I think it's really critical that we note that the economic system that we call unregulated capitalism, raw capitalism, naked capitalism, laissez-faire capitalism, in an unregulated state is like cellular division inside the body in an unregulated state. Normally cells operate in a regulated state, in what's called homeostasis; biological homeostasis. They're limited by the amount of food available to them. They're limited by their own internal control mechanisms. They're limited in the speed and size of their growth; they do grow and reproduce but within certain boundaries and limits. And they behave co-operatively with all the other cells in the body. Your kidneys don't try to take over your liver. Your liver doesn't try and take over your eyes. Your eyes don't try and take over your feet; you know, on it goes, right?
And when individual components of a finite system rise up and start eating out the core of that system, that is referred to as cancer, and we have a finite system that is known as the biosphere, the world we live in; it is absolutely a finite system. It is not infinite, and yet everybody's talking about infinite growth. "Oh, we've got to grow the economy". "I've got a better way to grow the economy." "I've got 16 plans to grow the economy". "I'm going to grow the economy." "Chinese are growing the economy". "In India, the economy is growing". Everybody thinks that's good news.
And we're up to the point where we're consuming about half of the total photosynthetic productive capacity of the planet; about half of all products of photosynthesis now. We have taken more than 90% of the large fish species out of the ocean. We've got 50,000 species a year going extinct. extinctions: 99.999% of all animals, all species that have ever existed on the planet are extinct. I mean, extinction are a normal thing. Are we next? And I think that this movie, Leonardo DiCaprio's movie "
The 11th Hour" just did a brilliant job of raising these issues and framing these issues and what we can do about them and pointing that out, that it is a finite system.
And also pointing out the fact that in nature, and this is, you know, again, the smartest things that we can do, the smartest thing that we can do as a smart species is to imitate nature. You know, you think steel is really strong stuff. Just spider web's silk is 5 times stronger than steel, ounce for ounce. Five times stronger than steel. And it's made at room temperature, and steel requires, you know, incredible heat. It's made with water. I mean, just basic reactions. Spiders eat bugs, they produce something stronger that steel.
So let's looks at nature. And what nature does, is everything that is excreted is absorbed by something else. We exhale carbon dioxide, trees inhale carbon dioxide. They convert it into biomass, and in the process they exhale a waste product -- for trees -- called oxygen, which we inhale. Plants and animals have this perfect dance: every animal or plant's waste in some way; salmon and bears, for example.
You find that for about a hundred, hundred and fifty miles stretch around rivers in the Pacific North West, the vast, over 70% as I recall,
Stuart Pimm told us this at a
meeting we had down in San Francisco about 6 months ago; over 70% of the nitrogen in the soil comes from bears eating salmon in the rivers, and other large fish, and then walking round in the woods and pooping. And that's what feeds the trees, and that's why there are forests there; at least the type, the mixture of types of trees and the types of habitats that there are. And without those bears or without those salmon, it would be a completely different type of biological system. Why don't we look at nature? Why don't we figure out how to recycle our waste?
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