Today is the national day of Québec. We call it national day but the fact is that, politically, Québec isn't a nation. A foreign government is still writing our laws, strengthening its foreign rule every day through immigration and the maintenance of a two official language policy. Because of this, Montréal will soon become an English speaking city. Québec doesn't directly face overpopulation--in fact, population numbers here are going down, like in Europe. Meanwhile, the immigrant/Québécois ratio is steadily going up. It's not hard to realize that multiculturalism currently is destroying our nation.

One might then ask: "So why do you celebrate?"

Like everywhere else, the Québecois don't like to face reality, and suffer from a profound lack of higher values. Add the fact that this is a good pretext to get drunk and have a day off from work, and suddenly there's a good reason to "celebrate." The fact that we as a nation has struggled to survive for 400 years doesn't interest them at all. Yes, 2008 is what we might call a "special" year as it marks the foundation of the oldest city of America. Québec city is 400 years old.

Samuel de Champlain was the founder; a man of courage, bravery and determination. Even at that time he had to fight against mercantilism; against the merchants who didn't want to see him establishing a colony, out of fear of losing a lot of money. With the help of the natives, he fought the merchants, the ocean and the winter--and he won. But, 400 years later, we're still a colony, because we like to think that way. We are afraid of taking the risk, afraid of thinking for ourselves and taking control of our own destiny, like a teenager who refuses to grow up. Unfortunately, de Champlain is no longer a hero, nor are our old patriots like Riel, Chevalier De Lorimier, Bourgault and Papineau. Our hero is a 50 goal scorer from the National Hockey League. People don't care about the past or the future, what they want is avoiding any adversity in the present.

All of this because of our profound lack of values. This lack of meaning in our lives has turned this nation into a place where courage and bravery have no importance. Is independence possible in a situation like this? I don't think so.

But, there's still hope for us. We didn't survive 400 years for nothing. Our ancestors were proud. They chose to live as French even when the money was controlled by the English. Colonized Québecois like to say that we are a bunch of losers because we lost the war against the English on the plains of "Abraham." The patriot's revolt had no result, the FLQ ("Front de libération du Québec") was crushed by the Canadian army, and we've lost two referendums on independence. To me this doesn't mean that we are losers, but that we are proud fighters who fight for our people. Independence will be possible if we remember the courage and the joy of life of our ancestors. 400 years of history is short compared to old Europeans countries, but this is our history and we have to fight for it. Vive la liberté! Vive l'indépendance!

André Audet is Editor and columnist of Société Nihiliste Du Québec, promoting philosophical nihilism and political independence for Québec

Michael Edward Arth, professionally experienced in building design, residential construction, and fine and commecial art, moved to DeLand, Florida in 2001 in order to rebuild a small slum neighborhood, today known as "The Garden District." Together with his daughter Sophie and his wife Maya, this is still where he lives today. Michael Arth is currently active with a new movie, "New Urban Cowboy: Toward a New Pedestrianism," addressing a complete reconstruction of the architectural design of the modern urban society.

1. Your major construction project, which you now call "The Garden District," was a complete remake of a neighborhood, formerly known as "Cracktown." Please explain your motivation and inspiration to take on such a great task and taking it to success?

The motivations were: 1. To find a project where I could try out some of my ideas about urban design in the real world; 2. Create a living laboratory for the book I've been working on for many years: The Labors of Hercules: Modern Solutions to 12 Herculean Problems, and; 3. Rebuild a historic neighborhood where my wife and I could live and raise a child.

Rebuilding an existing neighborhood was a partial fulfilment of a lifelong fantasy to design and build the perfect town. The next big project will probably be built from scratch, which is the best way to make sure that it embodies the principles of what I call New Pedestrianism or NP, for short. New Pedestrianism is a more pedestrian and ecology-oriented version of New Urbanism. NP segregates transportation for motor vehicles and pedestrians into two "separate but equal" networks—where the pedestrians and cyclists get to share a beautiful, tree-lined pedestrian lane in front of the houses and businesses. The cars go on a rear street, which is also tree lined and which has carriage houses with formal garden gates in the residential areas. The businesses also have entrances, front and rear, but the main entrance is on the front side—and front is always the pedestrian side.

2. In The Labors of Hercules you describe the system of corruption, which has polluted the American democracy and turned it into an oligarchy. What is the main reason why private interests have bought up public politics and turned it into a circus charade?

Even by the standards of the world's democracies, the American voting system is not very democratic, with the cards stacked in favor of private business interests, which in turn fuels the military industrial complex. Military-related expenditures are already over $700 billion in 2008, and comprise roughly half of all military expenditures in the world, even though Americans comprise only 4% of the world's population. Meanwhile, our law enforcement agencies, including the prison industrial complex, are bloated by the interminable war on drugs resulting in an incarceration rate 600% to 700% higher than Europe. There are also agricultural and oil related subsidies that are supporting unsustainable policies. These are only a few examples of policies influenced by non-proportional representation. We could improve the democracy and begin to address inequities like this in the system with these important voting rights reforms:

Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) for single member elections—where the voters rank their candidates in order of preference without fear of having to strategize their vote. Gore, and the liberal majority, lost to Bush in 2000 because Ralph Nader "spoiled" the vote. There would never again be a spoiler under IRV.

Get rid of the Electoral College, which is a relic from another era and gives voters in thinly populated states much greater representation than voters in densely populated states.

For multi-member elections (like the House of Representatives) trade gerrymandered districts in favor of large, semi-permanent districts with a field of representatives elected by Proportional Representation (PR).

Enact real campaign finance reform, where money is taken out of politics as much as possible. There should be very little private campaign financing; the election cycle should be shorter; and the information on candidates should be standardized in an official Internet site that would cost taxpayers a tiny fraction of what they spend now trying to influence a very restricted selection of candidates. Unless we vastly reduce influence buying, we will not have justice.

Having a more representative government has its own dangers. Currently only about 50% of Americans even bother to vote, partly because the field of candidates is only drawn from those politicians that support the status quo, for the reasons outlined above. That is why politicians are so maddeningly non-committal. With voter reform, you could have bright, informed candidates from different walks of life willing to state their real views and take a principled stand that anyone can understand.

If voters really mattered, we would then have to deal with the problem of the American electorate being poorly informed, superstitious, and easily manipulated. Apparently, many Americans suffer from selective exposure (where people listen more to those ideas which confirm their biases). For example, when it was shown that there were not weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (and even after Bush and Cheney admitted the lack of evidence) 50% of Americans in a 2006 Harris poll still believed Saddam had WMDs. Historically, it has served the powers-that-be to leave people in the dark, and it has served politicians to say little of substance.

3. The world population growth is critical in all areas of human expansion, but it is currently most problematic in the Third World. What is the responsibility, if any, of the West to help places like Africa to downsize their population – and which political policies should in that case be applied?

