I didn't realize you were living "off the grid", growing your own food, producing your own energy for transportation and heating requirements etc. There are a few people here in Alaska who live that life and take it seriously. It involves many sacrifices and hard work. I don't think any of them are forum members on GetDPI. My hat is off to you if this is indeed the independent life you lead. Personally, I prefer a life where I don't have to sustain it independently of the work so many other people expend to produce the food, energy and products I consume every day. Many of us here are fortunate to have the financial resources to enjoy a lifestyle which is far beyond anything we could achieve independently.
Maybe you didn't really mean "independently", you just meant to say buying the stuff you need or want, assuming someone else was able and willing to make it for you. In that case...I wish you the best of luck if you ever have to actually grow or make it "independently" (i.e. not depending or contingent upon something else for existence, operation, etc.)
I do agree that population growth is a serious concern. The biggest factor here is with population growth and excessive cosumption in developed countries. These consume a vastly disproportionate share of the earth's resources and have a much greater impact on the carbon pollution posing a threat to all life on our planet. Myself included of course (which is one reason my wife and I chose not to have any children).
Gary
Gary, to answer your quibble about definitions of living independently, I meant as not requiring explicit welfare or gifts as opposed to simply being alive in modernity. But picking apart an argument based on a triviality is a popular technique, like grammar policing or calling everyone you disagree with a conspiracy theorist.
Your larger point, the trope that developed countries consume resources disproportionately may actually be a misdirection intended to influence through guilt. No other than Jared Diamond, in his book
Upheaval:
If you read page 414 very carefully, you’ll notice that Diamond points out that immigration from the Third World to the First World worsens environmental problems such as carbon emissions and overconsumption of resources. (from Steve Sailer's review in Taki's magazine https://www.takimag.com/article/the-hunt-for-the-great-white-male/)
I explicitly hope that humanity will be able to continue its dominant, high technology, longer lifespan, consumptive lifestyle rather than returning to brutal hunter-gatherer crude agricultural status. My contention is that
to secure the existence of our people and a future for... our children we have to limit the number of consumers we create.
Thank you for not reproducing.
Sashin: Eugenic was and is a horrible idea. The fact anyone is still even entertaining the idea is chilling. I suggest a history book or two.
It's a tough branding to overcome (dogmatic indoctrination works!) so perhaps we should call such efforts by alternative names? Genetics. Evolution. Human Bio Diversity. Science. Nature?
Considering that groups of people have been manipulating their genetic material from the get-go by selecting more successful people to mate with we're all beneficiaries of the eugenic process. Also we eat the eugenic results of crops and meat, otherwise we wouldn't now have almost 8 billion because we'd have cruel famines wiping out huge swathes of the population.
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As far as Vieri's original piece one answer would be to turn away from the exotic and to photograph our locales and personal experiences. Such pictures may not be profitable economically but they can be soulful and rewarding. And within a small community they can be uplifting.
First person willing to go on international or exotic trip without their camera raise their hand!
It's a quandary. William Henry Jackson understood this, he helped open the floodgates to the American West. He lived long enough to see it despoiled. Ansel Adams came later and helped do the same to his beloved Yosemite. They were great men and photographers but at the heart of it they were no different than surveyors "who love the outdoors"; geologists "who love nature"; and property developers "who love the landscape".
I don't see any solution to this paradox. Some of us are aware of it but I doubt the masses would be able to grasp the concept of loving something to death. Of course, as always, less people = less effect.