Debate: Population Growth and Morality

            Many have criticized advocates for population control, and here we will be discussing China's implementation  under the communistic leader Deng Xiaoping.of its One-Child Policy in 1979. The law applies only to the urban Chinese, as the rural population has less need for population control - they use less resources and have a higher rate of infant death due to malnutrition and lack of healthcare. As of 2004, infant mortality in rural China was about 25 per 1000, more than double the urban infant mortality rate of 10. But what do the figures say about China's population growth? The current estimates are that due to this policy China now has 300 million less people! This can be viewed in two different lights. On one hand, that is 300 million people that China's rule of law has indirectly killed by not allowing to live. There are many logical fallacies in this, but its focal point is that these are children that parents were not able to enjoy raising and bringing in to their family. On the other hand, that is 1) 300 million people that are not taking away resources from other citizens across the world, many of whom are already deprived of necessary resources, and 2) 300 million people who are not potentially suffering due to stretching of resources. Either way we look at it this reveals a couple problems currently underway in our societies. We are coming to the realization that we do in fact have limited resources to use on this planet; and we are using the resources we have quite inefficiently and wastefully in many parts of the world.
            Now onto the ethical dilemma. We do not have to define here what the ethics are, for most of us can agree that killing people is wrong and that making people suffer is wrong. Those both have exceptions, but let's apply them to innocent people to turn away from those potential problems. What we do have to define, is not what the morality is, but when this morality is applied. Is it more wrong to deprive families of the miracles of child-raising and the family expansion that is so ingrained in our species, than to cause the suffering of many more people in the future due to stretched resources? In one case we are harming people now, in the other case we are harming possibly many more people in the future.
            The course of humanity's thoughts on morality have evolved from individual morality, how to change oneself to be let in to Heaven, live a holy and virtuous life, move up to the next strata in your next life, etc. From there we moved to the morality of nations as we began to pass laws and regulations on our behavior, and thoughts at most times. After a long time we came to the argument of cultural relativism - understanding that morality might be dependent on the culture in which it was born and is applied. Still we have a universal morality etched in our Universal Declaration of Human Rights written by almost every country's, or at least governmental representatives.
            But that is slightly besides the point. Over generations humanity has moved from dimension to dimension in defining and applying morality. The first dimension - a line, this is the individual and their movement through life. The second dimension - a plane, this is a group of people and their society. The third dimension - a sphere (our planet), this is the acknowledgement and combination of various cultures' codes of morality. All of these have their basis in space. What we are moving towards now is a realization that our morality needs to span time as well. Is killing one person now less moral than killing two people in the future? Because in many cases we will not be around to either gain or suffer from such consequences in the future, they seem irrelevant. But from a moral standpoint, is time not just another means of separation, any different from geography? If we are to understand morality as universal, must that universality span not only space but time as well? Or if morality is not universal, then will cultural relativism begin to apply to the culture's of the past and the future? Surely an American culture is different now than it was one hundred years ago, just as it will be different in another one hundred years. Is understanding American 19th century culture not a form of cultural relativism. We look in condemnation upon those culture's a thousand years ago that sacrificed people, but in that culture was it not morally relevant? Were those sacrifices not made to bring rain and great harvest and thus benefit to future populations? These are all questions that are evolving in our moral debate, and by simply acknowledging them we are furthering our knowledge and understand about our condition, and that of humanity.