Another example of selective perception is the population explosion. Despite the vast range of problems related to increasing population—pollution, congestion, climate change, resource shortages, and resource wars, to name but a few—most people don't consider it worrisome that the population of our planet goes up by 211,000 people every single day! That is 77 million more people every year, which is roughly like adding the population of England, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand every year. We should be in panic mode about what to do about this, yet it is not even on the political agenda.

It is not just a problem with the developing world, which has the highest birth rate, but with developed countries as well. The U.S. has the highest growth rate of any industrialized country—mostly due to immigrants and their high birth rate. This is a disaster in the making, because when we are talking about the dangers of overpopulation the most critical factor is not sheer numbers, but carrying capacity (carrying capacity = how many people can the Earth sustain at a certain standard of living). A hundred Bangladeshis use as many resources as one American, so more Americans are potentially as bad for the planet as 100 Bangladeshis. However, people are not trees—they move around quite easily. So every Bangladeshi who moves to a developed country multiplies his effect on the planet up to 100 times. This is why immigration from poor countries to rich countries is aggravating the problem. I'm in favor of reversing population growth immediately across the board in all countries. Japan and some European countries are nearing zero population growth and this should be cheered.

An additional factor in the population explosion is the very real possibility of life extension in the near future. Every day 155,000 people die. If the death rate was reduced to near zero, and the birth rate stayed the same, we would add 366,000 people every day, instead of 211,000. Obviously, we need to face the overpopulation issue squarely. There are people, often business interests, who make claims that increasingly the population is a good thing because it grows the economy, brings in fresh, young blood, and that American ingenuity (Terrafarm Mars! rocket to the stars!) will somehow find a place to put all these people. They laugh at Malthusian predictions of global disaster going back to the 19th century. These are the rationalizations of those with an agenda backed by whoever they can fool, similar to those who claim that global warming is not human caused. We are better able to assess the state of planet and its resources today than ever before, and the consensus of unbiased sources is that we may already be exceeding the planet's carrying capacity. It hardly seems prudent to take chances with the only habitable planet we've got.

Who knows? In the long term we might be able to upload our minds into cyberspace, and discard the bodies, but as long as we still inhabit our bodies, Birth credits is the solution. A choice-based, marketable birth license plan would be fair, non-discriminatory in regards the poor, and could stop population growth immediately. People are issued half a credit, which they can combine with a partner, and they get the first child free of charge. Any more than that, they have to buy a license, which costs a tiny fraction of what it actually costs to raise a child. Because we are used to breeding without any regard for the rest of the world, birth credits at first might sound extreme. It is a vast improvement over the one child policy, however, because people who do not have children should be rewarded, and people who are well-suited to having more children should have the option to do so. The poor would benefit the most from such a plan, because they suffer the most from the effects of having too many children. Proof of this is the fact that the average household net worth in the U.S. is in inverse proportion to the number of children in the household.

The problem in most "save the world" discussions, other than the difficulty of establishing the statistical baseline in regards resources, is to get people to agree on the boundaries between individual rights and collective rights. Our collective rights are being eroded every day by the cumulative effects of individual irresponsibility, so we need universal policies that define the boundaries of these rights.

If we could all agree on using birth credits, population growth would end and we might begin to get a handle on a wide range of problems facing our species and the other species that we share the planet with. You can read more about birth credits (which I also call a marketable birth license plan) at http://www.laborsofhercules.org.

4. You take a non-moralizing stance on topics like drugs and prostitution, emphasizing that behavioural patterns persist unless the consequences are brought to light. Do you see a future for alternative communities where drug use and prostitution might be legal under controlled forms, or would ending these prohibitions only serve as temporary examples for all people involved?

Drug prohibition and laws against prostitution constitute what we commonly call "victimless crimes." The irony is that by making these things crimes, we create far more victims. The moralistic approach to drugs and prostitution is ineffective, unethical, dangerous, and costly. It makes no sense to try and control what people do with their bodies, as long as legalization serves the greater good, which is does.

The facts regarding illegal drugs tell the story: Many, if not most, prohibited drugs (marijuana, mescaline, ayahuasca, psilocybin, LSD, DMT, MDMA, and others) are non-addictive, have proven to be effective in therapeutic and spiritual practices, and are generally not dangerous to the health. Meanwhile, the two most prominent legal drugs—alcohol and tobacco—are highly addictive, and kill 450,000 every year in the U.S. alone. Legal prescription drugs kill another 100,000. At the same time, all of the illegal drugs combined only kill about 17,000 in the U.S, with not one single documented overdose death on record attributable to marijuana, mescaline, ayahuasca, psilocybin, LSD, or DMT. If that is not enough reason to move toward legalization, we also know that many of the 17,000 killed by hard drugs would not have died if they had gotten clearly dosed, non-adulterated drugs, purchased legally.

Drug abuse is a medical problem that is compounded by the unregulated trade of criminal enterprises that exact a terrible toll on society in countless ways. The modern, popular "gangsta" culture was born of prohibition and the lure of the forbidden, and almost every town now seems to have a crack slum. We have had 40 years to observe the failed experiment in drug prohibition, which is an echo of the failed experiment of alcohol prohibition from the 1920s. Alcohol prohibition, beginning in 1919, launched the first wave of gangsterism, contempt for the law, and rapid prison expansion. We are doing it all over again, except it is much worse this time. Criminals, and others who stand to gain from the status quo, are making sure we keep pursuing the command and compliance approach. Alternative communities—like Las Vegas and Amsterdam—where prostitution and certain drugs are tolerated, are not enough. We need a universal end to prohibition.

5. With New Urbanism you envision communities where people live interconnected via compact neighbourhoods, and the automobile-oriented concrete jungles are replaced by practical, short-distance neighbourhood centers. "New Pedestrianism" develops the idea of building cities that conform to human nature (e.g. walking/jogging, social relationships, closeness to nature, public safety), instead of like today where we often make people conform to the nature of suburban cities. Explain more about the philosophy behind this vision; how will it affect people's life quality? Why do you think public officials haven't thought of looking at city architecture from this perspective?

New Pedestrianism is a more idealistic form of New Urbanism. Both movements involve reviving and expanding upon traditional street patterns. New Urbanism today is a new and improved version of what looks a lot like just about any American town before WWII. New Urbanism does not go far enough, however, because it still does not adequately deal with the cars. New Pedestrianism expands upon a few experiments in pedestrian-oriented urban design that never took hold—mostly because of the onslaught of the automobile age. Many public officials are beginning to look at New Urbanism, and change the laws accordingly. New Urbanism and New Pedestrianism are still against the law in most places because of zoning laws and street engineering standards that prescribe the width of streets, the radii of turns, setbacks, the segregation of uses, the elimination of trees within a certain distance of the street, and other restrictions that make our cities so unappealing. The New Pedestrianism movement, founded in 1999, is only now beginning to get some serious attention from planners. The city and surrounding rural municipality of Saskatoon, Saskachewan, Canada, for example, is considering five pedestrian villages that could be built on its southeastern edge. The housing bust is slowing things down in the U.S., but when things heat up again, planners may begin to realize that our suburban cities are no longer sustainable for many reasons. Pedestrian villages are compact, pedestrian-oriented, energy efficient, and beautiful. There are no automobile streets in front of any house or business, so the first instinct is to step out your front door and go for a pleasant stroll or bicycle ride on a pleasant, tree-lined, car-free lane. The second, less desirable choice would be to go out the back (where the automobile street is) and fire up the gas-guzzler.

