confined, as they currently are, to the political, scientific or technological: they need to be cultural too. This is not a luxury, but a necessity. It might also be useful to explain what Dark Mountain is not. It is not a campaign. It is not an activist project. It does not seek to use writing or art to ‘save the planet’ or stop climate change. Rather, it is a creative space in which people can come to terms with the unraveling of much of the world we have all taken for granted, and engage in a conversation about what the future is likely to hold, without any need for pretence or denial.

We’re Doomed The Guardian, 2018 by Patrick Barkham – ‘We’re doomed’: Mayer Hillman on the climate reality no one else will dare mention. The 86-year-old social scientist says accepting the impending end of most life on Earth might be the very thing needed to help us prolong it. Hillman says: “Our continuing uneconomic growth makes us complicit in a process that is triggering an ecological catastrophe for our children and generations beyond them. They will justifiably sit in judgment on our failure to have prevented its devastating consequences knowing that we chose to look the other way.”

Climate Change Is Forcing a New Manifest Destiny Time Magazine April 18, 2016 We can’t achieve a meaningful global consensus on global warming because not everyone loses equally or at the same rate. The urgency exhorted by the Pacific Islands isn’t truly shared by Canada and Russia, about half of whose territory is covered in permafrost and almost totally depopulated…the thawing permafrost of Russia’s Siberia and Canada’s Northwest Territories has made the world’s northern latitudes a giant bog that releases five or more million tons of methane (a greenhouse gas) per year, accelerating the demise of ecosystems lying to their south. The face of global warming will no longer be belching Chinese factories or the congested highways of Los Angeles but the endless tundra of Canada and Russia. According to New Scientist magazine, a 4 degree Celsius rise in global averages temperatures would decrease agriculture yields in today’s other leading states such as the U.S., Brazil,China, India and Australia. Meanwhile, Canada and Russia’s ramp’ed up industrial farming industries could be the breadbaskets for the planet. They are the hydro and food superpowers of a dry and thirsty planet. Adapted from Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization

The Population Bomb 1968 – Author Paul R. Ehrlich – The Population Bomb is a best-selling book written by Stanford University Professor Paul R. Ehrlich and his wife, Anne Ehrlich (who was uncredited), in 1968. It warned of mass starvation of humans in the 1970s and 1980s due to overpopulation, as well as other major societal upheavals, and advocated immediate action to limit population growth. Fears of a “population explosion” were widespread in the 1950s and 1960s, but the book and its author brought the idea to an even wider audience. Speculations of overpopulation grew once America was aware of food crisis. Under the too many people section of Paul’s book he explains, “Americans are beginning to realize that underdeveloped countries of the world face an inevitable population-food crisis”. The book has been criticized since its publishing for its alarmist tone, and in recent decades for its inaccurate predictions. The Ehrlichs stand by the basic ideas in the book, stating in 2009 that “perhaps the most serious flaw in The Bomb was that it was much too optimistic about the future” and believe that it achieved their goals because “it alerted people to the importance of environmental issues and brought human numbers into the debate on the human future.”

Civilisation’s Collape Near-Certain The Guardian by Damian Carrington 22 Mar 2018 – Fifty years after the publication of his controversial book The Population Bomb, biologist Prof Paul Ehrlich warns overpopulation and overconsumption are driving us over the edge. The toxification of the planet with synthetic chemicals may be more dangerous to people and wildlife than climate change. A shattering collapse of civilisation is a “near certainty” in the next few decades due to humanity’s continuing destruction of the natural world that sustains all life on Earth, says Ehrlich.

Entering the Sixth Mass Extinction Accelerated Modern Human-Induced Species Losses Science Magazine 19 Jun 2015 Gerardo Ceballos1, Paul R. Ehrlich, et al – The oft-repeated claim that Earth’s biota is entering a sixth “mass extinction” depends on clearly demonstrating that current extinction rates are far above the “background” rates prevailing between the five previous mass extinctions. Earlier estimates of extinction rates have been criticized for using assumptions that might overestimate the severity of the extinction crisis. We assess, using extremely conservative assumptions, whether human activities are causing a mass extinction. First, we use a recent estimate of a background rate of 2 mammal extinctions per 10,000 species per 100 years (that is, 2 E/MSY), which is twice as high as widely used previous estimates. We then compare this rate with the current rate of mammal and vertebrate extinctions. These estimates reveal an exceptionally rapid loss of biodiversity over the last few centuries, indicating that a sixth mass extinction is already under way. Averting a dramatic decay of biodiversity and the subsequent loss of ecosystem services is still possible through intensified conservation efforts, but that window of opportunity is rapidly closing.

