497. The Growing List of Unethical, Yet Very Real Human-Social-Environmental Experiments

"Human flesh: the most untapped resource on Planet Earth, in more ways than one." (Dr. Sam Sweet, paraphrased)

Transforming Human-Environmental Issues into a series of unethical (yet sometimes very valide) scientific experiments... he he he... someone's gotta be a mad scientist, eh?! I'm sure there's more than enough of those... disguised as politicians....

TEMPERATURE-CLIMATE
>> The Global Climate Change Experiment: How will the world change if we change the climate? Can humans survive a Snowball Earth or a Cretaceous Hot House?

>> The Hurricane Katrina Experiment: What happens when you have over thirty years of accumulated city corruption and infrastructural fragility + hundreds-thousands (?) of years of sedimentary erosion, landscape sinking + an inevitability of a hurricane predicted to ultimately occur 10-20 years in advance?

OXYGEN-GASES
>> The Gas Chamber Experiments: What will happen when you deprive humans of oxygen and expose them to gases that are not processable to the body? (World War II concentration camps, of course)

WATER-FLUIDS
>> The California Water Distribution Crisis Experiment: What will happen when southern California sucks most water from northern California and the Colorado River without paying even a dime, and there is ultimately not enough supply to meet the demand? The explosion is waiting to erupt.

>> The Arizona Cactus Garden Experiment in Southern California: What if all of southern California re-landscaped itself into desert cactus gardens as opposed to unnecessary water-sucking lawns filled with non-native, non-Mediterranean-climate plants? Then we would have money to restore the stability of the University of California system? And tuition wouldn't have to be thousands of dollars!!!

FOOD-DRUG
>> The Megacorporate Food Preservative Mummification (Taphonomic) Experiment: How can we best preserve human bodies through stuffing mass-produced food-like substances with preservatives?

>> The American Obesity Experiment: What happens when you place each human in a technological womb (television, office-space-cubicle, computer) and then feed them food like substances stuffed with sugar, white flour, and fat?

>> The International Fishing Experiment: How much do we need to fish in order to run out of the major staple fish food sources (occurring at the international scale, e.g.s whaling, fishing in Japan)

>> The Anorexia Experiment: What happens when you don't eat? (Been there, done that. Don't recommend trying this at home).

>> The Psychiatric Pill Popping Experiment: What happens when you solve all your problems with some pills (legalized drugs)? Turning out to be another method collective pacification, opiatism of the masses. And so the world stays... as it....

>> The Smoking Experiment: How does smoking impact human health? (I think we're a bit over this experiment, but it was still going strong in the 1950s-1960s)

>>Medical Commercialization Experiment: What happens when you allow television ads to encourage people to tell doctors what pills they should take? (drives up cost of pills and medicine) What happens when you allow television advertisements to convince their viewers/audience members that they are "sick"?

DISEASE
>> The Antibiotic Experiment: How much does society need to be antibioticked until the point of which we facilitate the construction, evolution of a deadly, non-resistant strain of bacteria? (ticking time bomb experiment, any day now...)

BIOLOGICAL
>> The Reproduction Experiment: What happens to Planet Earth when humans have found a way to reproduce like rabbits, well-fed bacteria, yet... most of the rabbits actually SURVIVE and pass on genes to the next generation?

>> The Human Biological Invasion of North America Experiment: What happens when you convolute a few generations of "European misfits" with the illusory notion of "Manifest Destiny" through the pursuits of colonization of the "Wild West"? (The space fills, dxmmit!) What happens when you introduce native Americans to un-human populated landscape (12,000 years ago) riddled with megafauna? (Pleistoceine Overkill Hypothesis, Paul Martin)

TECHNOLOGICAL
>> The Cell Phone Experiment: Will humans in America be alive after thirty years of chronic cell phone use? Will we all have brain tumors?

