Thesis #4: Human population is a function of food supply.
by Jason GodeskyThomas Malthus was one of the most influential thinkers of all time. His father knew Hume and Rousseau, and his own paper–An Essay on the Principle of Population–forever changed the way we think about populations and food supplies. It has informed food security policies worldwide, and provided the basic underpinnings of our modern concern with overpopulation. In The Origin of Species, Darwin called his theory of natural selection an application of the doctrines of Malthus in an area without the complicating factor of human intelligence. Yes, Malthus’ work has been a major underpinning and influence on everything since. It’s a shame he was so incredibly wrong.
Malthus’ case is simple: population grows “geometrically” (exponentially), but food supply only grows arithmetically. So Malthus warned of a coming crisis where we would not be able to feed our burgeoning population–the “Malthusian catastrophe.” Of course, the failure of such a catastrophe to come to pass took a lot of wind out of Malthus’ sails. Malthusianism was declared dead after the 1960s and 1970s saw the greatest increases in human population ever seen, accompanied with higher calories per capita, thanks to the abundance of the Green Revolution. Cornucopians rejoiced as they saw the evidence come in that increasing population meant increasing prosperity for all: the realization of Jeremy Bentham’s credo, “the greatest good for the greatest number.”
If it seems too good to be true, that’s because it is. Even Bentham knew that the two factors needed to be balanced against one another, and that increasing one necessarily meant decreasing the other. As Garrett Hardin refuted it in his classic article, “The Tragedy of the Commons“:
A finite world can support only a finite population; therefore, population growth must eventually equal zero. (The case of perpetual wide fluctuations above and below zero is a trivial variant that need not be discussed.) When this condition is met, what will be the situation of mankind? Specifically, can Bentham’s goal of “the greatest good for the greatest number” be realized?
No — for two reasons, each sufficient by itself. The first is a theoretical one. It is not mathematically possible to maximize for two (or more) variables at the same time. This was clearly stated by von Neumann and Morgenstern, but the principle is implicit in the theory of partial differential equations, dating back at least to D’Alembert (1717-1783).
The second reason springs directly from biological facts. To live, any organism must have a source of energy (for example, food). This energy is utilized for two purposes: mere maintenance and work. For man maintenance of life requires about 1600 kilocalories a day (”maintenance calories”). Anything that he does over and above merely staying alive will be defined as work, and is supported by “work calories” which he takes in. Work calories are used not only for what we call work in common speech; they are also required for all forms of enjoyment, from swimming and automobile racing to playing music and writing poetry. If our goal is to maximize population it is obvious what we must do: We must make the work calories per person approach as close to zero as possible. No gourmet meals, no vacations, no sports, no music, no literature, no art…I think that everyone will grant, without argument or proof, that maximizing population does not maximize goods. Bentham’s goal is impossible.
So why were the Cornucopians so right, and Malthus so wrong? Because Malthus got the entire problem almost completely backwards–and it has remained backwards ever since.
Science has never been as unbiased as it would like to be–how could it? Skewing results is easily noticed, and rightfully condemned–as happened with such forgeries as Piltdown Man. Much more insidious is a lack of curiousity. We do not question recieved wisdom, and what we do not question we cannot understand. From Genesis 1:28 to the present day, we’ve viewed population growth as an inherent property of human nature. It has gone unquestioned. Certainly an Anglican country parson like Malthus would not question it. Malthus’ problem was how to feed so many people–a problem that could only be solved by misery, vice (i.e., contraception) or moral restraint (i.e., abstinence). The country parson, naturally, favored the same kind of abstinence programs in favor by the United States’ current conservative regime.
This is entirely backwards. What are all these people made of, fairy dust and happy thoughts? No, they are made of proteins–of food! Without a sufficient food supply, such a population cannot be achieved. We understand this as a basic biological fact for every other species on this planet, that population is a function of food supply. Yet we continue to believe that the magic of free will exempts us from such basic biological laws.
The usual counter-argument goes something like this: Humans are different from other animals. We can think. We can rationally observe the situation, and decide for ourselves how many children to have. While this is certainly true of individuals, groups are governed by much more deterministic criteria. For every individual who decides to be responsible and only have 2.1 children, another will take advantage of the space that individual has opened by having seven. The variation in values, thought patterns, beliefs and feelings of social responsibility ensure that the fertility rates of a group will rise to the carrying capacity possible, regardless of the intelligent, responsible choices of others in the community. Charles Galton Darwin, the grandson of that Charles Darwin, said, “It may well be that it would take hundreds of generations for the progenitive instinct to develop in this way, but if it should do so, nature would have taken her revenge, and the variety Homo contracipiens would become extinct and would be replaced by the variety Homo progenitivus.”
Education is often proposed as a solution, but Garrett Hardin already offered the best counter-argument to that strategy, again in “The Tragedy of the Commons”:
The long-term disadvantage of an appeal to conscience should be enough to condemn it; but it has serious short-term disadvantages as well. If we ask a man who is exploiting a commons to desist “in the name of conscience,” what are we saying to him? What does he hear? — not only at the moment but also in the wee small hours of the night when, half asleep, he remembers not merely the words we used but also the nonverbal communication cues we gave him unawares? Sooner or later, consciously or subconsciously, he senses that he has received two communications, and that they are contradictory: 1. (intended communication) “If you don’t do as we ask, we will openly condemn you for not acting like a responsible citizen”; 2. (the unintended communication) “If you do behave as we ask, we will secretly condemn you for a simpleton who can be shamed into standing aside while the rest of us exploit the commons.”
Every man then is caught in what Bateson has called a “double bind.” Bateson and his co-workers have made a plausible case for viewing the double bind as an important causative factor in the genesis of schizophrenia. The double bind may not always be so damaging, but it always endangers the mental health of anyone to whom it is applied. “A bad conscience,” said Nietzsche, “is a kind of illness.”
We can see this problem of overpopulation and education as a case of the Prisoner’s Dilemna. The best case scenario is cooperation; if neither prisoner confesses, both go off free. If we are all responsible, then we can save ourselves from self-destruction. But this is not what usually happens. The fear of abandonment prompts players to pre-emptively abandon the other. The question becomes a simple one of game theory, and the challenge to stop overpopulation by education, a contradiction of human nature.
All of this, however, is theoretical. This hypothesis is easy to test: calculate carrying capacity, and compare it to actual human population numbers. This is precisely what Russell Hopfenberg of Duke University did in his 2003 study, “Human Carrying Capacity is Determined by Food Availability.” [PDF] As you might imagine from such a title, he found that the numbers lined up almost perfectly.
There is a significant complication in this, however, which critics of this stance are eager to point out. The First World is facing a population growth decline–the world’s richest nations are growing by the smallest percentages. Italy has been very concerned with its low growth rate, only 0.11% according to a 2003 estimate. Italy has the 201st highest population growth, and the 100th highest agricultural growth. Meanwhile, Singapore has the sixth highest population growth rate, and the 147th highest agricultural growth rate–out of 147.
If population is a function of food supply, why is the most significant growth taking place in those areas producing the least food?
