Caterpillar's loss is a reprieve for Nature

When millions of caterpillars chew away at cultivated plants they are seen as pests. But, when heavy equipment chews away at wilderness it's called "economic growth." It "creates jobs" but what does it really accomplish?

Minus the pretext of housing-starts and construction jobs, the main impetus is to flatten nature and accommodate endless numbers of people. This is all happening on a planet that isn't getting any larger. People keep buying into the fable of endless greener pastures. Many of them are actually brown, with so much desert construction despite shrinking water supplies.

There are roughly 3,000,000 more people in the U.S. each year and

75,000,000 more on the planet annually. This growth would automatically be treated as a crisis if other species were perpetrating it. We would expect them to live in balance with their surroundings. But humans are supposedly of supernatural origin, so it's OK to obliterate wilderness as long as we "plan" for constant crowding.

The wide open spaces that lured people to America are being chipped away daily. With the potential for a BILLION people by 2100, imagine America with far less open space, and industrial blight (like wind farms) on much of it. Even if people are corralled in denser housing, they will spread out on vacation and crowds will grow everywhere. This scourge on the land is welcomed by the construction industry and logged as GDP growth.

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On a personal level, it's no fun that Caterpillar had to cut 22,000+ jobs. But the building industry is not sustainable in its current form. A slowdown of construction is a reprieve for everything that remains pristine.

There's much talk of living efficiently and reducing the human footprint, but when it actually happens it's called a recession. In many ways, a recession is based on the expectation of endless population growth. The GDP has shrunk, but why must it keep growing in the first place? Without more people, we wouldn't constantly need to create more jobs; more of them funded by government loans now. In a steady-state system, we could refine the economy instead of just fattening it all the time.

Housing starts should be dropped as a leading economic indicator since they indicate bloat, not health. People buy fat homes with money they don't really have, which enables slick operators to do the same. Investors get involved and the whole sham collapses. Endlessly-growing resource consumption is the disease, not the cure, for our economic woes. But more growth is being peddled as the answer. People are still playing games with money while pretending the physical size of the economy is irrelevant.

In a sane world with a stable population and steady-state economy, the construction industry could scale back and finally operate in balance. Its main focus would be repairing old structures or replacing them with new ones. Since the Earth is FINITE, the entire economy should stop trying to grow all the time to pay off increasing debts. Global replacement-level birth control is the first step on the road to equilibrium.

E.A.

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Can one really be a productive member of a consumptive society?

Reply to
Enough Already
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Enough Already posts it is seen as a troll and spam.

what is sad is that this troll continues unabated to waste our time on drivil suhc as this crap.

Reply to
PeterD

So what do you propose as a solution? People have to live and work somewhere. Are you just going to shoot every 3rd or 4th new baby until you restore the earth to its year 1000 AD population level?

-john-

Reply to
John A. Weeks III

Obvious troll is obvious. Contractors do a lot more with Caterpillar equipment than work on undisturbed land.

Go away.

John Lansford, PE

-- John's Shop of Wood

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Reply to
John Lansford

Not to mention that CAT makes gen sets and truck engines.

Reply to
jimbobmitchell

Was your home or apartment built by large machinery(Caterpillar)? What about the laying of water and sewer lines and utilities? Perhaps you live in a cave? Then how are you powering your computer?

Oh, yeah, that computer...built in a facility constructed with the help of large equipment and shipped to you on ships, rails and roads constructed by large equipment.

If you are serious in this post you're a hypocrite. If you're a troll you're a moron.

Which is it?

Reply to
Rich Piehl

Step 1, deport every single illegal alien living in America. Step 2, limit legal immigration to 75,000 per year, and only the best and brightist. Step 3, increase industrial output with products competitive in global market.

mitch

Reply to
hpope

Well, none really. Since Caterpillar, is one those companies, much like GM, which is why the people with actual engineering brains even started researching into Autonomous Vehicles, Biodiesel, Solar Energy, Wind Energy, Pv Cells, Fiber Optics, Holograms, Parallel Processors, Cell Phones, Gas Turbine Engines, Post Ford Batteries, On-Line Banking, On-Line Publishing, lasers, masers, robotics, cruise missiles, digital-terrain mapping, GPS, and Drones. Rather than waste more money on Cement Mixers.

Reply to
zzbunker

Humans are what the Earth is for.

Anyone who believes we are a burden on Nature should begin by killing himself.

Reply to
John David Galt

And you reply to his BS.

HNK

Reply to
Matt Barrow

Deep environmentalists hate humans and anything we do. Enough Already simply posts that there are too many humans and not enough rats or something like that. As a group, they are against travel of any kind, and any way of getting there, except maybe for Amtrak.

Reply to
George Conklin

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