Another era will be upon us when private cars are no longer necessary. This will come when self-driving cars have taken over, and we will have the option of getting rid of almost all the cars. Ninety percent of the time, cars are sitting around parked somewhere, taking up space, consuming precious resources, and losing value. If we can move toward eliminating private cars in favor of driverless public cars, a vehicle can be summoned when you need it. It will cost a fraction as much as owning a private car and you can have any kind of car you need on demand. Almost all of the world's 1.2 million annual deaths and 48 million injuries from motor vehicle accidents are caused by human error. Autonomous cars could vastly reduce the carnage. It is hard to imagine that un-enhanced humans would even be allowed to drive a car in 20 years in the way they do today.

The other factor is the development of fully immersive virtual reality, which could cut down drastically on the need for physical travel. Combine this with autonomous cars, and life in a pedestrian village, and it is easy to see how we could eventually reduce the number of cars to a fraction of the current level.

6. What is the relationship between an established human community and a free, wild area in nature? Is it possible to organize the architecture of our cities to work in harmony with the design of nature?

That is what New Pedestrianism is about. Not only would the villages be beautiful, sustainable, and livable, they would be surrounded by greenbelts and be adjacent to preserves or waterfronts. In almost all cases, within the pedestrian villages there would be no roads between the edge of the village and nature. Only pedestrian lanes are allowed on the periphery, so that the dynamic edge of people and their architecture is not spoiled by traffic. Have you noticed that beaches, riverfronts, lakefronts, and forests are usually bordered by a noisy, car-filled road or blocked by a building? Under NP, all these natural amenities would be bordered by a pedestrian lane, thus providing an accessible boundary and greenbelt to bring the community into balance with nature.

7. While Christianity is losing ground in the secular West, Judaism and particularly Islam continue to thrive in the Middle East. What is the future for traditional religions in an increasingly atheist-oriented world? Is the creeping death of religion and myth an unavoidable product of our time, or is there a possibility of some form of spiritual rebirth in man?

Christianity is losing ground in the West because people are wising up. Even a moderately educated person can see that more than one contradictory idea on the same subject cannot be true. We have thousands of religions with contradictory absolute beliefs about things which are unknowable. The other Abrahamic religions are thriving in the Middle East because many people in those countries are still mired in a vengeful, feudal mentality, which is even more dangerous in a technological world where cooler heads should prevail. Traditional religions have had their time, and we see the dangers involved in dogmatic beliefs and intolerance in a world that is becoming increasingly more like a big village. Faith is not a viable epistemology, just as Creationism is not science. Faith should be replaced with something more like Dale Carnegie's "power of positive thinking" while maintaining the ability to adjust to reality. Humans are quite wonderful beings when they apply the Golden Rule, look on the bright side of life, and adopt a scientific approach to knowledge. Doing those three things alone will change one's life—really. We understand the basis of the old myths now, and they are quaint but not practical. We need a guiding vision for something that really could transform our species and carry us from the mud to the stars. Prayer, superstitious practices, ritual, and absolutist thinking, is not just naïve but potentially dangerous.

8. Transhumanism has recently become a topic of hot debate. With the advancements in technology our computers are developing a more and more subtle artificial intelligence. Mary Shelley once wrote a novel about the scientist Frankenstein, who created a monster he could no longer control and eventually were forced to destroy. Do you see humanity reaching a similar problem in the future?

With change comes fear and clinging to the comfort of the familiar. It is part of our evolutionary survival mechanism, and without a certain degree of caution, balanced with curiosity, our species would not have flourished. Ever since people began building machines and tinkering with nature, and especially since the power of the atom was unleashed, people have feared what might happen if we make a false step. Are we about to open Pandora's box and give birth to a machine that will terminate our species? It is quite possible that we will develop recursively self-improving machines that can in a very short time go from human child level intelligence to god-like intelligence. This makes it imperative to watch our future baby AI very carefully and help it make the transition from a dangerous adolescent to a benevolent overmind. I call this new form of life UNICE, which stands for Universal Network of Intelligent Conscious Entities, and for a year I've been interviewing scientists and thinkers from around the world about the subject for an upcoming feature documentary. Quite simply, it may be the most important juncture that our species will face, and we need to pay close attention. We will continue to balance our curiosity with caution, and that is a wise strategy (http://www.unice.info).

We may compare our past situation to that of a rapacious caterpillar gnawing up resources at a tremendous rate while unaware that it is facing a vastly different future as a butterfly. Now, as we are wrap ourselves in a chrysalis of technology we can begin to contemplate what might lie on the other side of the great transformation. Will we survive to transcend our mortal coil and ascend the heights in a radiant new form? People may argue about whether this guiding myth of our time may happen, or whether we will be destroyed by our creations, but the process is grounded in hard science.

9. Many people in modern society seem to feel existentially bored and unfulfilled. If you agree, what do you think is the reason for this anxiety? Is there a chance for people to regain a sense of playful, adventurous creativity in life?

I can relate to some of that. I was depressed after I rejected the Roman Catholicism of my childhood, and it took me until I was 18 or 19 years old to find my way out of it and become a secular transhumanist. I remember calling myself an existentialist when I was teenager, and I read a lot of Camus, Sartre, and Kierkegaard. Fear and Trembling and The Sickness Unto Death were two of my favorite titles, but I also read Teilhard de Chardin. That was 36 years ago, and I'm still a seeker of knowledge, but it is a lot more fun now. We live in the most interesting time for humans to have been alive, and it will just get more interesting. Personally, I am very rarely bored, feel quite fulfilled, and want to live indefinitely. One lifetime is not nearly enough time to do all that I want to do.

For me, the key is to follow my interests in the service of others. Maybe that will work for others who feel that their lives are meaningless. Each person has to find their own niche that contributes to the whole. For some this means service to other people or organizations, for others it means working alone toward a cause, or on projects. When we reach through the little ego to the collective self beyond, it fills the hole that the rejection of organized religion can leave. Buddhism, a philosophy more than a religion, takes the view that the individual can transcend the misery of the ego by identifying with the whole of the universe. It helps to be passionately, almost fearlessly involved in life, and still be able to sit back and observe the theater of one's life with detachment when things get too serious.