The answer, I think, lies in globalization. How much of what you ate today came from your own bioregion? Unless you do a significant amount of your grocery shopping at Farmers’ Markets or eat only USDA-certified organic food, probably not a lot. In 1980, the average piece of American fresh produce was estimated to have traveled 1,500 miles before it was consumed. Interestingly, those same countries which produce so much food but don’t see it translate into their population, are also the heaviest exporters, and the impoverished countries with significantly rising growth rates are often the recipients. When the First World rushes in with foreign aid, food, and humanitarian aid to a desert area in the midst of a famine, we serve to prop up an unsustainable population. That drives a population boom in an area that already cannot support its existing population. The result is a huge population dependent on outside intervention that itself cannot be indefinitely sustained. Eventually, that population will crash once outside help is no longer possible–and the years of aid will only make that crash even more severe. In the same way that the United States’ policy of putting out all forest fires in the 1980s led to an even worse situation in its forests, our benevolence and good intentions have paved the way to a Malthusian hell.
Another part of the answer lies in our ecological footprint. In the passage above, Garrett Hardin made the distinction between the calories it takes to maintain a human body, and the “work calories” humans use to do anything else. While it is certainly true that population is a function of food supply, standard of living–how many work calories we recieve, in addition to mere maintenance–is an important factor in that equation. Not only how much food is available, but how much food each individual demands. The dwindling First World has the largest ecological footprint; the growing Third World has the smallest. Italy comes in at #25 with 5.51 hectares per person (1996); Somalia is #114 with 0.97.
This is ultimately why education appears to have an effect on population: because higher education raises the standard of living, increasing the ecological footprint so that fewer people can live off the same amount of food, reducing the population. However, the problem we face is not one of Malthusian catastrophe. If we could not feed our population, we would not have such a population in the first place. The problem is the ecological consequences of such resource exploitation. Expanding ecological footprints do nothing to lessen this. Also, this trend can only continue so far, because the First World needs the Third. Our prosperity comes from the triumph of the corporate model, but the corporation itself runs on externalized costs. Our economy could never function if we had to pay the full and total cost for the luxuries we enjoy. Consider simply our oil costs–never mind the way it is built in to, say, our food. The Arab population oppressed under Saudi rule pays the balance for our cheap oil. Low prices at WalMart are made possible by cheap Third World labor. It is a grim economic reality that, given ten apples and ten people, for one person to have nine apples, the other nine must split one between them. In the conclusion to their 1996 study on ecological footprint, Wackernagel and Rees stated, “If everybody lived like today’s North Americans, it would take at least two additional planet Earths to produce the resources, absorb the wastes, and otherwise maintain life-support.” Since we have but one earth, this conclusion can also be spun around in the form that each of us essentially has three slaves whose existence is one of constant misery for our benefit.
Intelligence does not exempt us from basic biological laws–just as it has not exempted dolphins, crows or chimpanzees. Groups reproduce to the best of their ability, and the carrying capacity–their food supply–creates the ceiling of that ability. Populations will rise to their carrying capacity, and no further–even human populations. So Malthus has the problem entirely backwards. The problem is not how to feed so many people; of course we have the means to feed them, because if we didn’t, the population would not exist. The problem is the implications of so many people.
Every year, there is a certain amount of energy generated by the sun. This energy radiates in all directions, so there is only a small given percentage of it that falls on the earth. The total amount of solar energy available to our planet per time unit has a hard limit–what is called the photosynthetic capacity of the planet. This energy can be used in any number of ways. Plants turn solar energy into sugar; animals turn plant sugar into kinetic energy. Animals can eat other animals, and obtain the energy stored in their bodies, which they obtained from plants, which they obtained from the sun. But none of these conversions are perfect, and some energy is lost in each one; this is why an animal that eats other predators is almost unheard of. Also, each individual likely used some of the energy, before it was taken by the next link in the chain. As animals, we are always at least one step removed–and as omnivores, we’re just as often two steps removed. Also, we’re only one of millions, if not billions of species, all sharing the same, set amount of energy from the sun.
With the agricultural revolution, we found a way to convert biomass into human flesh, by reducing biodiversity in favor of our own foods. We increased the percentage of the planet’s photosynthetic capacity that we recieved. Solar energy that fell on an acre of forest would be divided amongst all the creatures, plant, animal and otherwise, that lived there. Solar energy that fell on an acre of wheat would go exclusively to humans. Our carrying capacity increased; not just that we had more food, but in more abstract terms, we were helping ourselves to more energy. Our population increased, so we cultivated more land. We had more people, so obviously we needed more food. We cultivated more land, and occasionally improved our technology to increase our yields per acre, but more food simply led to more people. Who required more food … the Food Race. But lurking high above our heads was an absolute limit: photosynthetic capacity.
In the 1960s, we saw the latest, greatest “win” in the Food Race: the Green Revolution applied the potential of petroleum to farming, allowing for vastly increased yields. We found a bit of a “cheat” to the natural order in fossil fuels. Now, we can burn through decades of solar energy every day to escape the limits of photosynthetic capacity. Essentially, we burn our past and take credit against our future in order to ensure our continued, exponential growth.
The Green Revolution set our carrying capacity to–well, whatever we wanted it to be. The population responded accordingly, with a huge initial jump, slowing as it reaches its asymptote. The scientists say that asymptote lies at 9 billion, and who am I to disagree? It seems like a perfectly reasonable figure. The population growth curve fits exactly what you would expect for a population adjusting to a suddenly raised carrying capacity–a huge jump, peaking relatively early, and extinguishing as it reaches the new “stable.”
Of course, it’s unlikely that this will remain the case for long. The Food Race goes on. 9 billion people will leave millions–billions, even–starving. Those people need to be fed. We need another “win” in the Food Race!
But 9 billion people is not sustainable. 6.4 billion is not sustainable. There is no sustainble solution for so many people. Only the Green Revolution can feed that many, and the Green Revolution is inherently unsustainable, because it relies on the consumption of a non-renewable resource.
The human race currently consumes some 40% of the earth’s photosynthetic capacity. This monopoly on the earth’s resources is having a devastating effect. We are seeing the extinction of some 140 species every day, some thousands of times higher than the normal background rate. Today, right now, we are seeing extinction rates unparalleled in the history of the earth. We are undeniably in the midst of the seventh mass extinction event in the history of the earth–the Holocene Extinction. Unlikely previous extinction events, however, this one is driven by a single species.
This is the true danger of overpopulation, not our inability to feed a growing population. As much as we would deny it, we depend on the earth to live. Dwindling biodiversity threatens the very survival of our species. We are literally cutting the ground out from under our feet.
Increasing food production only increases the population; our current attitudes about food security has locked us into what Daniel Quinn called a “Food Race,” by comparison to the Arms Race of the Cold War. Garrett Hardin began his famous article with this dilemna, and I’ll close with his assessment:
In our day (though not in earlier times) technical solutions are always welcome. Because of previous failures in prophecy, it takes courage to assert that a desired technical solution is not possible. Wiesner and York exhibited this courage; publishing in a science journal, they insisted that the solution to the problem was not to be found in the natural sciences. They cautiously qualified their statement with the phrase, “It is our considered professional judgment….” Whether they were right or not is not the concern of the present article. Rather, the concern here is with the important concept of a class of human problems which can be called “no technical solution problems,” and more specifically, with the identification and discussion of one of these.
It is easy to show that the class is not a null class. Recall the game of tick-tack-toe. Consider the problem, “How can I win the game of tick-tack-toe?” It is well known that I cannot, if I assume (in keeping with the conventions of game theory) that my opponent understands the game perfectly. Put another way, there is no “technical solution” to the problem. I can win only by giving a radical meaning to the word “win.” I can hit my opponent over the head; or I can falsify the records. Every way in which I “win” involves, in some sense, an abandonment of the game, as we intuitively understand it. (I can also, of course, openly abandon the game — refuse to play it. This is what most adults do.)
