633 - Putting The 'Mental' Back in Environmental

⇦

Episode #633 - Putting The Mental Back in Environmental (The Underground Forests of Niger)

⇨

⌚ Sat 8 December 2012  ☻Mike Freedman, name2

Download Hour1 Download Hour2Is humanity facing a food crisis? Are there too many people on earth? A range of voices from

This week with

We start the show with a Radio Ecoshock inter of filmmaker Mike Freedman who made on the question of population. He begins by pointing us to an 8 minute short film he made called Between Two Mirrors on the Occupy movement. We hear about the influential experiments of John Calhoun, who experimented on how the behavior of rats changes as their population density increases. Freedman notes that while he believes that Calhoun only ever intended his studies to serve as a metaphor, his studies have been used as an animal model of societal collapse.

The environmental movement has traditionally emphasized kind of the accounting tools of sustainability, how much water use, how much pollution, how much food do we need. But... we need to put the 'mental' back in environmental. Humans have deeper needs and a more meaningful purpose in life than merely finding enough rice to eat for the day and having enough water. And so we shouldn't simply think about the bare bones of supply and survival. We need to think about what it will mean to ensure that every person born on this beautiful planet of our has a full meaningful life. That's the real challenge - whether population is going up, whether it's stabilizing or whether its declining - is being willing to reassess and reorganize all of our assumptions, all of our algorithms and spreadsheets, all of our models for planning and molding society, based purely on the quality of life experience for every person alive.

— Mike Freedman, 2012

All life and sustenance come from the soil. If we treat the soil with respect, we go a long way towards creating food security.

— Tony Rinaudo

Thanks to Alex Smith for the Radio Ecoshock interview of [[]].
This how is a development of ideas from episode 597.
★ Start a Discussion about this episode (Login Required)

Source archive: Gift Economy - Refuting the Market Logic (6 min) Natura Vexata

⇦

To link to this episode, please use the short, permanent URL: http://UnwelcomeGuests.net/633

⇨