"News that's not known, or not known enough."
Helen & Harry Highwater's cranky weblog of news and opinion.
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"News that's not known, or not known enough." Helen & Harry Highwater's cranky weblog of news and opinion. |
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The only plausible solution by Herb Ruhs, MD Monday, July 7, 2008 PERMANENT LINK Re Visualizing no bombs at all In fantasy, in daydream land, I too long for no bombs at all. In the long term there will be no bombs at all or, contrariwise, there will be no long term. The problem is to imagine the next step to achieving the state of no bombs at all. Separating fantasy from possibility is a tricky business, but it must be undertaken if we are to be serious
A partial list includes: an increasing probability, enabled by mass global travel patterns, of a general pandemic, caused by either naturally occurring microorganisms or biowarfare misadventures, that would wipe out 95% of the human population, as happened on a smaller scale to aboriginal americans with the introduction of small pox; run away self replicating nanotechnology; incorporation in plant genomes, as the result of irresponsible genetic engineering, of the ability to produce prion like products that would make most food plants lethal after an incubation period of decades leading to a possibly complete die off of humans; a rapidly accelerating species extinction event (as we are already witnessing) that so depletes the ecological community that human life becomes impossible, the unanticipated cumulative direct effect of a vast array of toxins already in the environment (such as endocrine disruptors and DU) that act synergistically to radically decrease human reproduction and accelerate human mortality leading to a complete die off. I could go on nearly indefinitely, but the point is that all out nuclear war is only one of many likely threats to our species to come out of industrial culture. The common source of all of these dire threats is the culture itself. Ergo, if one wants to see our species saved from self destruction one is obligated to try to imagine practical means for pulling the plug on "progress." Many informed and thoughtful people propose well-thought out scenarios involving such things as permaculture, radically new economic systems such as Michael Albert's Parecon approach, general disarmament, alternative energy technology, and so forth. The list of proposals is as long as the list of threats. However, in each case the proposed solutions, or combination of solutions, does not address the problem of how to stop the exponential growth of our massively destructive industrial culture so as to create room for new, sustainable technologies to replace it. To plant something new the field must be plowed, hence my fondness for the high altitude nuclear war option. A similar, though much smaller scale problem, confronted mediaeval Europe prior to the Black Death. Overpopulation and over exploitation had mired the economy in a feudal cul-de-sac. The Plague, by reducing the population greatly, revalued labor and led directly to the introduction of industrial technology and domination of the world by Western European culture. Unfortunately, renewal generally follows destruction. More unfortunately, the destruction guaranteed by continued industrial development offers no convincing opportunity for renewal. We, me included in spite of my training, tend to think of medicines as magic substances. But the fact is that most (marijuana being one of the few exceptions) effective medicines are also lethal poisons. An aspirin or two helps. A bottle full kills. The possibility of rescue from our self induced demise as a species by means of a few high altitude nuclear explosions is analogous to the use of life-threatening substances in very small doses to achieve positive outcomes. It seems certain that, if industrial culture continues along its hyper-parabolic curve, that one or more of the catastrophes already contemplated, or some related, as yet obscure, catastrophe will destroy our species. I am fond of our species and would like it to survive and see a better, sustainable future. I welcome any proposed solution, but as I think deeply about the issue and study the relevant scientific issues, the only plausible solution I have been able to imagine is the setting off of a few nuclear weapons in near space. I believe in the power of concerted thought by masses of people. I see this as the origin of our current problems as masses of people pursued immature wishes for ever more material security without concern for the consequences of this pursuit. Hence, I sincerely wish for such a limited use of nuclear weapons in the hope that it will hit the cultural reset button and allow for a better future for our kind. I also, very unscientifically (though there has been some work on this), believe that if enough people wish hard enough that this very realistic possible outcome can be forced into reality. Tinkerbell can be saved. Therefore I continue to invite people to join me in visualizing such a limited high altitude nuclear event. If we let our fears master us we smother our imagination and abandon hope. Herb Ruhs, MD |
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