Questions from our readers

From Victoria McMagnus

10. Isn't the real problem with drugs the lack of strong political will to crack down on drug abuse and corporate crime? What do you say to those who fear that legalising drugs would mean they would become as acceptable as alcohol and advertised all over the place?

You could make the whole world a vast penal colony and people would not stop using their drugs of choice. The U.S. already has the highest incarceration rate in the world and it is well known that both legal and illegal drugs are easily obtained in prison. It is futile and unnecessary to stamp it out. Many illegal drugs are quite useful, and, as we see with alcohol and tobacco (which are potentially quite dangerous), they are better controlled through legalization and regulation. The Dutch police told me that the average age of hard drug users in Holland has been increasing because they have eliminated the lure of the forbidden and they tolerate the addicts. We do need a strong political will—not to crack down on drug abuse—but rather to end the futile war on drugs. We also need strong political leaders who will include severe restrictions on advertising drugs, alcohol, tobacco, and other substances that have been proven dangerous to society.

In regards corporate crime: As long as our corrupt voting system allows politicians to be bought, then you'll have special interests getting special privileges.

11. With a drastic reduction in birthrate, an increase in the ratio of old people doesn't take long to materialise. How do you think this issue would affect countries like China and India in the future, should they succeed in reducing their birth rates sufficiently?

I think it is a non-issue—especially in light of future developments in life-extension, helper robots, and the fact that crime and violence will plummet in an aging population. India and China's population has risen by 300 million people in the last 20 years, because of population momentum from young populations, so those two countries are not good examples of your point. Better examples are Germany, Italy, Spain, and Japan, which are nearing zero population growth. The fact that the countries with the oldest populations and slowest rate of growth are among the richest countries on Earth should tell you something. It is better to work toward a sustainable model with a stable, or declining population than to count on population growth to power the economy. We are also facing the strong possibility that humans will jump into cyberspace, or something more exotic, and leave the planet to the other species of plants and animals who may flourish in our absence.

12. How do you envisage your vision of a democracy that works being effected in a society in which corporate powers have seized such control over the government and political system? Can the corporate powers be peacefully deposed?

Traditionally, it has been hard to change society, but if UNICE develops, collective decisions governing every aspect of life will be automatic. We would have an individual consciousness at the same time as possessing UNICE consciousness. The president will be a figurehead, at most, and politicians will no longer exist in their present form, if at all. UNICE—the collective self that will comprise the future, self-aware Internet—will make sure that we solve all our various problems in the most efficient, judicious manner possible.

From Mathew Eugene

13. Much of what you suggest in your "12 Herculean Problems" would require some really fundamental changes in the current system, namely towards the growth-based economy. How is it possible to work within this system?

The fundamentals of our republic are sound, but there are institutionalized problems that need to be rooted out. The problems I list in the modern "Labors of Hercules" are generally ignored by politicians. This is why I list politics first. The first labor of Hercules, in the classic Greek myth, was the defeat of the Nemean Lion. This sneaky lion has two entrances to its cave and nothing can cut its hide except its own claws. Hercules has to shut off one of the entrances and then use the lion's own claws to flail it. When I was in Kenya working on the book and the documentary in 1997, I met a Masaai warrior who had killed a lion that was attacking his village and his livestock. He gave me one of the lion's claws from the defeated lion. I kept this claw from a real life, modern day Hercules to remind me of the first, very difficult task ahead of us. The irony is that this particular Masaai warrier was the runt of the litter, so to speak. To look at him, you would not think he had it in him, but he used his brains instead of his brawn. Might also does not make right in our struggle to reform a system where authoritarian attitudes have prevailed for years. The fight in Iraq is a sad example of this misbegotten policy. The Internet and the rise of UNICE might make it possible to work within the system. The mind of the future, self-aware Internet will hopefully become a collective wisdom, unmasking those who seek to hurt others. Or we might all go to hell in a hand basket. We shall see. There are surely at least a few acts left in the play of life.

14. Do we need an economic disaster for changes to really start happening?

No, but the folks talking about the breakdown of society following peak oil, might be onto something. Personally, I think we have a shot at tech-ing our way out of it, but it would involve reorganization along the lines that I propose in the Labors of Hercules, heeding the call to reverse population growth, and the advent of UNICE.

15. You suggest a choice-based, financial incentive strategy for population control, which seems fair enough. However, many will see this as a form of eugenics targeted towards the lower class. How would you deal with these objections?

I already addressed this to some extent above. Birth credits help the poor more than anyone else, since the well off already practice birth control and would not buy more birth credits even if they were free. Birth credits would improve society not only because of ecological issues but also because fewer unwanted children would be born. It would also free up resources to help everyone, regardless of social status. There is an interesting correlation in the U.S. between Roe v Wade decision, which allows legal abortion, and the precipitous drop in violence that followed a generation later. Presumably a lot of young, poor, single women got abortions instead of having unwanted children, who would later make up a disproportionate share of the criminals. Obviously, birth control is better than abortion, but if the correlation was really a cause, it shows that unwanted children, raised in poor circumstances, are not likely to help society advance. The poor would gain the biggest benefit from birth credits because they could be afforded a path out of multi-generational poverty. They could trade a life on welfare with multiple children destined to repeat the pernicious cycle, for education, job training, and integration into society. I don't know whether this would improve the gene stock, but so what if it does? Better eugenics than disgenics.

16. Do you consider long-term collective genetic effects in your reasoning?

Even without considering the taboo subject of eugenics there are more than enough reasons to stop population growth. Some people say that we should let nature take its course and Mother Nature will cull the herd. Well, that is roundabout way of saying we should invite pestilence, famine, climate change, natural disasters, wars, and other calamities to do the job because we do not have the good sense to practice birth control.

17. Overpopulation and immigration obviously go hand in hand. Immigration is also an extremely difficult issue, but probably less so than population control. Should immigration be tackled first?

The more pressing issue is overpopulation. Immigration problems flow from that. If Latin America had ZPG today, the immigration problem would evaporate in a generation.

18. Why would people vote for depopulation, when it would have negative effects on our growth-focused economy? Any way you look at it, aren't these ideas political suicide?

You are correct in that our politicians consider the subject political suicide, so we cannot rely on politicians to do anything about it. That is the tragedy of the commons. When everyone wants to get theirs without consideration of the commons, you get a tragedy. That is what has been unfolding in front of our eyes for the last few generations. The boom/bust cycles of our growth-focused economy are based on near-sighted goals that do not adequately address the long view. We need to do what is practical without always operating in fear of short-term consequences.

19. You just released a new movie, New Urban Cowboy: Toward a New Pedestrianism, how has the reaction been so far, and do you have any plans to distribute online?

