From: "Jon A. Lambert" <jlambert@...>
Date: 2009-04-19T16:13:36+09:00
Subject: Re: Goodbye Ruby - Hello Earth

This is one of the funniest e-mails I've read on this list.
Thanks.


"Christophe Mckeon" wrote:
> Hi guys,
> 
> Thanks for some of your positive responses.
> 
> I made my decision not because I was unhappy doing what I was doing. I 
> truly loved what I was doing. I did experience some of the health 
> complaints you guys are talking about though.
> 
> I made my decision because:
> 
> We are presently losing 200 species a day on this planet. That rate is 
> as high as during the greatest species die offs in the earth's natural 
> history, during disasters, like eruptions of super-volcanoes and meteor 
> impacts. Ecological diversity is of course what keeps us alive.
> 
> Climate change is going to be absolutely disastrous. The scientific
> community is in the vast majority in thinking that it is man made, that
> it is very real and that it is very dangerous. Not just for our 
> children, but at this point, for ourselves.
> 
> Petro-collapse or peak oil, which is not on too many people's radar 
> right now, but it will be very soon. Over 30 towns in England have 
> become 'Transition Towns' in order to build resilience against both 
> petrocollapse and cimate change. Agriculture is entirely dependent on 
> petrochemicals. 10 calories of petroleum are now being used to produce 1 
> calorie of food, compared with the 1 to 1 ratio of the 1930s. If you 
> don't know what peak oil is you are very dangerously in the dark.
> 
> Population overshoot. There are currently 6 billion people on the planet 
> and growing exponentially. You guys should all be able to guess what 
> happens when you have a finite resource base but an exponential growth 
> rate of both economies and populations. The carrying capacity of the 
> earth w/o constant petrolium input is estimated at between 1 and 3 
> billion depending on who you ask.
> 
> I closed my eyes to all these facts for years hoping they would go away 
> and that somebody would 'be on it', but they didn't and they aren't. 
> Just a single one of those 4 forces is massive and all of them combined 
> are at this point probably insurmountable. The longer we wait the harder 
> will be the crash.
> 
> But... I found permaculture which was designed by scientists (ecologists 
> and systems theorists), and believe it has great promise and that it 
> could completely revolutionize agriculture. Not only that but it is 
> tremendously energy efficient and increases biodiversity and soil 
> health. i.e. it is the complete opposite of current agricultural 
> practices. I think it would be very attractive to software people, 
> especially open source types, as it is all about design and small scale 
> local interactions. It even uses design patterns.
> 
> When I saw that there was hope, I had a sort of spiritual awakening, a 
> crumbling of the walls of denial, and a grieving for the planet we are 
> about to destroy, that's why I'm leaving, and that is why I am planning 
> on talking to as many people as I can. There will be more and more of us 
> 'dropping out' in the near future as the forces described above start to 
> become plainly obvious in not so nice ways.
> 
> So you see, it is not about back pain, or if my lamp is bad for me. I'm 
> sorry, I know it's a downer, but it's time for people to start talking 
> to each other about this stuff, especially smart people like yourselves. 
> It's life or death now, but the problem is that humans, even the 
> smartest humans do not react to threats unless they are directly in 
> front of them in plain view. We have our own evolutionary psychology to 
> blame for this.
> 
> We need all the brains of the earth on this one.
> 
> Good Luck.