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- Biology knows that habitual extreme safety and well-being are not advantageous for a living organism.
- Solzhenitsyn
[edit] Civilization's departure from nature
- On March 29th, 2008 at 8pm local time Earth Hour will commence ALL AROUND THE WORLD.
- Created to take a stand against the greatest threat our planet has ever faced, Earth Hour uses the simple action of turning off the lights for one hour to deliver a POWERFUL MESSAGE about the need for action on global warming.
- Be part of making Earth Hour 2008 a huge, global success by telling your friends and family. Remember, every single light makes a statement and makes a difference.
- Last year, on 31 March 2007, 2.2 million people and 2100 Sydney (Australia) businesses turned off their lights for one hour – Earth Hour. This massive collective effort reduced Sydney’s energy consumption by 10.2% for one hour, which is the equivalent effect of taking 48,000 cars off the road for one hour.
Civilization is defined by the destruction of the natural world to create comfort, allowing us to funnel our lives free of suffering into various kinds of self-pleasure and failed attempts to circumvent human nature, while at the same time remembering every once in a while that we are destroying the planet and turning off the lights to symbolize that we are sad to see it go.
Giving this up to return to suffering in harmony with nature is considered ludicrous because we already did that for many thousands of years and it worked well, without any complications, whereas civilization presents new complications every day which we find interesting. Also, people would not voluntarily sacrifice comfort for any reason on anything more than a token turning-the-lights-off scale, and even that is questionable.
The goal of civilization is unclear. It has already been proven that civilization cannot circumvent human nature, nor can one enter a permanent state of intellectual and physical pleasure. If it cannot be sustained, of course, it will regress. This may happen in a violent, voluntary, or slow and beautiful way, depending on obscure and unpredictable factors.
[edit] Further reading
Ishmael, I guess?
Peruse http://www.awok.org/ and see if anything there is interesting. I did not read much of it yet.