The class of “no technical solution problems” has members. My thesis is that the “population problem,” as conventionally conceived, is a member of this class. How it is conventionally conceived needs some comment. It is fair to say that most people who anguish over the population problem are trying to find a way to avoid the evils of overpopulation without relinquishing any of the privileges they now enjoy. They think that farming the seas or developing new strains of wheat will solve the problem — technologically. I try to show here that the solution they seek cannot be found. The population problem cannot be solved in a technical way, any more than can the problem of winning the game of tick-tack-toe.
It is incredible to me - and will always remain so - that many people, having seen what the thoughtless use of technology can do to the world insist that the proper way to solve the problem is to simply use more technology.
Technology and a conquering mindest MADE the problem, so if we just apply MORE of the same, an answer will readily present itself. Right?
Right?
Comment by Chuck — 26 July 2005 @ 7:46 AM
Jevons paradox.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 26 July 2005 @ 10:01 AM
Like the cotton gin and slavery.
“Look guys, if we subvert the natural way of things and allow only one type of plant to grow in a given area, look how much less land we have to use!”
Creepy.
Comment by Chuck — 26 July 2005 @ 1:26 PM
Good essay. Have you read Henry George? He discusses and dismisses Malthus and appears to prefigure Julian Simon. I was afraid you were going in the same direction — but you weren’t, so I agree with your argument. Let what will come come. Morituri te salutant!
Comment by sr — 10 August 2005 @ 9:13 PM
I’m afraid I’m unfamiliar with George, but dismissal of Malthus is pretty wide-spread. This is because Malthus is so easy to refute. We don’t have populations out-stripping their food supply. Of course, from my perspective, this is to be expected. The sorry fact of the matter is, that Malthus and his enemies are both operating within the realm of exceptionalism: they agree on the foundational premise that human population is not bound by the same principles as other species. Of course, if I were to set these numbers in front of any biologist and hide the name of the species, there would be no disagreement whatsoever. It would fit nicely and easily into our understanding of animal populations, and all data available would fit quite easily into the model. The only reason that this is an issue at all is because the species in question is us, and we refuse to admit the idea that we might be subject to the same biological laws as everything else on the planet.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 11 August 2005 @ 2:42 PM
Chuck says:
July 26th, 2005 at 1:26 pm Like the cotton gin and slavery.
“Look guys, if we subvert the natural way of things and allow only one type of plant to grow in a given area, look how much less land we have to use!”
Creepy.
Very creepy indeed - Rational planners diverted many of the river flows in Central Asia to provide irrigation for cotton, and within less than a couple of generations almost completely dried up the Aral Sea, causing horrendous environmental problems. Now I believe the cotton has gone, too.
regards
Richard
Comment by Richard Parker — 16 August 2005 @ 12:28 AM
And in my seaside Philippine island town, the lagoon used to be full of fish - the older generation talk about having to have a carabao (buffalo) down to haul out their catches. Now there’s hardly any fish left in the lagoon, and fishermen go out 10-15 miles into the open ocean to catch skipjack tuna.
Until about 20-30 years ago, the local people used only dugout canoes, in the lagoon. It was then that somebody introduced ‘new-fangled’ boats with outriggers and engines that could handle the open ocean in any other circumstances than almost flat calm. This was a big surprise to me - I’d thought that the ‘traditional’ outrigger boats dated back to time immemorial.
Now, one of the most well-stocked imported foods in the local shops (tiny things) are canned sardines.
I wanted to write a page on my website (www.coconutstudio.com) about the ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ but now I think I’ll just save the time and provide a link to Jason’s article.
Comment by Richard Parker — 16 August 2005 @ 12:40 AM
With the progress of the human genome project and the search for everlasting life, it should be inherent that everlasting exstinction shall provide itself as a useful tool towards many tribal species of Homo sapien. Generally speaking, if it is “tic-tac-toe”, then which species has the club? Will the power elite choose to use it with an aptosis mechanism such as HIV? If so, Which tribe to select as a work bearing gradient while the remaining rescend upon themselves?
Typically, the most efficient would be chosen by natural selection; while the tribes who lack the ability to provide a sustainable homoestasis would demise. Thus leaving a healthy collection of primitive human life to provide the energy harvesting workload, while a more advanced tribe distributes it to their advantage.
A form of religion or counterbalancing system of a sort would provide an adequate measure to circumvent the transfer of energy through culture so that the higher order remains at a level of conditioning to take the next evolutionary step. All the while the less primitve tribe of Homo sapien remain behind to contemplate their own inevitable fate as they watch it rescend upon itself. Leaving but a few to start it anew. I read once that at some point, everyone’s DNA can be linked back to arguably (of course) approximately a few dozen humans just a few thousand years ago. Maybe its just another cycle…
Also, give Malthus his respect. He had a good thought, but how was he to know about bio-genetically engineered kentucky-fried-chicken-substrate?
Comment by Huffy — 1 October 2005 @ 1:18 AM
“Eventually, that population will crash once outside help is no longer possible–and the years of aid will only make that crash even more severe. In the same way that the United States’ policy of putting out all forest fires in the 1980s led to an even worse situation in its forests, our benevolence and good intentions have paved the way to a Malthusian hell.?
This is only benevolence if you feel the “developed? world has a right to the resources it is using. This thesis states the problem well. Of course the “developed? world is headed for the same hell as it continues its rate of depleting resources.
A human society that distributed resources equally would necessarily reach equilibrium as other species do, where the death rate due to insufficient food, with periodic variations, equaled the birth rate. This would again be the Malthusian hell.
After the collapse the surviving human population, even if they were hunter-gatherers would eventually be faced with this same problem. This dilemma is true for most species with the exception that for some predators control their death rate. Humans often compensate for the lack of predators with war. I believe it is only humans, and only some of us, that are aware of this dilemma.
For me this brings to mind Marx’s 11th “Theses on Feuerbach?: “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.? It seems that an attempt to overcome the “prisoners dilemma? is warranted. This of course will require a social rather than a technical solution.
We might follow the example of the coyote. Their population is also limited by their food supply. Rather than allow their numbers to be decreased by starvation, they (or their genes) control the birth rate so that the number of births is proportional to the food supply.
“In one study, before control, coyotes had 3-4 pups per litter and only 32% of the females bred. After control started, 90% of the females were breeding and litter sizes doubled. This is called density dependent reproduction.? http://www.geocities.com/DesertCoyote_99/predcon.html
Comment by Bob Harrison — 11 November 2005 @ 3:21 PM
Hey Bob –
I see this assumption frequently — that cycles of plenty and famine are common and normal in ‘wild’ populations (humans included).
In fact, barring cataclysmic events, wild populations flux through birth rate more than through death rate just like the coyotes you mentioned.
There is a huge difference between ’scarcity’ and famine. In cases of scarcity (which hunter gatherers experience) there is generally a reduced birth rate as a natural biological response, plus some cases( I would assume) of greater death rates for the old and infirm. But not through starvation, rather as a subtle result of reduced nutrition, increased work load etc. (Analogous to the increased susceptiblity to common diseases found in AIDS patients) So people don’t starve as a result of scarcity, but the overal population does decline.
