Modernity : Killing the Golden Goose & then putting all its Eggs in One Basket

Are Peasants smarter than PhDs ?

It seems hard to accept that a few proverbs of peasant wisdom from before the time of Christ (and repeatedly found in cultures all over the ancient world) should be so much more useful to our 21st century world-in-crisis than anything found in the collective wisdom of tens of thousands of  main stream economists with PhDs.

Mainstream (Modernist) economists are terribly good in math and terribly bad in arithmetic -- their complex verbiage in/ verbiage out mathematical models all say that Gordon Gekko was right --- growth is good and more growth is better, ever upwards ever faster up into infinity.

Adults, who half understand Math, are impressed ---- but school children, who understand only arithmetic, are not.

They dont understand how you can get ten slices from an eight slice pie.

Being non-physical scientists, the economists base their belief upon a mis-understood and half-baken bit of knowledge about the commercial viability of both fusion energy and of the perfect transmutability of the elements found in the Earth's abundant inorganic rock.

By this means, they plan to escape the admitted resource limitations of the biological part of a finite Earth upon their model of human economic growth forever.

In addition to their delusions about fusion and transmutations, I fear our mainstream economists uniformily greater underestimate how much of our commercially viable ore bodies are themselves biological in 'organization'.

And no, that is not a typo for 'origin'.

Many of our mineral deposits are only economical to mine because microbe lifeforms in the distant past  'organized' them into high concentrations, from their originally un-economic low percentage concentrations throughout all of the the Earth's crust.

Many commercially important minerals ONLY exist on this earth because they were formed by the actions of lifeforms on the relatively limited number of minerals found on the Earth at its formation.

I bang on and on about the key importance of biological minerals because there tends to be an intellectual division ( a false division) between plants and animals on one hand and rocks on the other.

And not just in the minds of mainstream modernists either - it commonly found in the minds of environmentalists who really ought to know better.

Kill off the tigers, lions & bears if you must -- but leave me the plankton

Like humanity, these big predators are nothing but 'takers' and like humanity, the world would go on perfectly well without them.

But the plankton are 'makers' and without them, all the oxygen-breathers ( like us) would die.

Currently the greed of humanity is killing off all the biological 'makers', the golden geese, that keep us fat and rich.

That is what these makers are doing for us today and have done for us in the past.

But what might they potentially do for us in the future, as conditions change and we need new methods of survival ?

If we sink all our intellectual and biodiversity resources into one basket, we might not have the tools we need to meet future crisis.

We can't just have one type of corn and one type of wheat etc - anymore than we can rely on the One Percent, a handful of white shoe WASPs, to pull us out of the next jam.

We need all the possible natural biodiversity and all the possible human intellectual diversity inside our life-saving Big Tent, inside our Cabinet of all possible Talents..