>> The iRobot Experiment: When will all technologies merge into every human's iRobot? Will humans 10 years from now have any ability to retain information long-term since this society, with the prevalence of internet-etcetera, has become merely Information Retrievers? When will humans have completely lost the ability to have long-term memory storage? When will humans start to implant iRobot chips into fetal human minds, giving birth to the fully direct, integrated biotechnological evolution? (Biotechnological evolution is already happening in terms of the co-evolution of ecosystems and technology--cows-chickens-agriculture--and the co-evolution of the human body-the immune system-and medicine, the "arms race" so to speak) (chips will dictate the human's conscience rather than their own? To what degree of control the human has of his or her own individuality and individual decision-making anymore? To what degree of brain control?) (Technology reduces people's capacity to think--1984, Animal Farm, government or large organizations tells everybody how to think, George Orwell, corporate-private-capital-fancy-machines-economic-private-competition-economic-competition-more-dichotomy-between-intelligence-stupidity) (What if the first ten years, children are allowed to develop consciousness, but at age 12 or so, they are implanted the chip because consciousness is largely developed and the rest is about accessing-cramming-informational bs in your brain....)

SOCIAL-PSYCHOLOGICAL
>> The Human Torture-Shock Experiments: What will happen to the human mind when you you torture him or her for long enough (depravation of resources, stimulation, etcetera)? (see The Shock Doctrine)

>> The War Experiment: What are the psychological impacts of war? (World War II, Vietnam veterans, now the whole Iraq-Afganistan scene)

>> The Capitalism Experiment: What happens when a nation/political state becomes defined strictly based on currency/economics, in which all human behavior is assigned and valued according to the dollar bill? (Mothers and environmental problems aren't then well incorporated) Evaluate everbody on the basis of financial wealth rather than any other forms of values?

>> The Socialism Experiment: What if everyone were valued with true equality, even though everyone is unique and has different performance and contribution fo society?

ENERGY
>> The Global Fossil Fuel Experiment: What is the bottom of the well? How long will it take to run out?

LANDSCAPES-ENVIRONMENT
>> (Human Built-Environment) The 9-11 Experiment: How is human health impacted post 9-11 incident? In the immediate, and long term?

>> The War Experiment: How is human and landscape health impacted by war? (Europe, uranium, lead poisoning?)

>> The Ocean Oil Spill Experiment: How badly does an oil spill impact the environment (Dr. Jeremy Jackson, Panama, mitigation money research... uh-huh)

>> The Smokey-the-Bear Fuel Accumulation Experiment: How much chaparral and pine forest fuel do we need to build up past the 50-year cycle in order to construct a non-containable wildfire during Santa Ana wind weather?

>> The Pastoral Japanese Garden / Designer Ecosystem Experiment: What kind of an utopia-esque terrestrial or marine Japanese Garden are you trying to create? With what values? What baseline? Ecological engineering-sculpting / niche constructionism.

>> The "Hug Nature to Death" Wildland-Disneyland "Living Museum" Experiment: How much will you hug and save nature to a point in which you kill it? (Excessive Preservationism, isn't also like Protestantism in the beginning of America? The concept of saving every single human life, excessive pro-Life so to speak in which we keep vegetables plugged into machines with our tax-payer dollars?) e.g. situation with southern California wildland fire; most people perceive nature and outdoors as an "untamed Disneyland" ecotourist adventure without knowing the details and nuances of the landscape, a utopia-esque pastoral view, the game of adaptation and manipulation, over-manicur-ing landscapes... tree-huggers, shrub-huggers (my dad's neck of the woods), fish-huggers (some MLPA folks), cactus huggers....

This list sparked from a simple response from my fisherman friend residing in LA Harbor. I have been wanting to make this list for sooo long, and NOW is the time! I called my father, and he ended up helping me extend the list.... Another half-hour phone conversation indeed! I can definitely perceive this topic to be a syndicated newspaper column.

KEY WORDS: ecologically unethical, unethical human experiments, human flesh, mad scientist, cactus garden experiment, cell phone, iRobot, information retrieval, designer ecosystem, japanese garden, Disney satire, hug nature to death, manicuring, protestant