Janene
Comment by Janene — 11 November 2005 @ 4:03 PM
The population problem is most certainly not one with ‘no technical solution’
Correct me if I’m wrong but the solution is and always has been exceedingly simple and is totally reliant on our capacity for technology. If we outgrow the food supply or photosynthetic capacity of earth we must move beyond earth. There are far greater energy sources out there than the sun why should we limit ourselves to it. In this resepct we are totally unique and superior to all other creatures with who we share this planet as we alone (at least so far) have the capacity to move beyond a limited energy supply to the theoretically infinite energy supply of the universe which as yet has no proven ‘hard limit’. We only need to focus our technological advances in the right places to ensure that the limited energy we are able to harvest from this earth is best put to use discovering and cultivating larger extra-terestrial sources of energy.
Comment by technologist — 19 January 2006 @ 12:49 AM
The universe is finite in matter and energy, if not in volume. But colonizing space is not a solution of any kind–technical or otherwise. It is a “win” in the Food Race, and thus, nothing more than an escalation. If this generation is sufficient to consume an entire planet, the next will need two; then four, then eight, then sixteen … the “best case scenario” outside of collapse is that we become the alien invaders from Independence Day, and devour all life in the universe before we, ourselves, die. Like all other schemes to postpone collapse, this one, too, escalatates the cost of collapse–instead of just one planet at risk, that scheme jeopardizes untold numbers of worlds.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 19 January 2006 @ 10:10 AM
From Jason Godelsky’s Thesis #4:
The usual counter-argument goes something like this: Humans are different from other animals. We can think. We can rationally observe the situation, and decide for ourselves how many children to have. While this is certainly true of individuals, groups are governed by much more deterministic criteria. For every individual who decides to be responsible and only have 2.1 children, another will take advantage of the space that individual has opened by having seven. The variation in values, thought patterns, beliefs and feelings of social responsibility ensure that the fertility rates of a group will rise to the carrying capacity possible, regardless of the intelligent, responsible choices of others in the community. …
Education is often proposed as a solution, but Garrett Hardin already offered the best counter-argument to that strategy…
This hypothesis is easy to test: calculate carrying capacity, and compare it to actual human population numbers. This is precisely what Russell Hopfenberg of Duke University did in his 2003 study, “Human Carrying Capacity is Determined by Food Availability.” [PDF]
I tried to download hopfenberg2003.pdf but it doesn’t seem to exist. Even if I could find it, I don’t know if I would believe that human population figures or food availability figures are truly, precisely known. History seems very murky to me.
I put great weight on several points. Godelsky knows but dismisses the first point: the fact that highly educated and highly civilized populations have trouble breeding.
The second point is that payoffs from complex social structures are different for different populations within a society — thus even if complexity does not work well for “us,” it often works well for the priests, the landowners, and the cops — and those populations suffice for stability. Cops may not be rational enough to rein in the reproduction of folks they like, but they are rational enough to rein in the lower classes.
(Consider, for example, the totalitarian measures taken in medieval Japan to conserve wood. The rulers valued forests more than poor people — the poor suffered, but the forests were nursed back from the brink.)
Possibly groups are deterministic. However, not all populations are created equal. Not all humans have the same abilities, not all food has the same qualities.
The First World is suffering a severe population crash of natives, especially in the middle class and well-educated elites. They are partially compensating by allowing immigration of less-educated poor folks.
If a country with technical infrastructure requires a highly educated elite to keep it running, immigrants who have seven illiterate kids per family will be less influential than a pair of Ph.D.’s who marry and have a single near-autistic kid whom they educate.
So the country may appear to be one country, but it really becomes an apartheid territory, with the numerically tiny educated class hiding from the numerous illiterate poor.
In such a situation, I submit that the outcomes are chaotically non-linear. One cannot make sweeping predictions because too many things could get crazy. Even simple laws like Jevons’ Paradox could get complicated. (My naive understanding of Jevons’ Paradox applied to food is that food technology becomes efficient, food consumption will increase.) I submit that “efficient” might be hard to analyze.
E.g. suppose the literate educated class allows the poor to eat lots of junk food. The poor are afflicted with malnutrition and disease, even though they can stuff themselves to the point of obesity. Possibly the poor will continue reproducing, but the variation in human health will be of strategic importance. The typical poor person will be too sickly for effective revolt. In one sense, widely available junk food spurs the consumption of junk food, but malnutrition impairs reproduction and health.
In the example above food technology is “efficient” for the junk food shareholders and gluttons, but “inefficient” for health. Of course I decry totalitarian and classist measures which promote human suffering, but in situations like medieval Japan’s wood conservation, these inhumane measures are effective.
So I think I’ve proven that qualitative differences in populations (of humans, animals, artifacts, resource samples) can make Godelsky’s analysis a bit more wrinkled. Quite possibly Godelsky has foreseen these wrinkles or could accommodate them.
To my mind, we are currently seeing the emergence of societies which have plenty of food but cannot breed. Families in these societies become less and less fertile. Combined with pollution and decreased ecosphere viability, this could mean that even a population crash could lead to extinction, not relatively happy horticulturalists or hunter-gatherers.
So to tip my hand, I’m open to much more pessimism than Jason Godelsky. I’m willing to give higher odds than humans will drive themselves into extinction, even though totalitarian conservation measures are likely.
Comment by Rick — 31 March 2006 @ 12:29 AM
Update on Hopfenberg:
I still haven’t found the original paper, but a Reason editorial seems to have the same objection that I was trying to voice above: taking a global view can conceal critical mechanisms and produce incorrect answers:
Source:
http://www.reason.com/rb/rb072804.shtml
So has the Malthusian case finally been proven? No. Hopfenberg’s analysis makes the mistake of considering only global numbers. This hides a great deal of information. If we look on the regional level we see a very different picture than one of a relentlessly rising tide of human babies. Fertility does not correlate with food availability.
The countries with greatest access to food are, in fact, the countries with the lowest fertility rates. As the United Nations reports, 14 developed countries have fertility rates lower than 1.3 children per woman. (Replacement fertility is 2.1 children per woman.) The fertility rates in practically all developed countries are below the replacement rate. Clearly, food availability does not mean more children. More generally, as food security has increased around the world, instead of increasing as Hopfenberg’s theory would suggest, global average fertility rates have dropped from 6 children per woman in 1960 to 2.6 today. And the rates continue to plummet. Sadly, in Africa, which has the highest current fertility rates, food production per capita has been declining for nearly 30 years.
If food availability really determined human reproductive capacity, Illinois farmers should have the highest fertility rate in the world. Instead, they have one of the lowest. Hopfenberg would reply that excess food produced in North America and Europe fuels population growth in the rest of the world. In some sense that is trivially true, but the strictly biological model that he says applies to people does not account for such phenomena. For example, deer in Virginia don’t sacrifice their chances to produce fawns and ship their food to deer in Arkansas, nor do sparrows in New York forego nesting in order to supply food to Floridian sparrows. Individuals, not populations, reproduce.
The notion that capping food supplies will halt population growth is also trivially true, but not by the gentle means which Hopfenberg and Pimentel suggest, e.g., reducing human birth rates. Food shortages no doubt reduce fertility, but they also shrink population much more quickly by simple starvation.
Finally, Hopfenberg and Pimentel’s projection that world population will reach 12 billion by 2050 is off. They simply extrapolate current levels of fertility, yet as we’ve seen, fertility rates are rapidly declining. The 2002 revision of the United Nations’ World Population Prospects’ median variant trend projects a world population of 8.9 billion by 2050. Given the rapidly falling global fertility rates, the low variant trend is more likely—and that projects a world population topping out at 7.5 billion by 2040, then beginning to decline. Perhaps Malthusianism will finally decline along with fertility rates.
Comment by Rick — 1 April 2006 @ 8:23 PM
Hey Rick –
That article explains why Malthus was wrong.