We got good reviews, up to four and four and half stars, but for six months we were still looking for ways to improve it. We got audience reactions at four films festivals—San Francisco, Savannah, Orlando, and Daytona Beach—and then it was re-edited by Blake Wiers, my collaborator on the project. Various languages were added as subtitles in an international edition of the DVD, which is now available at http://www.newurbancowboy.com. It is actually the first film in a planned trilogy, to be followed by The Labors of Hercules: Modern Solutions to 12 Herculean Problems, and UNICE: Universal Network of Intelligent Conscious Entities. Visit http://www.goldenapplesmedia.com to find out more. My personal web site is at http://www.michaelearth.com.

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Interview was conducted by Alex Birch the 21th of May 2008.

Corrupt would like to thank Michael Arth for kindly participating in the interview and sharing his creative inspiration and visionary ideas with us.

British royal radicals have been making green news twice within a week. First we had ecofascist Prince Philip highlighting world overpopulation, and right after this, plant rights activist Prince Charles stated his concerns on the clearing of tropical rainforests. We should be rooting for them both!

It surprised me to discover that the plight of the rainforests has been increasingly relegated to a lesser priority in politics and the media than the specific need to cut carbon emissions. These issues cannot be separated! Rainforests and emissions go together like white corpuscles and infections. We need the rainforests to reduce the emissions as well as to stabilize the climate. They absorb CO2, while cutting them down releases large amounts of the gas.

So, how can it be that there are powerful voices seriously arguing that the rainforests can, and indeed must, be entirely cleared? This is exactly what Brazil's "soy king," Blario Maggi, is demanding. While he stands to further enrich himself in the short term should this happen, he says it is a moral imperative to plant crops on this land. The fact that the land will merely become desert is not something he allows to penetrate his skull. Maggi urges that we have to take all opportunities to grow both food and biofuel for the starving masses. An efficient solution would be to convert those masses into green biofuel and turn Maggi into IKEA worker in China.

Prince Charles favors a scheme to offer financial compensation to the various vested interests profiting from the deforestation. That is tantamount to offering to be held to ransom, and a foolish carrot to hang out. Now we are showing willingness to be blackmailed into paying £30 billion a year to halt the tree slaughter. Developing nations are also keen to blackmail us into helping them out with becoming greener in their industry and energy production - even though our economies are crashing and we are in serious debt, while India and China are surging ahead. Globalists are keen to encourage this line of thinking since it means ditching national interests and moving instead towards political interdependence.

Why is it fine to bomb Iran for fear of their nuclear ambitions, yet not okay to militarily occupy the Amazon and stop corporations from destroying our vital rainforests? Failing to prevent the latter threatens a far more catastrophic outcome for all of the world and should be priority number one. In 1950 the rainforests covered 15% of the planet. Now they cover less than half of that. 78 million acres a year are being lost. Almost incredibly, ten million Indians used to live in harmony with the ecosystem of the forests five hundred years ago, with no ecological footprint - but now only 200,000 remain there. Ninety tribes were wiped out since 1900. Various species are going extinct at a rate of three every hour.

Let us have a moment's silence to think of the holocaust.

The people farming on the peripheries of the forest, who are pawns in the game of the corporations, can barely make ends meet. The big businesses exploit them. It has been calculated that we all pay an unacceptable price (understatement alert!) for the disappearing rainforests. The climate change it causes will devastate millions of the poorest people - not that the corporations care about "externalities" like that. Then there are the other money making opportunities that are being ignored. Take the pharmaceutical ingredients solely available from these ancient forests (which contain more than half of all species of plants, animals and insects) and also add the rich harvest of nuts, fruits and so on which can be sustainably reaped. There is no economic justification for deforestation. We should avoid buying tropical wood, soy and palm oil products. Let's make the Soy King a "has-bean"!

You must have seen the kind of newspaper columns telling you the various ways in which you can be greener and save the planet. Well, if you're cutting down on paper consumption, you'll have read all that spiel online at any rate.

Some of this advice is of use: recycling your plastic bags; driving a more fuel-economic car - and some of it is worse than useless. In particular I am thinking of the big push towards eco light bulbs. Those things crack faster than the ice at a Billy Connolly show - particularly the swirly sort. I have had three of the buggers smash in my house in the past year. Environmentally friendly? That's so inaccurate anyone saying so should be prosecuted under the sales descriptions act. They are not environmentally friendly, they are environmentally lethal. They contain mercury, did you know?

And you have a mini biohazard to deal with when the inevitable breakage happens. There are some rules on how to embark on the clean up. I suggest you google about this beforehand. You can't just throw them in the trash either, they have to be specially recycled. I can tell you that very few people indeed will go to the trouble of finding where the hell you're supposed to take these pesky things. We haven't even been told of such a location. They'll be dumped along with all the other household waste and they'll contaminate the land and the water table. Whoever thought of this initiative can't have been too bright!

And what is more, while insisting we have to buy these scourges, the government blithely expands airports, motorways and you name it - immediately canceling out the optimistic projections of how far carbon emissions will be reduced by changing the light bulb. And they're going to ban the old style, standard bulbs. Perhaps people will end up going back to candles in desperation.

Companies know that "green" sells. People will pay more for "green" products and so it is a temptation ill resisted by manufacturers to tinker with their goods just enough to qualify them to seem environmentally responsible. Then people will continue on their consumer binging, buying stuff and dumping stuff while entirely guilt free. Almost no one wants to change their habits unless they can see a personal advantage from doing so

There is even an ethos growing amongst the common man that making or doing things yourself is to be looked down upon - it suggests you are a failure in life. This goes with the idea that "if you don't pay for it then it's worthless." Hence there is a general disregard for nature, which is taken for granted as a worthless "freebie." Certainly a shrewd businessman will see his opportunity to sell bottled water and indeed bottled air to a population who show so little interest in their surroundings and who are not at all outraged by the spreading pollution of both these resources, which should always be clean, pure and free.

Perhaps it is a good thing then, that decadence is becoming ever harder for people to afford. They may be prepared to make all kind of superficial excuses for their wish to buy while they can financially afford to, but the days of plenty are numbered. Food prices and the cost of living generally have led to everyone tightening their belts. It would have happened sooner had they not run up extortionate sums on credit, which they now find they can't pay back. Running out of cash is one way to make people genuinely greener. How's this for a slogan: "Make Poverty the Future"?

There have never been more people on Earth. There have never been more cows on Earth, nor pigs, nor chickens. We are using more pesticides today than at any other time in history and we are losing a greater percentage of the crops. At the same time, there has never been less clean water on Earth. There has never been less available topsoil, nor fewer fish, nor fewer mature trees. There has never been less cause for optimism for the future of the human race. Our natural resources are disappearing at an unbelievable rate, and our so-called leaders offer only cosmetic solutions. The Earth's population calls for more of everything while the Earth demands time to recover from years of abuse.
~ Howard Lyman

Why has the population of the world grown so quickly, why does it continue to grow exponentially, and why is so little being done to stop it?

