Organization

There are at least 6 million people (0.1%) on the planet who are dedicated to keeping the earth healthy and habitable and who are willing to spend significant time energy and money toward this end. There are thousands of nonprofits and foundations focusing on the environment and spending billions of dollars each year.

A much smaller group could take over the world. The largest international corporations could be fully taken over by this group in 1 day (do the math). So why are the rainforests still vanishing, why are oil companies still predicting growth, why are we degrading nearly every aspect of our environment faster than ever before?

The answer is simple, lack of organization. Organization means people get behind a common set of goals and a common action plan. They then do what every successful conqueror does, look for an easy target, and take it over. Then look for the next easiest target, and take that over. and so on. The leverage from each victory makes bigger targets feasible.

Now, what goal could everyone rally behind? this is the key. I would love to see the end of pesticide use, destructive farming and herding practices, war, poverty, race discrimination, fossil fuel burning, etc. but in many cases these goals conflict (at least regarding the next step to take), and it is tricky to come up with a strategy that gets us from A to B intact. So environmentalists end up fighting each other (often without realizing it, like when someone is against petroleum so they buy a diesel car and run it on soybean oil, which is grown using pesticides.)

Upon reflection of many alternatives, I believe the proper goal has three parts:

1) Maximise the earth's carrying capacity
2) Ensure a minimum standard of living for all humans
3) Improve the median standard of living

Guided by broad agreement on these commandments, we could map out a strategy for accomplishing them.

Or we can continue to fritter away billions of hours trading recycling strategies, alternative fuel toys, and ecosafe packaging solutions, shaking our heads while we watch millions of species go extinct.

Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches

This post gets its title from a fascinating 1974 book by anthropologist Marvin Harris. I will summarise his main points in my next few posts.

Cows: In India there are people who are starving, while apparently useless cows wander around causing a public nuisance. It seems like the Hindu doctrine of the sacred cow is costing the country billions of dollars, using up scarce agricultural resources, and effectively causing large-scale human suffering and death.

On closer look (including analysis of artificially induced gender imbalances in cow populations, differential treatment of cows by different castes, and the various ways in which cows are fed and used in different situations) it turns out the cows are integrated into the economy rather more efficiently than the farm animals and machines found in more developed nations. The practical reason behind the ban on cow killing is similar to the practical reason behind the bans on lying, cheating, and stealing: it counteracts the temptation to reap short-term personal gain at higher long-term societal costs.

It's easy to assume that the people with the highest standard of living are doing things right, and the people with the lowest standard of living are doing things wrong. Whereas in some cases the latter may actually be doing better, if we were to control for the diverse starting points and environmental factors.

The solution to poverty is not to get all the poor people to act the way rich people are now acting. The solution involves getting all people to act a little differently than they are acting now.