This is the Opposite of Malthus.
A freind of mine over on IshCon has a good analogy. Imagine a box filled with tennis balls. Each ball represents a unit of population.
Now take the same box and fill it with golf balls.
Lo and behold, a whole lot MORE balls fit. Why? Because as the diameter of the ball is reduced, the amount of EMPTY SPACE is also reduced. The diameter of the balls represents standard of living.
Most important of all, in order to get another golf ball into the box, you only have to reduce that standard of living slightly (again, basic mathematics). By contrast, in order to fit another tennis ball, a much more significant reduction is required.
In this analogy, The US and Europe (etc) are bowling balls, while India and much of Africa are marbles. Do the math. It does not matter where the food is produced it only matters where it is eaten, plus the economic cost/benefit ratio of more children. When you’re talking marbles, children are an asset. When you are talking bowling balls… not so much.
Janene
Comment by Janene — 1 April 2006 @ 8:33 PM
A freind of mine over on IshCon has a good analogy. Imagine a box filled with tennis balls. Each ball represents a unit of population.
When you say “unit,” do you mean a group of standard size, such as 1 million persons?
The US and Europe (etc) are bowling balls, while India and much of Africa are marbles. Do the math. It does not matter where the food is produced it only matters where it is eaten, plus the economic cost/benefit ratio of more children.
Well, I’m doing my math and you’re doing your math, but our calculations don’t seem to be using the same definitions.
If the “bowling ball” represents all useful resources, I think the Americans might be bowling balls but Europe might be cantaloupes and Japan might be a tennis ball. However, resource depletion is very, very hard to measure.
Resource collapse and resource wars have been extensively simulated by the Pentagon. The problem is not new to military science. But they come up with very different answers. This is not to say that they can offer realistic hope of surviving, much less preserving civilization.
http://www.climate.org/topics/climate/pentagon.shtml
The 2003 Schwartz/Randall report at the link describes a scenario where famine and drought become major motivators while there is still enough oil to transport food and fight wars. This influences my belief that peak oil is not just one inevitable scenario.
I don’t deny that the earth’s condition is grim: I *do* deny that it is easily planned for and that a plan of primitivism is very likely to succeed.
Comment by Rick — 2 April 2006 @ 9:21 PM
Hey Rick –
Nice links, but resource wars have nothing to do with the discussion at hand, do they?
I was simply trying to provide another tool that might help you understand the relationship between food and population.
A ‘unit’ is whatever standardized number is agreed on.
And the Balls represent no ‘useful resources’ but standard of living. IE, how much resources the average person in that culture uses. Europeans may use slightly resources than Americans… but at the end of the day the cost-benefit ration is nearly identical and for the same reasons… it cost a LOT of money to bear and raise a child in the first world. I’ve heard US $1 Million. Considering what I have spent on my son so far, that does not surprise me at all.
What are you coming up with? The above article fails to dispute the thesis, because it addresses a different set of issues. Likewise, resource wars are unrelated to population dynamics. So what calculations are you coming up with, and how?
Janene
Comment by Janene — 3 April 2006 @ 8:17 AM
Fertility rates are a red herring in this argument. The argument is that population increases with increased food production. Last I checked the population of the US hasn’t been shrinking. Population has 4 sides: Birth, death, immigration and emigration.
And what are all of these new people eating? The fact is that they are eating food. If they aren’t producing the food, that food is still being produced. And thus the Illinois farmers.
You can’t sit around and say that there are more people, but less food. People are made of food. If there are more people there MUST be more food.
Capping food production would not cause starvation. If there was enough food this year, then the same amount of food is enough for next year.
Comment by JimFive — 3 April 2006 @ 9:11 AM
available land = footprint * population
Footprint is measured as (average individual production / resource extraction efficiency) + (average individual waste / waste reclamation efficiency)
Increase your land while maintaining your footprint (i.e. expand your operation without changing it as in farming more land next year) and your population increases.
Increase your extraction and/or reclamation efficency and your footprint will decrease causing an increase in your population.
The smaller your footprint the more people you’ll have. The larger your footprint the less people you’ll have. Assuming that your land remains constant. The bowling balls have huge footprints and cannot have too many people (very few can fit into the box (available land)). But Africans have small footprints and you can have a lot of them.
Foragers have huge footprints, larger than any civilization. And so have a spread out, and small, population.
An increase in food production (without increasing land use) would be an increase in extraction efficency, which, as previously discussed, increases population.
Comment by Benjamin Shender — 3 April 2006 @ 10:56 AM
Godesky. No “L.”
You mean this one?
It’s not dismissed, so much as explained. Higher education and lower birth rates are positively correlated, I readily admit that. But correlation is not the same as causation; this is a common logical error. In this case, both higher education and lower birth rates are results of a third variable: increased complexity. That’s why they’re so tightly correlated, but it’s important to understand that higher education is not causing lower birth rates, any more than a higher incidence of people wearing shorts makes flowers bloom.
Funny–that’s one of my main points in the Thirty Theses.
No system like that can long endure. The masses must be incorporated somehow, or else the system begins to splinter apart. See France’s Arab community. They can be incorporated as an underclass and exploited–which is precisely what we have done–but greater complexity requires the integration of, ideally, all populations. If a population falls out, it must be re-absorbed.
But now we’re talking about the internal dynamics of the system, rather than the qualities of the system itself. How food is apportioned within a population is meaningless if the population’s growth as a whole perfectly matches the food supply available to it. In that case, we can see clearly that the population is a function of food supply. The only remaining question is how that food supply is distributed throughout the population, and the mechanism by which food supply determines population.
That may be, but I think Hopfenberg’s study is pretty open-and-shut insofar as showing that population is set by food supply. It may or may not be chaotic, but the higher level is quite determinative.
I don’t think you’ve done any such thing. You’ve mentioned many of the several ways in which food can be apportioned within a population; you have not said anything concerning the relationship between the population itself, and its food supply. I agree, there are many ways to distribute food, some more equitable than others. But the essential fact remains that population is, was, and ever shall be a function of food supply.
Frankly, I think it is anything less than the global view that conceals the critical mechanism and produces incorrect answers. Missing the forest for the trees, and all that. Focusing on the details of how food is distributed misses the point that global population rises in lock-step with our rising food supply. How the food supply is distributed, and how the population growth is distributed, those are things we can configure any way we please, or so it seems. But we cannot escape the fact that if we increase our food supply (regardless of where we increase it), then we also increase our population (regardless of where that population growth takes place).
Whatever. “1 millions persons” is an arbitrary unit. You could make it 20. You could make it 324.6. It doesn’t matter; it always works the same.
Whatever. You’re nitpicking. You get the idea. Not all countries consume alike.
In fact, a great deal of the crops those Illinois farmers produce is shipped to Third World countries, to farmers who produce cash crops like cotton and coffee, to sell to Americans, in return for money to buy American foods which can be bought more cheaply than just growing the food yourself.
And vice versa, it appears that if you have more food, you will have more people. Where those people will be is another question, but you will have more people somewhere.
Except that then the economy stalls, and the expected value for any investment approaches zero. Investment stops; infrastructure crumbles. Then capping food production has caused starvation. The system is too unstable to exist in a steady state.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 3 April 2006 @ 2:17 PM
Jason wrote:
Godesky. No “L.”
Sorry about that, and thanks for the link to the Hopfenberg paper. Since the Hopfenberg claim is so central, I’ll spend some time analyzing that and do a literature search — it ought to be cited by other publications.