The first explanation for this is the rise in technology and advances in medical science since the end of the second world war. The twin driving forces of unbridled capitalist greed and misplaced humanitarian concern for the so called "developing" nations led to a globalist push to industrialize. Suddenly people who used to have a sustainable way of life in the Third World were being fed and generally looked after. This led to a birth explosion, as well as greater levels of survival. Longer lives are as important a consideration as higher births as an explanation for overpopulation.

Old habits die hard, and the people of the developing nations have a tradition of large families for reasons of status, attempts to beat the odds of perceived risk of death before adulthood, competition and religion - as well as lack of contraception or interest in it. For many families, children are an investment because there is no state pension and they hope their offspring may take care of them.

Tribal conflicts have an effect of upping the birth rate. We have seen a noticeable drop in births in Ireland coinciding with the advent of peace there. Before this, the Protestants and Catholics rivaled each other to produce more babies. Obviously the Catholics were more successful there with the religious ban (now rarely observed) on contraception. Indeed the Pope is far from helpful in attempts to curb world population because he fervently encourages Catholics to breed and is opposed even to condoms to protect from AIDS. Now that Muslims have overtaken Catholics in number over the world, the Pope is only going to react by further entreaties to Catholics to get breeding. And the Muslims themselves have an expansionist agenda. In Palestine and Israel they make no secret of the design to defeat the Jews by outnumbering them.

People feel power from their numbers and there is an instinct to expand as long as resources allow for it. This is happening in many countries and amongst many ethnicities, although one rarely hears mention of it in the western media. If we understood this principle better we would not have the politically correct attitude required of good sheeple.

For some time now some nations have been trying to curb their birth rates because they are running out of resources and their governments have realized the economic advantages in reining in the expansion. Since 1979 China has had a "one child" policy which has slowed down their growth, although far from stopped it. China is colonizing areas of the world, and those who leave China have full permission to breed to their hearts' content.

India is also making attempts to reduce numbers. And while there was worldwide horror and condemnation of Indira Gandhi's program to offer transistor radios in return for sterilization in the 1970s - so all such attempts in the world were stamped on - India is now offering similar bribes without much murmur of opposition. There is a scheme offering men gun licenses for having vasectomies!

The Indian government has no jurisdiction over their north-eastern Khasi population however - who are so keen on expansion that they offer hundreds of dollars to any woman exceeding fifteen offspring!

And while we are talking of paying women to have babies - this is precisely what European nations are doing. Estonia even offers mothers, from their first child, about $2000 a month for a year. Japan, whose population is aging even more rapidly than Europe's, has a company offering $10,000 for each of its employees' children born after the first one.

India and China face problems in the future with an aging population born during their baby boom, should they succeed in reducing their birth rates. The whole thing is an utter fiasco.

As yet, the official bodies who should be engaged in active solutions to help reduce world population are refusing to acknowledge the problem. This becomes even more shocking when you realize that in the 60s and 70s such organizations and politicians were publicizing the severe danger of overpopulation and seriously formulating strategies to deal with it. Suddenly all this stopped, as if by some greater authority decreeing the whole issue out of bounds. And now we can thank the internet for allowing the many thousands who are fully aware of the situation to speak out publicly, together with the fact that symptoms, such as food prices soaring, point inexorably in the direction of overpopulation as a cause. Soon the politicians and various green parties who have been such traitors to the Earth will turn around and behave as if they were never responsible for suffocating voices of concern on the issue.

In 1974, the US government study - NSSM 200 - called for a drastic world population decrease, and the Carter administration released a document "Global 2000" saying that an immediate reduction to 2 billion was necessary. At the time, environmentalist groups agreed with these concerns, and Oxfam publicly supported zero population growth, while a Greenpeace slogan stated "Stop at Two".

This was suddenly replaced with the present Green policy that overpopulation is not a problem, that immigration to the west is a moral imperative, and that the cause of environmental collapse is down to polluting by western industry. This they say, while calling to end poverty all over the world - ie spreading the same consumerist lifestyle aspired to by our middle class.

Can you smell something rotten? That would be the necrocapitalism. Big business has bought our governments and our environmentalist groups. Evidence for the latter comes from the revelation that the Sierra Club, a leading US environmentalist group, accepted donations from a certain David Gelbaum, of over $100million in return for staying schtum on the impact of immigration on environmental problems.

Cheap labor and spreading globalist capitalism through loss of ethno-nationalist unity are essential for the necrocapitalists.

Corporate greed; religious doctrine; ethnic competitiveness; the wonders of modern medicine and humanitarianism - all are to blame for driving world overpopulation. Only when it becomes uneconomic for the situation to continue will our politicians agree to change things. By then it could be too late for the planet. We must struggle to destroy the farce of democracy and replace it with active solutions now!

Just like the crazy things that people buy these days say a lot about their character and interests, federal spending, that in the U.S. makes up for more than half of the total government spending, reveals the true state of America today. A total of 42 % of the entire Federal Budget goes exclusively to two things: national defense and social security. Paranoia and self-defeatism. The once biggest superpower in the world has now become a confused and hurt animal, and no matter how much it kicks to scare away enemies, it's effectively digging its own grave.

It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that America is spending lots of money on defense. What we're currently seeing today on the world political arena is a growing Cold War Redux, with increased tensions between the growing powers in the East ("Mother Russia" and Iran being two of them) and a globalist-capitalist alliance in the West (where America is still in the forefront); it's a war about power expansion, natural resources and cultural-ideological conflicts. Given this context, it's no wonder our national defense costs us a fortune -- despite the message of "peace," we're constantly fighting useless wars to track down spooky terrorists across the globe, and under our current regime, the world is apparently full of them. If there aren't any terrorists, we create them, arm them, and then hunt them down (Saddam, anyone?!).

Apart from the endless stream of enemies that force us to sleep with the gun under our pillow, the second economical drain on the budget is the social security. A system overloaded by illegal immigration, baby boomers and parasites, combined with a dysfunctional economy that's debt-based and currently collapsing in on itself thanks to the unstable housing market, will eventually wreck the budget and plunge America into a semi-third world state. The priorities reveal that the economy is bleeding cash and that all our bought up puppet politicians are able to do is to try to cover the wounds with cash already spent. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that this is not going to work, despite the blessings from God on our dollar bills. Hey, that's why the new presidential candidates have already given up on their tasks and instead ask of you to believe in change -- if God can't fix this, we're screwed anyway, they reason.

The fact that only 1 % of the budget is spent on the environment, tells us that any serious societal reform would have to rearrange the economical priorities in this country. Ron Paul had this right: cut down on social welfare that keeps idiots and bloodsuckers alive. Reform the economy by disallowing the organized oligarchs to issue our money based on nothing, and make the money supply a state-run institution, not a leak hole for corruption. Stop the Iraq war and cease being part of the globalization process (to avoid future wars we're destined to lose anyway). Localize this huge bureaucratic machine and start caring for the environment. All of our social and political problems can be solved by recognizing that our enemy is not in Iraq, Iran or Russia, but within. We're bleeding because we're not operating correctly. Let's get back on track by fixing our internal problems here and now. It can be done, with or without God's blessing, and it will save America from becoming the next Brazil in collapse.

