Occasionally around these parts, in the metro, the Canadian goose population becomes a nuissance. They poop all over beaches, in the spring the goose mothers terrorize human mothers and their little kids, chasing them in the park, usually after said humans try to get too close to feed them, one of the reasons the geese become a nuissance. A full grown goose chasing you is scary, I’m sure especially if you are a kid, or said kid’s mother. As it won’t do to have professional hunters swarm the park with shotguns culling the flock and terrorizing the local humans, they use bows and arrows. But that sometimes leads to bad optics, people freak out and the geese are free to foul up the beeches again. Culling never works as well as the cullers think it will.
The interweb is increasingly full with talk of culling the herd, which is to say, a lot of people are freaking out that we-the-herd are in the process of being culled.
The thinking goes: Our elite think there are too many of us, we are putting too much pressure on ecological systems, we are fouling up the planet and perpetrating the sixth great extinction, with the growth of automation and artificial intelligence most of us are useless anyway, so the only solution to resource contraints, pollution and extinction is a controlled demolition of the existing economy and reducing global population in an ordered and contolled fashion, with a combination of famine and “vaccines” in the third world and “vaccines” and fentanyl in the first, and bioweapons for everybody.
I got into it a bit with Dr Mike Yeadon, over at Mathew Crawford’s Rounding the Earth substack page, about overshoot. Dr Yeadon used to be at Phizer R&D, but now he is pretty well convinced Phizer et al are trying to kill us. Mathew Crawford takes if for granted that the world is run by kunlangeta, an inuit term for psychopaths, about whom the only solution is, according to the Inuit, to quietly push them off the ice when no one is looking.
On balance I agree with both of them about most things. They are both more intelligent than me by a long shot. Mathew especially is doing great work in this world, much greater than anything I am doing. I admire both of them very much. But I digress. Dr Yeadon is convinced we humans are not beyond carrying capacity, that current global population is stable, that if we just get rid of the psychopaths who run the world the rest of us can get on with life no problem.
I pointed out: “I spend a lot of times outdoors, I am [a] long time wilderness traveler and gardener, and the past ten years I have seen a precipitous decline in pollinator populations. This year I am seeing hardly any, it is very alarming, and yet such is the distraction I haven't heard anybody else talking about it.
Pollinator decline is a combination of habitat loss and chemical agriculture. I know China has already gone a long way toward the extinction of pollinators. We are feeding all 8 billion, but we seem to be extincting pollinators in the process. We are emptying the oceans as well. The aquifers here in Minnesota, the land of 10,000 lakes are so polluted with nitrates and chemicals like atrazine that the water is undrinkable. You cannot shower in it, in some places. This, despite that you would be hard pressed to find a more civilized place than Minnesota.
Of course one could make an argument that this is an effect of practices, not population. But a radical shift toward organic and you get Sri Lanka. A reduction in natural gas derived fertilizer and you get famine. That is a fine line and not resilient. Overshoot.
I'm sure if we wanted to save everyone living and not create mass extinction of other species, we could. But the press of 95% of humanity is to increase their standard of living, not reduce it, and the vast majority of those will put economics before the health of the biosphere.
Something has to give. The methods of our overlords however, are despicable, not about saving the earth, but about becoming more powerful with less competition for that power. From their perspective, it's a transhumanist future of cyborgs, robots, automation and AI. In that vision, 90% of us are dead weight, useless.
Me, I want clean water, healthy soil and biodiversity. I want everyone to have a sense of ownership over their own production. I want decentralization and open-source. I want everyone to have a sense of opportunity, and creativity. I want currency I can hold in my hand. I want the King to fall, the people to rise and build an entirely new civilization on this continent, this land, with our fellow Americans.
But that sort of overshoot argument seems to play right into the hands of our overlords, the eugenicists who think there are too many of us, of not high-enough quality. (They are at the leading edge of evolution, it is for them to decide how we will die-off, how it will be managed - so I imagine they think.)
And therein lies a conundrum.
The World Economic Forum and the eugenecist transhumanists they represent, aren’t wrong that humanity is at a turning point, that to continue as we are is a road to ecological disaster. Their monomaniacal focus on Climate Change is not scientific however, and the future they imagine looks like a lot less of us, who line up for bimonthly mRNA multiboosters tied to our social credit score tied to our bank account, every move and every purchase and everything we write and say surveilled, a panopticon run by woke cultural revolutionaire with the power to cancel, for the benefit of the elite saving the world, to make the world equitable, inclusive, race diverse and trans. If you think that is a great vision for humanity, that’s fine, but you are probably one of the herd that is not welcome, so there’s that. The good news is apparently, once they reduce global population by many billions we can stop eating insects and go back to eating meat. Not that our overlords will stop doing everything they tell us we can no longer do in the meantime.
It really is not funny at all that the failure of herd immunity with Covid-19 begins to look now more like a slow and steady depopulation scheme from the beginning.
(that’s a eugenecist masquerading as a farmer fishing.) But even if we were to push all of these kunlangeta psychopaths off the proverbial ice shelf, or we sheep head butt them into the never-never and go back to normal, normal itself is pathological, ecocidal, this notion of eternal economic progress and growth, limitless consumerism for everybody, like there are no ecological limits.
There has definitely been, among those who recognize that these “vaccines” are not on the level, that what is happening in Sri Lanka is part of the plan for all of us, a reaction, that everything is fine ecologically, that an ecological predicament is just part of the endless lies of the eugenicists perpetrating global genocide.
The thing is, all of this is what it looks like in overshoot. It is chaotic, it is messy, there are attempts to control it, manage it, genocidal maniacs among the global elite are to be expected. There will be many wars of many kinds for many reasons. There will be a great deal of migration. It is not some great awakening, it is a radical shift over time to a lot less energy use per capita, it is extinction of many species, it is fragmentation of narratives and descent into madness that proliferates and metastesizes. It is not apocalypse, but it is something we all will have to face whether we want to or not, and a lot of it is not going to be pleasant. It will have a negative effect on the standard of living and opportunities for economic expansion we have grown accustomed to.
I’ve also been saying for at least ten years now, there is no reason that shift can’t be intentional, healthy for people, society and the earth. But for that to happen, we have to be honest about attempts to cull the herd, and ecological limits and responsibilities to the earth.
The elites are to blame for their cockamamie schemes.
But as William R. Catton Jr. advises, no one is to blame for ecological overshoot. It was over before we had the wisdom to realize it.
In your view, is there a better way to promote real environmentalism than robust and well enforced property rights? I'm operating under the assumption that our legal system could get us there, but only with a dramatic cultural shift. The suckering of environmentalists with good intentions into atmospheric carbon monomania will make such a shift difficult, but I'm hoping the obvious failure of mRNA vaccines might be a wedge issue to promote the cultural values necessary to meaningfully conserve the environment. That is, assuming we can overcome the Gell-Mann amnesia.