Talk:Managing Abundance, Not Chasing Scarcity

Let me see how much of this I understand.

1. Abundance-based economy is based on equitable sharing. The system elements and boundary conditions are not clear to me. What is the quantity of resource (forest) to be shared and what are the populations (various communities local to the resource and remote populations with various lifestyles) among which it is to be shared? Suppose one Yaka-person-lifestyle requires several acres. My lifestyle requires only a small amount of paper products--maybe .05 acre per year, or 1 acre for sustainable harvest. Does equitable sharing imply we should get equal allocations? It seems somewhat against the general drift of the article that each Yaka requires/gets far more resource than I do. But maybe I don't belong in the picture at all. I am unclear about this. Should everyone on earth be entitled to a Yaka-sized plot of forest? If so, then what is the population carrying capacity of all existing forest? Do we get rid of any excess people in order to share equitably? If equitable does not mean equal, what are the rules of equitable apportionment? The rules developed by Yaka for their own use probably wont work for people with other lifestyles, population densities, etc. So what exactly have we learned from the Yaka that is translatable to non-Yakas?

2. The Yaka lump loggers and conservationists together because both exclude them. If Yaka-style land use is not destructive, then the answer is they should not be excluded and conservationists are just idiots for doing so. I am provisionally willing to believe that for now.

3. Conservationists are either idiots or collaborators for not adequately restricting logging. Implication: the conservation preserves are merely tokens, and even that is used to offset (read "green light") exploitation elsewhere. Conclusion from premises given: green-washing con game. I'm provisionally willing to believe this, but the Yaka anthropology (much of the article) has little or nothing to do with it.

4. The article actually faults conservationists for "not standing up to" logging interests, not for failing to control them. The relation between conservationists "standing up" and logging interests actually standing down is unclear.

5. Are the token preserves all the conservationists can get, try as they might?

6. Are the token preserves really worth anything at all if in the end they are used as offsets for logging elsewhere and the Yaka are excluded? Given those conditions, a reasonable person might say the preserves are worth nothing at all. If so, the conservationists are idiots or industry collaborators. If that is the case, is there any available remedy at all?

I'm not clear about the power and the degrees of freedom that each player has. So the article leaves me feeling pretty uninformed except for the porteait of the Yaka and the basic facts of their predicament. While I am empathetic to the Yaka and similar peoples, how can I help them, and given the limitations of my own resources, why them (whose situation may well be hopeless) as opposed to some other tribe or cause?

Have I missed anything? --Poor Richard 00:58, 11 September 2011 (UTC)