Wild salmon are going extinct at an alarming rate thanks to the practices of a lucrative and unconcerned fish farming industry. The farmed salmon we find in the supermarkets today are naturally gray but usually modified to look pinker. Wild salmon is pink/red in color. To make their fish more attractive, salmon farmers resort to cosmetics and, as well as these chemicals, farmed salmon are loaded with dioxins, PCBs, anti-biotic and other nasties. Unlike the wild variety, the health advisors say you cannot risk eating farmed salmon any more than once every two months, and not a big portion either.Unlike the wild variety, the health advisors say you cannot risk eating farmed salmon any more than once every two months, and not a big portion either.

Now industry is going in for the krill. Described as "pink gold", krill is a very lucrative commodity and there are fears it will soon be mined to hell. This will hit wild salmon, as well as other wildlife such as penguins that rely upon this food source.

Farmed salmon are often raised in crowded underwater pens. Of all the fish to choose, salmon are particularly unsuited to this habitat. Such treatment is both cruel and idiotic. Think of the natural life cycle of the salmon, in which the young swim down rivers to the ocean and, as adults, return to their spawning grounds undergoing the trial of flinging themselves upstream in rapidly flowing water, ensuring only the strongest survive to keep the species healthy. They are a far cry from the degenerate and flabby domesticated salmon.

The toxic soup in which the farmed fish are raised has, unsurprisingly, allowed a deadly virus to emerge, that is quickly wiping out salmon in Chile. Domesticated salmon are also teeming with sea lice. Mother Nature, in all her wisdom, ensured that baby wild salmon were not infected, since adults die before infestation could take hold and be carried back to the ocean. Now, thanks to the wonder of modern food production, the young wild salmon must run a gauntlet of infected farmed fish. This is an explanation for the crashing salmon stocks in Ireland, Scotland, Norway and the Chinook salmon in California, with Canada following close behind.

But the lice and the virus are not the only threats. Millions of farmed salmon have escaped, and their inferior genetic quality is having a horrific effect on wild populations. Perhaps because of the parallels regarding human bad breeding, this is not a story we hear much about.

In Autumn 2006, the estimation was that up to 90% of salmon returning to some rivers in Canada, Scotland, Ireland, the Faero Islands and Norway are in fact of farmed origin. These are not the same strains of salmon as the wild ones, and 70% of the hybrid offspring die in the first few weeks due to genetic incompatibilities. The first hybrid generation seem just fine, and anglers are thrilled with the bigger fish. ("Isn't out breeding wonderful?") but then the population collapse occurs in the next generation. Farmed salmon have a success rate in the wild of 2% that of a pure wild salmon.

Incredibly, some brands of farmed salmon are labeled "organic". Comparing the farmed "organic" with the wild variety, you notice not only the gray shade, but the mesh of creamy fatty veins and the floppy muscle tone similar to a twenty stone couch potato. When fried, it falls apart quicker than a pair of paper underpants, and has been described as tasting watery and bland, compared with the sweet juiciness of the wild version. This makes a mockery of organic standards. Farmed salmon is a completely unsustainable and destructive industry and we should boycott its produce. Also needed is an all out ban on salmon fishing until stocks recover. But don't hold your breath.

Soon it's one year since the Korean-American student Cho Seung Hui went on a rampage at Virginia Tech University that led that 33 deaths, including Cho's suicide shortly after the massacre. Big newspapers construct glamorous, mournful, psychological analyses of why Cho committed the act, and to no one's surprise, we're supposed to believe that 33 people lost their lives "at random" because of a depressed and deranged student. "It just happened." Bullshit.

Cho was before the killings diagnosed as suffering from selective mutism, which means that the person alienates him- or herself because of social anxiety. Coupled with depression, this explains why Cho wasn't very social in the classroom. From here, TV priests and pop psychologists alike draw the conclusion that Cho began to grow feelings of resentment toward people around him, which eventually led to the school shooting. Note the word "eventually." This is where the media constructs a slippery slope-argument that fails to explain what actually happened.

Why was Cho feeling socially anxious and depressed? Just like any other high school student, he was confined within an environment that's defined by money, escapism and popularity. Cho, like his Finnish counterpart Pekka-Eric Auvinen, was probably unusually aware and intelligent. He quickly learned the social mechanisms behind the behaviour of his Western classmates and saw only emptiness and fear. In his suicide notes and the videos he sent to NBC, he crusades against "rich kids," "debauchery," and "deceitful charlatans." It's a reaction, not against his fellow students, but against a behavioural pattern in our society.

Cho chose to deviate from the essence of our society. Driven by commerce and desperate, hedonistic urges, the modern West is an obese monster devouring itself while in denial of its own self-destruction. Cho came from an Asian background and probably experienced a stark contrast between a cultural behaviour of self-control and what he saw in American teenagers as "debauchery;" alcohol, sex and materialism. This conflict led to his eventual downfall, which reached a bloody climax just before his death. His retaliation found an expression no one would be able to ignore.

The Virginia Tech massacre is no random phenomenon. By merely counting the number of school shootings the last 2 years, this is obvious. The public media is trying to cover these shootings up by focusing on the perpetrator alone and depicting him as a lonely, depressed and hateful individual. While this picture might be accurate in many cases, it fails to address where this social alienation comes from. It also hides the motives behind the shootings, effectively writing all suicide notes and manifestos off as "ramblings of hate." These school shooters don't hate people - they hate society, and they make people suffer for it.

We construct a false image of these perpetrators because we want to avoid panic. All people know, deep down inside, that these incidents are not random events. They all point to a breakdown of the social foundation behind our society and it's falling apart faster than ever. We will see more of these shootings in the future, possibly in other forms, as long as we continue to live in denial. Cho's act of vengeance was a violent revenge against our neurotic lifestyles that force us to compete with money and social fashion, until we cannot take it anymore and self-destruct. For Cho, it was a last, desperate cry for help in a society where everyone's too busy to pay attention to its downfall at micro level.

Originally trained as a psychologist in the scientist-practitioner model, John Feeney, Ph.D., is today an environmental writer. His current primary areas of focus are population growth and the media's failure to acknowledge the gravity of the global ecological crisis. Today John lives with his family in Boulder Colorado, USA, where he continues to research and to write and speak about ecological topics.

1. Please tell us about how this all started; what sparked your interest and concern for the environment?

First, I want to thank Alex Birch and Corrupt.org for making this interview possible. The questions are great, and I appreciate the chance to share these thoughts with the readers here.

