When we seed millions of acres of land with these plants, what happens to foraging birds, to insects, to microbes, to the other animals, when they come in contact and digest plants that are producing materials ranging from plastics to vaccines to pharmaceutical products?
Interpretation
The quote highlights the potential ecological impacts of using genetically modified plants for industrial purposes.
Jeremy Rifkin's quote raises important questions about the consequences of introducing genetically modified plants that produce a range of materials, from plastics to vaccines, into natural ecosystems. It suggests that we must consider the effects on foraging birds, insects, and other wildlife that interact with these plants, as well as the broader implications for biodiversity and ecological balance.
In practice
This quote can be shared in a presentation about the impact of GMOs on the environment.
It seems disingenuous for the intellectual elite of the first world to dwell on the subject of too many babies being born in the second- and third-world nations while virtually ignoring the over-population of cattle and the realities of a food chain that robs the poor of sustenance to feed the rich a steady diet of grain-fed meat.
t century, hundreds of millions - and eventually billions - of human beings will transform their buildings into power plants to harvest renewable energies on site, store those energies in the form of hydrogen and share electricity, peer-to-peer, across local, regional, national and continental inter-grids that act much like the Internet.
The very notion that millions of workers displaced by the re-engineering and automation of the agricultural, manufacturing, and service sectors can be retrained to be scientists, engineers, technicians, executives, consultants, teachers, lawyers and the like, and then somehow find the appropriate number of job openings in the very narrow high-tech sector, seems at best a pipe dream, and at worst a delusion.
Basic income is not a utopia, it's a practical business plan for the next step of the human journey.
Generations of human beings were transformed into machines in the relentless pursuit of material wealth: We lived to work.
What makes the IoT a disruptive technology in the way we organize economic life is that it helps humanity reintegrate itself into the complex choreography of the biosphere, and by doing so, dramatically increases productivity without compromising the ecological relationships that govern the planet.
Why do more than 40 percent of Americans think that the Universe began after the domestication of the dog?
I learnt to distrust all physical concepts as the basis for a theory. Instead one should put one's trust in a mathematical scheme, even if the scheme does not appear at first sight to be connected with physics. One should concentrate on getting interesting mathematics.
In some sense, gravity does not exist; what moves the planets and the stars is the distortion of space and time.
Some 5 billion years from now, there will be a last perfect day on Earth... then the sun will begin to die, life will be extinguished, the oceans will boil and evaporate away.
Astronomy would not provide me with bread if men did not entertain hopes of reading the future in the heavens.
There's no tradition of scientists knocking down the Sunday school door, telling the preacher, That might not necessarily be true. That's never happened. There're no scientists picketing outside of churches.
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