So the country may appear to be one country, but it really becomes an apartheid territory, with the numerically tiny educated class hiding from the numerous illiterate poor.
No system like that can long endure. The masses must be incorporated somehow, or else the system begins to splinter apart. See France’s Arab community. They can be incorporated as an underclass and exploited–which is precisely what we have done–but greater complexity requires the integration of, ideally, all populations. If a population falls out, it must be re-absorbed.
Well I agree in general, but between the general notions and the specific predictions is a vast gulf of estimation. In the course of making those estimates, our value judgements have conflicts, and we predict different eventualities.
But now we’re talking about the internal dynamics of the system, rather than the qualities of the system itself. How food is apportioned within a population is meaningless if the population’s growth as a whole perfectly matches the food supply available to it. In that case, we can see clearly that the population is a function of food supply. The only remaining question is how that food supply is distributed throughout the population, and the mechanism by which food supply determines population.
So how food is apportioned is meaningless, but how food supply is distributed remains as a question? I would like to see a specific analysis that can describe distribution without considering apportionment.
But the essential fact remains that population is, was, and ever shall be a function of food supply.
That is very notable rhetoric. The editors of Reason definitely are not swayed by it, but perhaps they’re all wrong. Now that I have a copy of the Hopfenberg paper (thanks again) I’ll be reading it more closely.
We seem to be talking back and forth without really connecting on specifics. Perhaps I can find details in the Hopfenberg paper.
But we cannot escape the fact that if we increase our food supply (regardless of where we increase it), then we also increase our population (regardless of where that population growth takes place).
So if a mad dictator demands that storehouses of grain and smoked fish be set aside, that food is automatically eaten by humans, producing more human biomass.
You’re nitpicking.
I had thought this forum was for science nitpicking. Someone mentioned the peak oil forums — possibly they, or some science-specific forums, would be better suited to my nitpicking.
Except that then the economy stalls, and the expected value for any investment approaches zero. Investment stops; infrastructure crumbles. Then capping food production has caused starvation. The system is too unstable to exist in a steady state.
I apologize if I’m misreading you, but I think your prediction is that system contraction will result in sudden collapse, a total loss of high-technological capacity, starvation, etc. My prediction is that system contraction will result in numerous problems, the loss of some subsystems, and the survival of high-technology using the redundancy of the current system until a more efficient system emerges.
Comment by Rick — 4 April 2006 @ 7:11 PM
“the survival of high-technology using the redundancy of the current system until a more efficient system emerges.”
What redundancies? Redundancies are too expensive. We don’t have them. Just look at what happened to gas prices after Hurricane Katrina. They shot up because there were no redundancies to make up the shortfall in refining capacity.
Comment by ChandraShakti — 4 April 2006 @ 9:08 PM
It is. I’ve seen it.
They’re the same question, as far as I can tell. But it is a very different question from the one we’re addressing here, which is whether or not population is a function of food supply. It is. We know this. Now, the fact that it doesn’t seem to translate directly suggests that the mechanism is more complicated, there’s more variables involved. But that’s a different question entirely. It doesn’t say anything about the original question, “Is population a function of food supply?” The answer is, “yes.”
I disagree with the editors of Reason on very nearly a daily basis.
Obviously not–and yet, the human population goes up by the same amount as if that food had been eaten. How does that work? Obviously, the function in question is not fully understood. What we do know is that human population, like any other animal’s population, is a function of food supply. The specifics of that function remain very much open to debate, but that is a different question.
The best thing I got from John Michael Greer’s paper (linked in the Vault) was an understanding of how catabolic collapse is a self-reinforcing cycle. Any contraction that last too long will initiate that self-reinforcing cycle, which will not stop until we reach the next highest level of sustainable (at least in the short term) complexity. Having destroyed all previous bases for complexity on our initial ascent, the next highest level that now exists is something along the lines of the Upper Paleolithic.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 4 April 2006 @ 9:34 PM
Obviously not–and yet, the human population goes up by the same amount as if that food had been eaten. How does that work? Obviously, the function in question is not fully understood. What we do know is that human population, like any other animal’s population, is a function of food supply. The specifics of that function remain very much open to debate, but that is a different question.
Well, there you have succinctly stated the question which fascinates me. How does that food function work?
I’m still looking over the literature of population ecology. I haven’t forgotten about Greer’s essay in the Vault — I’ll be reading it over and thinking. You’ve given me a lot about which to think.
I’m looking into acquiring a copy of “How Can People Can the Earth Support?”
http://www.environmentalreview.org/vol03/cohen.html
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/sitb-next/0393314952/002-1227231-3512811
Comment by Rick — 6 April 2006 @ 8:01 AM
I have no idea what the function is–I’m not sure anyone does. What I do know is that it doesn’t set human population numbers according to food supply (just like any other animal), then it’s just wishful thinking.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 6 April 2006 @ 9:12 AM
I agree that there is no technological solution to the human overpopulation problem, but that does not mean that there is no solution. Most of the organizations involved with population issues (such as Population Connection and the Sierra Club) emphasize education for women and women’s rights as the key. (This includes family planning education, and easy access to affordable birth control.) The idea is that if women are educated and have careers, they tend to have babies later in life, and thus have fewer babies. There is certainly a lot of data to support that this.
In general, I found that the article was too pessimistic about the power of education. I don’t think that “the tragedy of the commons? really applies here. Is it true that most women—if given the choice—think that having a large family (but no career other than homemaker) is really a better life than having a career and a smaller family? I doubt it.
Comment by Ben Jacobs — 15 April 2006 @ 10:14 PM
I agree that there is no technological solution to the human overpopulation problem, but that does not mean that there is no solution. Most of the organizations involved with population issues (such as Population Connection and the Sierra Club) emphasize education for women and women’s rights as the key. (This includes family planning education, and easy access to affordable birth control.) The idea is that if women are educated and have careers, they tend to have babies later in life, and thus have fewer babies. There is certainly a lot of data to support that this.
I think you have a typo in the last line, but it’s not essential to your meaning.
I’ve been researching population ecology lately, since this Thesis #4 is critical. If it turns out to be false, then all 30 Theses are in trouble.
I’ve been talking to professors of various sciences. I haven’t found any experts who agree that human population is a function of food supply. Because nearly all of them dismiss that claim, nearly all of them are not interested in discussing the 30 theses any further. They all do agree that there are serious problems, and most of them are pessimistic. However they are all cranking out publications and teaching classes rather than preparing for the collapse of civilization.
There are a large number of publications denying Thesis 4. There is one publication affirming it. So it’s not suprising that the professors I’ve found don’t pay it any heed. This is not to say that it’s *wrong* — professors dismiss all kinds of true things out of hand.
Possibly they will starve to death in ten years when the lights go out … and possibly not.
Comment by Rick — 24 April 2006 @ 3:12 AM
Indeed, it’s not a popular position. There’s a lot more than just one publication, though. I’ve run through the opposing arguments, though, and most of them are responding less to what I’ve argued here than they are to Malthus, who was demonstrably wrong. But this is, as I titled the first iteration of this argument, “the opposite of Malthus.”