Now to answer the question, I was mildly concerned even in grade school. I remember the thought occurring to me then that overpopulation was probably the biggest problem the world faced. I was also something of an outdoorsman as a teen, so some concern for the environment was natural.

But I drifted away from that and the population issue was squelched in the media and I pretty much forgot about all of it until about five years ago. That's when I moved with my family to tiny Mount Vernon, Iowa in search of a sort of utopian small-town-America life. In some ways it lived up to our hopes. It's a beautiful little Victorian town. But there was a new development going up that would (and will) just destroy the town's character.

I got involved with a group trying to fight the development but wondered why I was the only one advocating a true "no-growth" policy. Everyone else was pushing for "smart growth." As I researched the topic I came to see how pervasive was the rhetoric of the growth industry, hammering away with the message that growth was "inevitable and good" (hence, the defeatist notion that "if we have to grow we might as well make it 'smart growth.'"). I started reading the few alternative voices out there, such as Eben Fodor and Gabor Zovanyi who exposed the truth of such rhetoric and began to point me toward broader environmental issues. I also started a blog to try to debunk developer propaganda.

As I continued, I began to dig into issues I'd merely glanced at in the news: population, climate change, the whole array of environmental declines, peak oil, etc. I suppose everyone sees these mentioned in the news, but for me it took purposefully tracking down and connecting these things to see that we faced a profound global crisis. The convergence, at this moment of history, of several huge ecological problems, all nearing potential global crisis points, made me quite concerned about the future my kids would be heading into.

I was especially drawn to the population issue because it seemed clear it was a driving force behind the growth and sprawl which had first prompted my activism. And it is!

We moved to Boulder, Colorado where I spent about half a year thinking about how to deal with these issues. I decided to go with another blog, this time reaching out not just to my immediate community but to the world. I've used it as a kind of home base on the Web, and hope now to be able to reach out more to some large publications in an effort to reach more people.

2. Many people today witness how once green, untouched land is being transformed into concrete suburbs and shopping malls at a rapid speed. The effect and impact are overwhelming; how do you think this development is affecting the human mind? Does the lack of free, wild, untouched nature have a negative psychological impact on how we feel, think and behave as individuals throughout our everyday life?

A fascinating question. First let me just underscore what you point out by mentioning that I grew up in the Phoenix, Arizona area. It's been one of the fastest growing cities in the US for many decades. A few years ago I came across the population statistics for Scottsdale, a suburb of Phoenix. I can't find the link now, but if I recall correctly the population numbers were... 1950: 2000, 1960: 10,000, 1970: 68,000, and on up to something like 225,000 today.

One advantage of being a half century old, is that I've been around long enough to have seen first hand what urban growth and population growth have done. I remember some dirt streets in Scottsdale in the '60s. No one new to the area today would believe that. There was vast, beautiful desert to the North which today is housing developments and car dealerships. And while I can't prove it, I would contend it was a far more liveable place 40 years ago. Today, it could pass for just another suburb in West L.A. There's an amazing video showing the history of sprawl in the Phoenix area, how it's completely transformed such a huge amount of land.

But yes, I think the shrinking amount of untouched land has to have a negative impact on our ways of thinking and behaving. Oddly enough, though, despite my background in psychology this is something I've only recently begun to look into. So I'll just share a quick thought or two.

We've replaced wilderness with concrete and maybe a smattering of trees and grass. We spend most of our time in homes not at all of the earth. This has to affect our ways of perceiving ourselves, our surroundings, and the connectedness of the two.

Some have noted that, compared to us, hunter-gatherers had/have a tremendously heightened awareness of their surroundings. I suspect they'd see us as dulled in our ways of perceiving much of the world.

One has to wonder, as well, how a disconnection from the natural world may impact a person's emotional life or patterns of psychopathology in our culture as a whole. Such disconnection coincides with disconnection from other people as our social organization today is completely different from the smaller, more cohesive groups which were characteristic of hunter-gatherer cultures.

Now I won't argue there was ever a utopian culture. I'm not even sure there was ever a truly ecologically sustainable culture. (Certainly many came much closer than ours today). But this isolation from nature and loss of social connection which was once integral to living has to have had some serious, pervasive impacts. There is a growing field of "ecopsychology" which I have not looked at closely, but which examines those among other issues.

3. Some people have spent their whole life in vast cities and never been in real contact with wild forests. How do you think the ever-increasing urbanization is affecting the interest and understanding for nature in general? Is it true that what we don't see nor hear, we don't think of?

I think so. We are progressively out of touch with the natural world. In the US there are fewer visitors to national parks than there were a few decades ago – which is remarkable considering that the US population is much bigger now. This is of course good for the parks (perhaps outweighed though by the spread of chemical toxins to the parks) but hints, I think, at a troubling loss of interest in the wilderness, in nature. I have to think it makes it more difficult under such conditions to generate concern among people about the state of the environment.

That is, in fact, almost certainly a major reason behind our having let things slide as far as we have. Just to summarize, we see a long list of environmental problems including a mass extinction of species, climate change, extreme overfishing of both the oceans and fresh water environments, deforestation, huge "dead zones" in the oceans, extensive loses of coral reefs, the global spread of chemical toxins (e.g., fire retardant in the bloodstreams of polar bears, who are themselves threatened), the peaking of world oil production, and projections of serious water shortages to come. The real worry is that all of these are converging at once. The big ones, like mass extinction, climate change, and oil depletion are all nearing crisis points, and all have the potential for major societal impacts.

It's difficult to drum up concern, though, when most of us feel separate from nature and have the sense things are just going along as usual in our urban lives. But we're still living within and dependent for out lives on the biosphere even if we've made our immediate surroundings (e.g., a city) quite artificial. Somehow we need to get people to appreciate that they're still dependent on the web of life and are just one of millions of species within it. We also need to come to an understanding that humans have no special privileges among species. Then maybe we'd treat other species more respectfully – which simultaneously means saving ourselves.

4. After global warming became a worldwide phenomenon via public media, there has been a growing interest in turning environmentalism into a "green lifestyle." Do you believe this has had an overall positive effect on environmentalism action in general, or is modern green awareness fading out into just another social trend?

Mainly the latter. It may have had a few positive effects, but on the whole I think it's been a tremendous distraction and to a large extent a waste of time. Look at the more popular environmental sites on the Web or even at most of the major environmental organizations these days. The focus is mostly on how to "go green" in your lifestyle, what kind of products to buy, how to reduce your driving, and sometimes on considerations of things like carbon trading schemes. People get the message that this is what environmentalism is about.

While some of those things do have value, their emphasis is an evasion of fundamental ecological truths. There are far too many people consuming too much. The overconsumption part does get some play (which is why I don't focus on it much), but the "too many people" part is avoided at all costs by most environmentalists and groups. This has the potential to go down as the most tragic instance of intellectual dishonesty in human history.

We also have a corporate driven economy based on a notion of endless growth. This ties into the