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Show c THE ZEPHYR/DECEMBER 2005-JANUARY 2006 FEEDBACK © FORTE. Te READERS & EDITOR JOUST increase is occurring, there won't be affordable food reserves to ship to relieve famine. Nations with grain shortfalls and large trade surplus cash balances like China and Kuwait will bid for exports, driving up food prices worldwide. This is already occurring; wheat prices were up 23 percent as of six months ago. In the United States, what we will predictably see is much higher food and energy prices consuming a much larger percentage of household income. This will reduce consumer ability to spend on retail goods, housing, automobiles, et cetera, which in turn will reduce the volume and profitability of these economic sectors. The most likely outcome is an economic deflation like that which occurred in Japan from circa 1982 to 2004, when the This was a slow month for FEEDBACK submissions (what the hell is WRONG with you people?7) so | took the opportunity to engage in & print a couple of exchanges between a couple of FEEDBACK contributors and myself. Here they are...JS Japanese economy finally began growing again at a very slow rate. If our huge trade account and federal budget deficits finally convince foreign investors that our Treasury A WOLFE IN SHEEP’S CLOTHING? Editor's Note: [rarely allow a letter to be printed without a signature. In this case however, of the money which finances our federal budget deficit currently comes from foreign because the author is a working parent and worried about retribution, and because I know the writer and respect her honesty, I have chosen to print it. If Mr. Michael Liss questions the accuracy of the comments that follow, we welcome his reply in the April/May issue (there is not a Feedback section in the Feb/Mar edition...JS Dear Jim, Several months ago I was the server for Michael Liss and a group of people that he brought to Moab to participate in the Cloudrock design charettes. I normally make a point of trying not listen to the conversations at my tables; however, this group was seated in a small private room, and it would have been impossible not to hear their discussion. Regardless securities are "junk bonds," then they will demand junk bond interest rates. Over 80 percent investors from the Pacific Rim, Persian Gulf, and European Economic Union buying our securities. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan has repeatedly warned Congress that failure to reduce the federal budget deficit will lead to high interest rates, which in turn will - choke off economic expansion and real estate values in the U.S. Population demographic studies have documented again and again that, when a favorable economic climate goes into deflation and depression, the birthrate drops dramatically. European nations, Japan, and South Korea have below-replacement birth _tates. In the United States, most of our population increase is due to immigration. During the Great Depression in the U.S., immigration fell from an average of 305,000 from 1925-29 his point, he brought up the median decision that the town to an average of 53,000 per year in the 1930's - including a net exmigration in 1932 when more people left the U.S. than immigrated into it. Another factor which reliably lowers birth rates is the education and economic emancipation of women in a society. As immigrants assimilate in the U.S., birth rates drop from generation to g until they resemble the below-repl trates of we Anglos. A few decades ago, dictator Pol Pot's Luddite regime in Thailand ended up killing off about one third of the population. Currently, AIDS in several African nations is having a similar impact. In nations where population has been sharply reduced by genocide or disease, there has been a strong tendency for the surviving population to consolidate and for large areas in the more rural or marginal agricultural areas to be depopulated of human beings. A number of observers have documented nature reclaiming these abandoned areas. Even in the United States, the overall demographic tendency is for population to concentrate in urban areas. Although the tendency of the rich to colonize rural areas is median to beautify Main Street and they did not doit. It was obvious he thought Moab was highly visible, this tends to be concentrated in areas with rich environmental and recreational amenities. The choice to move out in the country and commute a long way to of this, the discussion went on as though I was not there, and I would like to share with you my account of that evening. The mood was quite self-congratulatory. There was a tremendous amount of back patting and ego-massaging regarding the success of their charette. The discussion led to making fun of some unavoidable physical traits of several local people (council members, financial backers) who had participated in the charettes. Then came the real meat of the discussion. They pondered the impact they had made on the locals. Michael speculated that he had done what he needed to draw the environmentalists to his side; however, he worried that in campaigning to them, he had alienated the right wing conservatives in the area. The gentleman at the table that seemed to be his right hand man, an architect I believe, stated, "these people (the locals who were not backing their project) don't understand culture." The phrase 'these people’ was said with such disdain and judgment it made me feel uncomfortable. To support had made last spring. He said something to the effect of---they had free money to build a comprised of idiots. Unfortunately, when someone else at the table asked WHY the locals were against it, Mr. Right Hand Man could not tell them why. Listening to their discussion that night made it clear to me that ‘those people’ had no understanding of our community, of the reasons why we live here in the west, of our values, lifestyle and really who ‘these people' are. But it is clear that they did enough campaigning and ass kissing to win us over. Lance Christie wrote about how sincere Michael Liss seems. It is ashame he cannot hear what Liss and his helpers have to say, when they think no one is listening. Sign me... Heard you Loud and Clear. anything in particular - grocery stores, pharmacies, health care, schools, transportation _ hubs, jobs - is strongly influenced for all but the very rich by the cost of transportation. Fuel prices are up by 74 percent in the last four years. When we had fuel cost spikes and shortages during the Carter administration, rural resort areas such as Fairfield Pagosa went into severe economic tailspin. High energy and food costs and the consequent economic deflation of the U.S. economy will predictably cause radical retreat of the bulk of people from living in dispersed, remote locations in the outback. Putting together core ecological habitats and connectivity corridors that don't conflict with human habitat is going to get easier, not harder. ; The "Buffalo commons’ of the upper midwest is losing population because it has neither economic opportunity nor environmental recreational amenities for residents by current human standards. The climate sucks from the viewpoint of a retiree or an educated person LANCE CHRISTIE ADDENDUM ON ‘RE-WILDING’ Dear Jim, ‘ In the last issue of the Zephyr you saw Dave Foreman and myself as naiveidealists because we were pursuing the implementation of ecological restoration and conservation in the face of a tsunami of human overpopulation sweeping away nature before it. The first thought I had when reading your editorial comments was, ok, so what do you suggest we do? I don't entertain helpless despair as a hobby. Mike Roselle's comments years ago about saving some of nature so ecological recovery is possible after civilization collapses somewhat resembles the more sophisticated agenda Thave in mind currently. I want to blueprint and begin to implement a viable alternative restoring and conserving ecological integrity - to the consumption of natural capital by the industrial growth culture. I think that human tsunami is going to break and recede in time that ecological cores can be restored and survive to re-integrate a larger landscape on which of leisure who can live anywhere and wants something "interesting" to do there. Talso think that there is a psychology among the rich which will limit their dispersal into wild areas. What is the point of having a “trophy house" if you cannot display the trophy to envious admirers? To engage in ego-inflating "conspicuous consumption" requires an audience. Thus, I think we can expect conclaves of the rich to continue to form in places with high prestige value because of scenery and/or recreational opportunities, but not elsewhere. The fact is, Jim, you and I are not "normal." We like to be ina place where we can't see our neighbors. If we bought a large acreage fronting on a highway, we'd put our house somewhere we couldn't see or hear traffic on the damned road. Just drive down a highway and see where 99% of people put their houses on such parcels! So be of good cheer! The Bush administration seems to be aiming to win the "Pol Pot environmental award" with its economic and environmental policies, invoking a karmic the footprint of homo sapiens will be greatly reduced. Some of that reduction may be due equivalent of the second law of thermodynamics: for every action, there is an equal an opposite reaction. The trick is knowing when to duck to avoid the recoil. to fewer homo sapiens, but it will mainly be due to our per capita ecological footprint shrinking from adoption of alternative technlogies and land occupation patterns forced by the restriction in, nature, and cost of energy needed for transportation, Lance Christie Moab. Utah production, and housing. Various recent studies on carrying capacity and limits of growth seem to concur that homo sap has far overshot the current sustainable carrying capacity of planet Earth. Weare literally eating fossil energy. As WorldWatch has been documenting, worldwide production of grain, fish, and all other forms of caloric food per capita has been dropping. We have had a world grain shortfall for several years now, and because the absolute amount of farmland and irrigation water is dropping while the number of human mouths is increasing, grain reserves are nearly depleted and we are about to hit a Malthusian wall. I was predicting we would pass the Hubbert Peak for world oil production around 2008, but I now believe that we hit it in November, 2005, because I had not predicted the increased petroleum demand from India and China. In third world countries where the majorityof world population MOAB'S SOURCE FOR: . EDITOR'S REPLY: "Naive" is NOT a word that would even remotely come to mind when describing the environmental philosophies of either you or Dave. But especially in your case, because of the numerous emails I've read from you on a wide variety of related issues, over the last few years, I get the impression that you believe the population issue is be yond our reach---that when it comes to dealing with future environmental crises, an expanding Population is a ‘given," at least for the forseeable future, and that we must operate within - that framework when shaping our future battles. It's as ifs0 many in the environmental community are saying, "OK...we can'tdo a thing about population growth, so what can we do to make things better, given the fact that we're So what's the deal G2 with the tuxedos? fj WZ Who knows... maybe he's dreaming about penguins or PC & Mac Repairs & Upgrades by Footprints _ 12] East 100 South, The Footprints Building Moab, UT 84532 435.259.3443 footprints@feets.com www.footprints-inc.com rien a Installation & Support CALL US Give the Gift that KEEPS ON GIVING! Reliable Computer Repair-when you need it done and done well! Co |