Population Bomb Has Been Defused Sample of an extensive public forum debating whether the population bomb has been defused. Some of the most spectacularly wrong predictions in history have been made by those who claim that overpopulation is going to swamp the planet. Thomas Malthus, a British economist writing in the late 1700s, is the most famous of these. Extrapolating past trends into the future, he predicted that population growth would inevitably swamp available food resources, leading to mass starvation. That didn’t happen – we continued to develop new technologies that let us stay ahead of the reaper. Why are people so eager to point out that Malthus was wrong all the time? As far as I can tell he was not. He said if population growth continued as in the past, then we would starve, not that we necessarily will. I also think it is wrong to say we engineered us out of starvation, at best it bought us some time to get the fertility rate down. As the article admits, exponential population growth can never be finally solved by technology.

Earth’s Sixth Mass Extinction event under way, scientists warn Researchers talk of ‘biological annihilation’ as study reveals billions of populations of animals have been lost in recent decades. Opinion: You don’t need a scientist to know what’s causing the sixth mass extinction.

The Population Bomb PBS 8 min video aired: 02/27/18 – Is overpopulation real? Is Earth filling up with too many humans? How many people can Earth hold, anyway? As our species approaches 8 billion, human overpopulation is a major concern for many people. How can we reduce poverty and our impact on the environment? Do we need a forced one-child policy or something? Maybe not, because when we look at the science and history, populations seem to be in control.

Half Earth Our Planet’s Fight for Life Half-Earth proposes an achievable plan to save our imperiled biosphere: devote half the surface of the Earth to nature. In order to stave off the mass extinction of species, including our own, we must move swiftly to preserve the biodiversity of our planet, says Edward O. Wilson in his most impassioned book to date. Half-Earth argues that the situation facing us is too large to be solved piecemeal and proposes a solution commensurate with the magnitude of the problem: dedicate fully half the surface of the Earth to nature.

Why E. O. Wilson Is Wrong About How to Save the Earth (AEON) 01 March, 2016 by Robert Fletcher, associate professor and Bram Büscher, professor and Chair at the Sociology of Development and Change Group at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. Edited by Brigid Hains – A contrary view to E. O. Wilson’s technological approach to defusing the overpopulation bomb.

Can We Prevent the End of the World? TEDTalks presentation by Sir Martin Reese 2014, A post-apocalyptic Earth, emptied of humans, seems like the stuff of science fiction TV and movies. But in this short, surprising talk, Lord Martin Rees asks us to think about our real existential risks – natural and human-made threats that could wipe out humanity. As a concerned member of the human race, he asks: What’s the worst thing that could possibly happen?

World-Population Humans are Doing Nothing to Stop Their Own Self-Destruction by Paul B. Farrell – The human race is in a suicidal rush to self-destruction. We can’t blame some grand conspiracy of climate-science deniers, Big Oil, Koch Bros, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, GOP governors and Congress. We are the problem. You. Me. Too many of us. Population is out of control worldwide. Seven billion today. Ten billion by 2050, in one generation. Too many babies. Too many old folks. An out-of-control civilization committing mass suicide. We are responsible for destroying the planet. See also: The Supra-Intelligent Design The Union of Science and Religion – Reflexive-Emanation – Panendeism – Why-Is-REP-Necessary? – Meta-Religion – Cosmotheology – The-Natural-Truth – Symmetry – Evolution – Atheism – Intellectual-Immortality – Primitive-Thinking – World-Population – Selector-Theory – Entheogens – Environment – SARAS.

As of April 30, 2018 I’ve turned 90 and joined the growing percentiles of America’s productive aging population. I’m hoping some younger writer who has a panendeism/philosophical turn of mind and finds my samadhi chronicles of value and ideologically compatible could continue to build the Anthropic Trilogy WebBook in partnership with me until I go eternally non-dual and then have it as their own production. Although my writings are exclusively from the perspective of my Samadhi revelations I feel they are a unique contribution to the body of evidence for the Brahman/Gaian Paradigm and should not be lost after I’m gone. Anyone interested can Email me at smalltownsATusaDOTcom and enter anthropic trilogy as subject. (I’ve funded an account with orders to automatically renew the annual fees for hosting my four websites that contain over 100 of my Maya-Gaia pages and the evolution-involution.org slideshow and other webpages. I have provided auto-funding to at least 2023.

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MAYA-GAIA INTRODUCTION & SITEMAP