cultural materialism

"traditional management strategies strive to enhance the effciency of growth by minimizing the annoying variability in natural ecosystems and maximizing the production of system components and variables of value to people...when humans maximize the harvest of a particular species, for example, we inadvertently alter that species' realtionships to multiple other species(e.g. preditors and prey)in the ecosystems, setting off a cascade of feedback responses that can fundamentally erode the system's integrity. some species may be lost, otheres may be favored, and, ultimately, the system may cease to function in ways that are necessary to sustain either the target species or their human predators.
in short, the evidence suggests that in addition to overharvesting, efficiency-oriented maximun production strategies simplify both the exploited ecosystems and the social systems they support. they eliminate important processes and redundancies, and make the socio-ecosystem more vulnerable to additional stress. the system loses resilience."
from "thinking resilience" by william f. rees.

it is patently obvious to me that the technology bubble that i am sitting in, protected form the storm outside ( it is a night de quincey would relish...no-one would be dropping by to get between him and the laudnum)and using the internet to vent my spleen, is being realized at the cost of massive use of petrochemicals...and while bill rees is primarily taliking about overharvesting animal species in the quote, you could extrapolate that out energy use as well...ultimately the market mechanisms that "simplify" and "maximize" the use of resources force the lot of us down pathways that we don't really pay much attention to...or understand for that matter...simplifying the complex omits or distorts alot of details...plastering over a bewildering mass of diverse and interconnected relationships we probably cannot hope to fully comprehend with a facade of rationalizations...the devil is in the deatails and that is something the buyers of the consumerist utopia and its purveyors don't really want to go into...it just gets in the way of the efficient functioning of "the system" and bogs people down in unprofitable thought...questioning instead of consuming...debating instead of buying...thinking instead of just doing it...i can't help but wonder just exactly how much this sort of reasoning has contributed to the somewhat erratic patterns of behavior that have been emerging in everything from the weather to masses of people that are clearly disenchanted with the quality of their lives but may have no clear-cut idea of why or what alternatives they could or might care to explore...something's not quite right here...it doesn't feel natural...culture should be telling us how to address the problems we can resolve and how to accept the dilemmas we cannot..not that we'll feel better if we just go buy something... how much longer this can go on before we gdp ourselves to death?

just a note about the ads google put on the page telling me that this post was successfuly published: "increase efficiency and reduce labor costs"-software; "graduate programs in ecological toxicology"; "factory labor software-track productivity"; "ecosystem lesson plans-200,000 teacher reviewed lesson plans."...google is reading my blogs for a purpose....i ceratinly hope they are misunderstanding them.