Gardening and Natural Processes

            This will be the first in a long string of posts dedicated to growing and maintaining your own food supply, whether it be simple herbs like sweet basil or winter thyme, annuals such as cherry tomatoes, or perennials like asparagus or eggplant. I will not stress here the many benefits from growing your own food, or plants for that matter. It is as fulfilling as it is filling. Gardening is a power, a control that we place over nature's processes and over the years humans have, in vast ignorance, strayed from those natural processes. Just as humans can not live off of multivitamins (which are derived from petroleum but that is for another post) and protein supplements, plants and the earth's soil can not live off of synthetic nutrients (which are also petroleum based). It sounds strange to refer to the soil as living, but in fact in just one tablespoon of healthy topsoil there exists over one million microorganisms. It is these organisms which break down organic matter and nutrients and make them digestible for a plant's roots. And when the plants shed their leaves and fruits they provide food again for these soil organisms. Animals are also part of this cycle, as we serve both the plants and the soil. By eating the fruits of a plant (this refers to vegetables as well) we digest the seeds. These seeds pass through our digestive tract often unharmed and we release them in another location, encased in a ball of nutrients. It is strange to think of our feces as nutrient-dense, but it manure nonetheless. What we are doing here is helping the plant to spread its seed and increase its chances of reproduction and survival. We are also providing the soil with rich nutrients for them to feed off of. Surprisingly enough, fungi are some of the most prevalent organisms in soil, and are a vital part of the nutrient cycle by breaking down nitrogen for plant's to use. Thus a cycle is born with life, survival and dependency ingrained in every step. Soil organisms depend on plants for organic matter and animals for manure; Plants depend on soil organisms for vital nutrients and animals for spreading their seed and/or pollinating them; Animals are dependent on plants for food and thus soil organisms as they give life to plants.
                So where does agriculture play in all of this? When we first began domesticating and controlling the growth of plants, we seriously altered this cycle. Methods of permaculture (permanent agriculture), biodynamics, companion planting and every other method you here in the "healthy, sustainable, organic" food movement are simply trying to replicate nature's processes. When this cycle is fully understood, we can more effectively replicate it for our own benefit without altering our ecosystems to a state where we can no longer use them for our survival. Abrahamic religions - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - as well as more modern Elizabethean and Puritan ways of thinking revolve around the premise that humans are separate from nature. Nature, its plants and animals and bacteria, are all primal and dirty and beneath us. Whether or not you prescribe to that train of though makes no difference to nature, as we still utterly depend on its processes, on its nutrient and chemical cycles from tectonic plates to topsoil to trees to atmosphere to our protective magnetic isosphere. Humans are just as much a part of the food chain and the nutrient cycle as a dust mite, a blue whale or a red oak. You can dismiss this information, or you can look at it as depressing to think that we are no different from bacteria in the dirt or birds in the sky. But we are different, because no other part of this cycle has the ability to realize that it is in fact a part of this cycle. Humans can take a step back, look at their lives, their environment and the world in which they live and understand it. We have the ability to become aware of our place within this world, we can break free from thinking and acting just in line with our place in this cycle and realize the cycle as a whole. If that is not fascinating enough or a sign of the magnificence of humans then i don't know what is. We have only to look around us to find what is most brilliant, beautiful and worthy of our attention. Humans have studied and replicated nature since the dawn of agriculture. Now we use it to understand how to fly, to create hearing aids, to build farms, and to acquire energy from the sources around us. This replication is currently deemed Biomimicry and is a fast growing field in construction of net-zero energy houses, buildings, and cities.
               More posts will come providing detailed and helpful instructions on how to specifically grow plants cheaply and efficiently, whether on your windowsill, in your backyard or at your school. But it is of crucial importance before beginning any project to understand the project as a whole. If you go in to growing your own food without any insight as to the natural processes at work, or without understanding your place in the process, then there will inherently be oversights and failures. And you will learn, by trial and error, from those failures. But this need not be the case, as nature and man have provided us with more examples and information then we could gather in a lifetime. When the process and context of growing food is fully acknowledged and understood, the actions springing from that frame of mind will inherently be successful and virtuous if only in the process. This applies naturally to all of life and any future projects. What is it that you are really doing? What is the object and how does it relate to you? And one last word of advice before I wrap this up... The process of any project is equally if not more important than the final product, and as the product is merely an extension of the process, a healthy and fulfilling process based on as much knowledge and insight as can be gathered will lead to a healthy and successful product.

Quote: May I Never Be Complete

May I never be complete. May I never be content. May I never be perfect."

                          ~Chuck Palahnuik

This quote symbolizes man's constant progression throughout history and throughout his individual life. The definition of perfect changes from culture to culture and from time to time. Even in your own life your idea of perfection changes. We think of the perfect person as including notions of morality, of actions and thoughts alike, maybe of physical and mental fitness, and of our relationship to others whether they be through love or power. As it is constantly changing, and not absolute through space or time, how can we expect to reach this perfection. It's a cruel joke reminiscent of a Greek underworld. 

But the idea of perfection does not have to be totally dismissed, just shifted. Since there is no absolute perfection we must change the form of perfection from one of an end-result, to one of a process-result. Trying to understand what perfection means to us, what it means in our cultures and why humans have even come up with the concept of perfection is as close to perfect as we will come.

What does perfection have to do with survival? How did this hierarchy of imperfect to perfect evolve in our thinking? How has it been projected on to our world? We see it in media across the board, from technology to diets to relationships; we build it through art, in symmetrical skyscrapers, in Michelangelo's David and Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man; and we formulate it in our conscious. We judge ourselves against a perfect us, something that will never be achieved similar to drawing a perfect circle. The circle is an abstract concept, it does not exist in nature because it presupposes that everything does not move, that it is static. But the world is dynamic and therefore a perfect circle can not exist in our natural realities because it will always be moving and changing.