Warwick wrote: And yes if we all live in Texas there will be no lack of room for wildlife, but since that hasn’t happened yet, we’re kind of spread out and like to build lots of roads and cars. Rezwan’s flying cars will be here one day maybe, then we can just kill birds, but I think that for the average subsistence farmer in the majority world, that day is a long way off. It’s been shown many times that the effect of dividing up wildwood with roads is that the ecosystem fails – all the larger species need to cross the roads and if they can’t they’re screwed. We could imagine a different world where is some weird and wonderful rural public transport, but let’s not bet on it.

“All my exes live in Texas, that’s why I live in Tennessee.”

BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) goes underground through the city of Berkeley, instead of above ground as it does in most other cities. This is because the good citizens and their elected officials thought that a rail system would bisect the city and create an “other side of the tracks” situation, which they didn’t like.

So, they paid double the price per mile to stick the whole thing under. Choice. Affluence. Trade offs, values.

I don’t see that it would cost that much to take certain portions of roads and stick them underground or raise them above at certain spots that coincide with migration routes.

Or, better yet, to become a people that pays more attention to migration patterns. Like surfers who check the tides, we’d have people linked in to migrations, getting data from some of the herd that are tagged with gps linked speed and directional sensors. (Like how they have sig alerts on the internet – you can see the rate of traffic flow on all the major freeways in LA – probably everywhere).

Perhaps we’d have cowboys, too. Or girlscouts and boyscouts all out there getting their migration badges or whatever. [Note: the massive animal migration incompatibility with human civilization/property/transport is one of the issues I’m most interested in exploring. It’s next in line after fusion for my big issues. Oh, maybe water cycle – well, that overlaps with both.]

I suspect that, as we solve the affluence problem and get rid of this sense of fear and survival and miserly possessiveness that people have which makes them see everything as property they must hoard and control – perspective on nature will shift, and become much more interesting.

It’s the limited resources paradigm, after all, that is behind a lot of things that are supposedly for our sake, but really are not what we want. Take those commercials where someone has a headache, and they take a pill and feel better. The person is shown at a grueling job, where they can’t miss a second, but because of the pill, they get to stay on the job. Yippee.

Obviously, evil employers are behind that ad. If your employee has splitting headaches, their body is telling them to get rest and change their lifestyle. Many employers just see the workers as tools, want them to ignore the sensible message from their bodies to get rest. So they vilify the headache, and not the insane work hours, and work to solve the symptom (headache), and not the cause of the headache (life out of balance).

All of that is possible, is reinforced, under a survivalist mentality, where you’re worried someone else will take your job if you don’t kill yourself working, or the Chinese will control market share, or whatever. Zero sum self and nature exploitation. Very boring. And I don’t think it reflects reality. But people do get shrill about it.

This is often couched in terms of “efficiency”.

The temptation of efficiency is strong, and certainly, efficiency has its place. But I think a big part of human essence is inefficiency, gratuitous exploration, play. Hopefully, this will assert itself more as years go by. The grumpy hoarding survivalist generations will pass, and the emerging generations will be a lot more groovy about it all. More integrated with natural patterns, setting their clocks by wildebeest migrations, very happy to have excuses to not go to work for 3 weeks at a time while roads are closed.