Discussion
The photo for this linked article is a malnourished gray whale. Which reminds me that Americans have been likened to having the calorific demand of a large whale. Usually, blue whales are cited.
But my understanding is that it’s one of those questionable analogies. Nonetheless, it’s obviously true that the average American makes an outsize demand on what’s available. Many Americans don’t choose to do so, it’s just an effed up birthright of having been born into greed
…A few days ago I looked up how many blue whales there were reckoned to be before industrialism.
340,000 is suggested.
Which has an irresistible echo in that there are roughly 340,000,000 Americans.
The blue whale analogy is probably very flawed but it’s striking to reflect that the undirected ‘search’ mechanics of evolution discovered that 340,000 blue whales didn’t ecologically upend things for millions of years, and then…
…along come some Pennsylvanians https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/111692835222631626 and then some Texans https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/111946108968098290 and 167 years later America has gone fk that, we’re throwing the whole thing out of whack by a factor of 1,000, try and stop us.
But hey, let’s not stop there. You should all be like us too.
And billions of us have gone, “Sure Chuck, why not”.
Let’s fk everything up in less than 200 years
…I really don’t have the grounding to say anything definitive about the blue whale analogy.
From what little I understand – please inform/correct me – there are some base metabolic dynamics to the cell biology that all mammals share, so although a blue whale has a much higher calorific demand than a human (because of its size) its *power* demand per unit of weight is much the same
…So the *Americans are like blue whales* analogy is flawed in the sense that it pronounces on the basis of energy throughput but the really fucked up thing about Americans (with millions trying to emulate them) is their utterly outsize and unquestionably unsustainable *power demand*.
And blue whales do not do that, because they are not made self-terminating by their outsize brains and dumb ideologies
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