Comment by Jason Godesky — 24 April 2006 @ 8:14 AM
Rick, would you cite some of these? A statement like that needs backing, as it flies in the face of common sense. Food supply seems to me to be the sine qua non for population. Sure, other factors contribute to the growth of population, like medical care, sanitation, and other factors that reduce the death rate. But the birth rate is very dependent on food supply. That’s why population grows when cultures shift from foraging to agriculture: caloric intake shifts from being protein-based, which is an inefficient way to get calories, to carbohydrate based. Carbs are converted to energy far more easily than protein, and the birthrate goes up. (see, for example, Harris, David R. An Evolutionary Continuum of People-Plant Interactions. In Foraging and Farming: The Evolution of Plant Exploitation. Harris, D. R. and G.C. Hillman (eds.)
Then there’s the huge population increase at the point when fossil fuels got turned into food, around the 1940s. The Green Revolution resulted in enormous increases in 3rd-World population, since petrochemicals and seedstock dependent on them allowed India, Indonesia, and many other populous nations to grow vastly more food. Like I said, medical care reduced the death rate, but even more important was the drop in death by starvation. Famine kept European populations in check until the Oil Age (see Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism Volume 1, p.74.
So I’m very curious as to what support there is that food supply is not the primary factor in population growth. If you know population biology, you know that it certainly is for the animal world.
Comment by Toby Hemenway — 24 April 2006 @ 1:51 PM
Rick, would you cite some of these? A statement like that needs backing, as it flies in the face of common sense.
Well, you deserve a careful list of peer-reviewed titles, but you’re not going to get that until I’m done taking care of my students’ midterm grades, which will be at least a week. Sorry, I’ve got to do that first.
For the moment, let me clarify my comment: there are lots of publications which show that one can supply a moribund human population (e.g. Japan, Europe or native-born America) with virtually unlimited food without stimulating that population to reproduce in numbers sufficient to sustain itself. This is known as the “birth dearth.”
Of course, the virtually unlimited supply of food in those countries can filter to other countries with more vigorous breeders, but that requires transportation and energy. The surplus grain of Iowa only flows to Africa when someone is willing to expend time, money, and energy to get it there.
I’m just flailing around for a few minutes, so I’m going to offer you a paper that may turn out to be unsatisfactory. Please take it in good faith, for a week, at least.
Lutz et al. “The Low Fertility Trap Hypothesis.”
Available in PDF at:
http://www.iiasa.ac.at/
I’m not vouching for Lutz personally — that just happens to be the paper I had handy. There are many, many researchers whom I must put on a list for you. Midterm grades come first.
Comment by Rick — 26 April 2006 @ 7:21 PM
i want to know if the human population would die out if all the animals ate he sme food
Comment by Avery — 6 November 2006 @ 10:04 AM
Well, if all animals eat the same food, then the entire animal kingdom–including humans–are all utterly dependent on a single species for all of their sustenance. This is an absurd lack of biodiversity that would probably result in the rapid collapse of the entire animal kingdom, humans included.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 6 November 2006 @ 12:46 PM
OK, if I understand you correctly: Malthus’ error was in seeking to find ways to feed a growing population, whereas your position is to reduce population to a sustainable limit. Then you close with Hardin’s statement that population growth is a problem with no technical solution. Is that about right?
One thing I think I see in the discussion is a degree of confusion over the use of terms that have varying definitions.
For example “ecological footprint.” One can say that Native Americans, living as HGs plus limited horticulture, have a high footprint: their population density was sustainaed at a fairly constant level of 3.2 persons per square mile. In this case the term “footprint” equates to range or density. One can say that modern Euro-Americans have a high footprint, in terms of land-equivalent resources per person; in this case the term translates to resource consumption that includes burning natural capital as if in a planetary going-out-of-business sale. In terms of persons per square mile, agriculture and industry allow higher local population densities by way of transportation of food etc., ultimately up to the level of global trade. This in turn is dependent on cheap energy, the era of which is about to come to an end.
—
Setting food as the limit works as a generalization. More strictly speaking, the limit is whatever resource is most-scarce in a given area, for example water in the Middle East. Elsewhere the scarce resource might be land, down to the “Tokyo limit” of capsule hotels where the minimum is the number of square feet needed in order to lie flat on one’s back during sleep, plus a 1/n share of kitchen and bathroom space, or minus a 1/n time division for example by sleeping in shifts. Elsewhere the limit might be waste disposal, not just in terms of impact on food and water production but in terms of the breeding of pathogens and their vectors.
In any case all of these factors interact and the result is the same: a population of 6.5 billion humans cannot stand.
—
Technological solutions: In fact there are a number of technological solutions to overpopulation, from contraception to spaying & neutering humans in large numbers. Most of these would have to be applied against the will of the individuals to whom they are applied, which frankly bothers me less than the prospect of starvation occurring against the will of the persons being starved.
The real issue here is psychosocial: the instincts to reproduce and consume, as translated through cultures into such practices as the oppression of women (reproduction) and the “Christmas shopping season” (consumption).
Getting Americans and Europeans to consume less per person is a problem analogous to that of getting Africans and Middle Easterners to reproduce less. Frankly I don’t think either is going to happen. Instead, humanity will follow its reflex instincts in a perfectly Newtonian ballistic trajectory over the edge of the proverbial cliff.
Thus, our problem, i.e. the problem of those of us on this site who more or less agree about these issues, is not only one of sustainability. It is a problem of resilience, i.e. for our emerging communities to make it through the 21st century crash that is apparently following the 20th century overshoot.
For small intentional communities, such as of neotribal HGs, sustainability is the easier of the two problems to solve. Resilience on the other hand, in a world of people made desperate during the collapse, is a bitch.
Comment by gg3 — 28 January 2007 @ 5:09 AM
Dear Friends,
Perhaps you can assist me by responding to the following questions.
What do you suppose billions of fertile young people, who are expected to be capable of reproducing in the middle of this century, will be doing with their sexual instincts and drives other than what human beings have been doing during the past several thousand years?
Please, kindly take a moment to explain what you expect will occur that results in the consensually validated forecast indicating stabilization of absolute population numbers of the human species on Earth in the year 2050, given the fully anticipated young age distribution of a global population of 9+/- billion people at that time.
Thanks,
Steve
PS: Is it not yet evident that increasing food production equals increasing human numbers somewhere on the surface of Earth, thanks to improving food distribution capabilities; that decreasing food production results in decreasing human numbers somewhere in the human community; and that no food, in any and all cases, equals no people ?
Comment by Steven Earl Salmony — 7 March 2007 @ 11:44 AM
I’m sorry, did you just say:
[quote]PS: Is it not yet evident that…no food, in any and all cases, equals no people ?
[/quote]
?
Am I misunderstanding something? (It could well be, I’m known for being slow sometimes).
Comment by jhereg — 7 March 2007 @ 12:44 PM
Steve,
The answer to your question is that in the best case scenario, most of these young people will be working very long hours to sustain themselves, leaving very little energy for reproductive urges. Also, in the best case scenario, these young people will be educated enough to know that supporting a child will ruin them, and will doom them to slowly starve, and this knowledge will be correct. Also, in the best case scenario, contraceptives will become even more versatile, cheap and widely available compared to today.
And ofcourse, no one here really believes the best case scenario. For worse scenarios, read the site.
Comment by _Gi — 7 March 2007 @ 3:18 PM
In all fairness, jhereg, scientists are making dramatic advances in hybrid-electric people.
But if I were going to put all my eggs in one basket, I would bet on wind-powered or photovoltaic-powered people being the future of the human energy crisis in light of agricultural food shortages.
Of course they would have to be AltEnergy eggs, and I could probably only carry my basket at about 2 - 3 miles per hour–and then only on sunny or windy days.
In short, I do think there is hope for people in a world without food.
