It seems disingenuous for the intellectual elite of the first world to dwell on the subject of too many babies being born in the second- and third-world nations while virtually ignoring the over-population of cattle and the realities of a food chain that robs the poor of sustenance to feed the rich a steady diet of grain-fed meat.
Interpretation
The quote critiques the hypocrisy of the privileged when discussing global overpopulation while overlooking issues related to food distribution and resource allocation.
In this quote, Jeremy Rifkin points out the hypocrisy of those in developed nations who focus on the problem of overpopulation in poorer regions, while they themselves ignore significant issues within their own systems. He highlights how the overpopulation of livestock and the inequitable distribution of resources contribute to ongoing poverty and hunger in the world, suggesting that the real discussion should center on how wealth and food resources are mismanaged rather than blaming the population growth in less affluent countries.
In practice
In a panel discussion about global food security, this quote can be referenced to highlight the need for responsible resource management.
t century, hundreds of millions - and eventually billions - of human beings will transform their buildings into power plants to harvest renewable energies on site, store those energies in the form of hydrogen and share electricity, peer-to-peer, across local, regional, national and continental inter-grids that act much like the Internet.
The very notion that millions of workers displaced by the re-engineering and automation of the agricultural, manufacturing, and service sectors can be retrained to be scientists, engineers, technicians, executives, consultants, teachers, lawyers and the like, and then somehow find the appropriate number of job openings in the very narrow high-tech sector, seems at best a pipe dream, and at worst a delusion.
Basic income is not a utopia, it's a practical business plan for the next step of the human journey.
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When we seed millions of acres of land with these plants, what happens to foraging birds, to insects, to microbes, to the other animals, when they come in contact and digest plants that are producing materials ranging from plastics to vaccines to pharmaceutical products?
What makes the IoT a disruptive technology in the way we organize economic life is that it helps humanity reintegrate itself into the complex choreography of the biosphere, and by doing so, dramatically increases productivity without compromising the ecological relationships that govern the planet.
A cultural fixation on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty but an obsession about female obedience.
What is the use of living, if it be not to strive for noble causes.
A checkbook is a theological document, it will tell you who and what you worship.
She always imagined that evil played out on a large canvas- wars, concentration camps, gas chambers, the partitioning of nations. Now she realized that evil had a domestic side, and its very banality protected it from exposure.
Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.
Alcohol doesn't console, it doesn't fill up anyone's psychological gaps, all it replaces is the lack of God.
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