I didn’t mean to suggest that our only hope for salvation was in technology. Being restricted to how much I can cram into a single post, my regular readers will know that my posts often discuss humanity evolving as a cultural being, not just as a technological one. If everyone was fed, clothed, sheltered, etc, it would mean there had already been a major shift in our communal worldview, which would imply we’d learned enough that technology would not be our only choice for a solution.

Yes, you’re right about the problems or corporations - the greed and pollution they spread. But isn’t it true that there’s enough food produced in the world to feed everyone? Okay, it’s not evenly distributed - yet - but we don’t need to increase pollution/genetic modification to feed people, just learn to share.

My whole blog is about a holistic approach to… well, every single thing on the planet, really.

And all it would take is a simple change in mind set. We change our minds constantly, every single day of our lives - would one more change be so great?

Thanks for stopping by and posting a well thought-out comment, Deb.
Steve

It’s clearly an advert with the most tenuous of links to the subject of the post.

There has been a spate of advertising on my blog through inappropriate comments with very tenuous links to the subject of this post. I will not allow this.

If people want to make a decent comment and actually talk about the subject at hand, then add a brief remark and even a link to something related that’s fine. Merely saying, ‘Hi Steve, Good post.’ then launching into your promotion is not a proper comment and those concerned know it.

This is partly my fault - I turned a blind eye to one such comment as it was quite subtle - that inspired two other people to think my blog was an excellent promotional tool for their purposes and posted with less and less subtlety.

Commenters who abuse this blog in that way a second time will be banned.

I may agree with your cause or think your product excellent, but I will not allow you to use my blog as a billboard!

Steve

What you have sggested a solution to an extremely complex political and social problem - one of social injustice of resource distribution. Indeed, if the distributional inequity is removed, social and corresponding inequities should also become mitigated. However, there are two great fallacies in your suggestion.

First, you assume that IF everyone get sufficient foods (which presupposes food is eveny and equitably distributed all over the world), people would come up with more creative technologies to solve existing problems. This total faith in the “technological fixes” to social and political problems is a non sequitur. It begs the question: Why are the millions of well-fed people in the North (and parts of the South) innovative enough to influence their governments to solve the problem of inequitable distribution? Why cannot they “invent” some technology that distributes the excess production evenly, rather than stifling it with subsidies? (Please recall the enormous subsidies given to the US farmers to NOT produce on their farms; also the enormous subsidies to US food export to, but prohihibitive taxes on import from, the South). Until that happens, food distribution will never be equitable, so hungry people will persist in the world - even in the USA, and Europe - despite any rates of GNP growth. Also please recall that even if technological inventions and interventions happen to boost national food grain production, pockets of endemic famine persist in countries like India, Paraguay and Sierra Leone.

Second, Your assumption of the importance of food has already been shared by the multinational biotech corporations like Monsanto, who claim that genetically modified (GM) foods are the solution to food security. So they sell more GM crops, pump in more of their propreitary agrochemicals (especially herbicides) to grow the same crops, and inject more toxins into air, water and soil. Agrochemical industry, following the same logic, produce more chemicals, and create more hybrid seeds designed to grow on these chemicals, and their factories spew more toxic chemicals in the environemnt in the process. And the world gets warmer and warmer!

Currently the debate in the South is whether to grow biofuel crops (another technological innovation!) at the expense of food crops, and sell the fuel to the North to buy foods. So more people are designed to go hungry.

I suppose your blog is a good starter. But the solution to global warming requires a more holistic political thinking and action. The current industrial hegemony ought to be overthrown in order to imagine a new hunger-free world order. Deb

No, I don’t know anything about this 2012 thing, I’m afraid (short of London getting the Olympics in that year which is going to cost the taxpayer an absolute fortune, but then who cares about that?!). My time is so stretched these days that I rarely have time to simply surf the web without some work-oriented goal, but I’ll certainly Google it and see what turns up.

Tipping points? With all the things that go on in the world and yet don’t act as a tipping point, it’s hard to imagine what needs to happen to change anything. Not that I think change won’t happen - if I did, I wouldn’t waste my time writing this blog - but it would be nice to think it was going to be some time sooner rather than later.

I’m pleased you are enjoy my posts. And don’t worry, I will be keeping up the good work! Thanks for stopping by,
Steve

Firstly, keep up the good work - I do think poverty and particularly food poverty are way too far from the top of the agenda these days.

Secondly, I think you glossed over the comment on eating lower down the food chain without paying it enough attention. The main reason why this is a good idea is that we currently devote way too much of our resources - land, water etc - to producing meat. If less livestock was reared, there would be more agricultural land available to produce food directly for human consumption, making it easier to feed the world - not to mention the lessening of the greenhouse effect of ‘cow farts’!

Finally, re the comments about it taking a long time to make the change, and not knowing when this will happen, there are many traditions in which the date of 21 December 2012 or thereabouts is given as the tipping point, at which time the choice will be made as to whether Earth/humanity slips into chaos or rises into evolution to higher consciousness. There’s so much out there about this, if you google 2012, you’ll find a whole raft of information on it. Everything we can do to help tip that balance in the right direction is worthwhile. If it’s true, we have only 4 years to make a difference! Focusing on what we want the world to be like (and not how we see it at the moment), and ‘being the change we want to see’ are two very important ways in which we can contribute to this. I get the impression that most of the people who visit this site are interested in helping to achieve this change, so the more the merrier, and never think you can’t do anything to change the world!

Also, if the balloon becomes a sphere, what happens to its reflective properties? Mirrors need to be flat.

Thanks for contributing to the discussion,
Steve

we need millions of space mirrors… place them between the earth and sun, reflect the heat away from the earth… each one could be a mirrored mylar baloon about 20 feet in diameter filled with a cup of water… in the vacuum of space the water would boil (due to the heat of the sun) and expand to cause the balloon to become a sphere…