Comment by Rix — 7 March 2007 @ 3:31 PM
You know, I think I mentally transposed Is and it. So I read
[quote]PS: It is not yet evident that…no food, in any and all cases, equals no people ? [/quote]
but the actual quote was
[quote]PS: Is it not yet evident that…no food, in any and all cases, equals no people ? [/quote]
In which case, I believe that most readers here will concur with the postscript. I certainly do.
Comment by jhereg — 7 March 2007 @ 4:24 PM
Good catch, jhereg. I totally read it as “It is” as well. Funny that the question mark at the end did not make me realize the sentence was a question. I guess I’ve just gotten so used to reading (and often creating) bad writing that I’m used to punctuation not making sense.
Sorry for the sarcasm, Salmony.
Although the mental image I had of the entire human population wearing beanies in order to capture wind power for their biological needs was immensely valuable in helping me get through an otherwise dull day at work.
Comment by Rix — 7 March 2007 @ 6:13 PM
[quote]Please, kindly take a moment to explain what you expect will occur that results in the consensually validated forecast indicating stabilization of absolute population numbers of the human species on Earth in the year 2050, given the fully anticipated young age distribution of a global population of 9+/- billion people at that time.
[/quote]
Well, my opinion is that a number of things will occur which prevent that many people from surviving to 2050. Peak Oil is a likely contributor, as is Global Climate Change. I could be wrong, but….
Granted, that’s not exactly stabilization of human population, it’s more like decimation.
Comment by jhereg — 8 March 2007 @ 12:56 PM
Gentlemen:
Thanks for your responses above. Let’s agree to continue with this exchange of ideas
If we were to set joking and sarcasm aside for a moment, would you agree that the humanity could soon be confronted with a distinctly human predicament, one composed of daunting challenges that result from the current scale and rate of growth of unrestrained consumption, unbridled production and unchecked propagation activities of the human species now overspreading Earth?
Comment by Steven Earl Salmony — 12 March 2007 @ 4:00 PM
Would you think it somehow correct to suggest that certain global overgrowth activities of the human species could soon become patently unsustainable on Earth………. even in these early years of Century XXI?
Comment by Steven Earl Salmony — 12 March 2007 @ 4:10 PM
[quote]If we were to set joking and sarcasm aside for a moment[/quote]
Happily. I never intended to go that route anyway. I was legitimately confused.
[quote]would you agree that the humanity could soon be confronted with a distinctly human predicament[/quote]
Hmm. I could somewhat agree to that. Overgrowth isn’t really a distinctly human predicament, other organisms suffer through this as well. However, having said that, the particular scale of humanity’s overgrowth at the present time (ie, global) is quite possibly a unique occurrence.
[quote]challenges that result from the current scale and rate of growth of unrestrained consumption, unbridled production and unchecked propagation activities of the human species now overspreading Earth?[/quote]
Well, I believe Anthropik’s official position on that is that these activities are directly related to the ‘business’ of civilization and are, as you say in your next comment, “patently unsustainable”.
[quote]Would you think it somehow correct to suggest that certain global overgrowth activities of the human species could soon become patently unsustainable on Earth………. even in these early years of Century XXI?
[/quote]
Well, technically, it’s patently unsustainable now
. But, yeah, your point stands, and I don’t think you’ll find a lot of debate on that here. For the most part at Anthropik, the points of debate are in the ‘how to become sustainable’ category rather than in the ‘are we sustainable’ category.
Comment by jhereg — 13 March 2007 @ 8:51 AM
(sets sarcasm and joking aside and takes full responsibility for same)
before i heard of peak oil, i always assumed that over population would be the downfall of civilization. with world populations doubling within a generation cycle, i always figured that we would end up breeding ourselves into oblivion.
i was actually relieved to learn that the crash is likely to happen before we reach that point, though. i would much rather that we suffer population atrophy at 6.5 billion than at a semi stabilizing 9 billion down the road simply because the collateral environmental damage will be that much smaller. not that i think a peak oil/global warming crash will be pretty by any means.
i think we are in a “distinctly human predicament” right now where our consumption is unrestrained, and it’s only going intensify before we start to notice the downward spiral that we are already in. we are feeling the braxton hicks contractions (if you will) of the crash right now because what we are currently doing is “patently unsustainable on Earth”.
Comment by Rix — 13 March 2007 @ 10:39 AM
Gentlemen,
There is a matter related to our exchange of ideas to which I would welcome your thoughts.
Let us consider for a moment that Earth is round, finite, has boundaries and contains limited resources. Let’s also recognize that, at the current scale and rate of growth of the global economy, economic globalization could be approaching a point in human history within Century XXI when a small planet the size of Earth simply cannot sustain additional increases in economic growth? I am supposing that seemingly endless economic growth must come to an end in the relatively small finite world we inhabit. Please note, however, that nothing whatever has been said about economic development.
We can see, even now, that making things bigger, in terms of growth, will become patently unsustainable. On the other hand, making things better, in terms of development, could continue without regard to the limits imposed upon living things by biophysical reality.
All this is so say rather simply that endless growth of the global economy will become unsustainable; whereas, sustainable development could go on without regard to limits. Economic growth would necessarily end; economic development would be endless.
Always, with thanks,
Steve
Comment by Steven Earl Salmony — 14 March 2007 @ 9:42 AM
I just saw this article today that puts the current population at 6.7 billion.
Comment by Rix — 14 March 2007 @ 11:31 AM
Thanks Rix, I just added a question to the comments filed in response to the article, for which you provided us a link, regarding the UN Population Division’s 2006 estimate of world population growth currently and the UN Division’s regularly reported, but perhaps preternatural view, that absolute global human population numbers are somehow going to magically level off and stabilize at 9.2 billion people in 2050.
Comment by Steven Earl Salmony — 14 March 2007 @ 2:53 PM
Evidence is beginning to emerge of the systematic repression and pervasive corruption of the good scientific evidence in the IPCC Report.
Through many ‘talking heads’ in the mass media, cascading “disinformation? is being foisted every day upon the general public by the powerful and wealthy leaders of the predominant global political economy. These leaders and their many minions appear to have determined that the current scheme, by which the political economy is operated, must be preserved as it is, regardless of the costs.
Changes to the current economic scheme are not negotiable. Their one and only ‘right’ way to manage global business activities is so well-established and so successful, they say, that suggestions for changes of the economic system cannot even become the subject of discussion. Such topics are taboo.
Even if the current scale and rate of growth of seemingly endless expansion of the global economy in a finite world is shown by science to be patently unsustainable, these masters of the universe apparently intend that we “stay the course? marked by unrestrained per capita consumption of limited resources and by unbridled extension of ever-larger scale production capabilities now overspreading our relatively small planetary home.
Biodiversity is extirpated; the environment is degraded; natural resources are depleted; Earth’s body is dissipated; and, still, these leaders of my not-so-great generation of elders tell us to pay attention only to economic growth indicators while they would have us ignore the global economy’s very foundation: namely, the Earth.
Can such a thing as a functioning human economy of any imaginable kind exist without that which is provided to humankind for its benefit by the natural world we inhabit, thanks to God?
Comment by Steven Earl Salmony — 15 March 2007 @ 1:05 PM
Virtual mountains of scientific evidence indicate that a contradiction exists between the physical reality of the finiteness of the world we inhabit and the cornucopian fantasy of so many economists assuring us Earth is a maternal representation, an ever-expressive teat at which the human species can eternally suckle.
Perhaps this accomplished group of global thinkers can help us objectively consider this contradiction.
Comment by Steven Earl Salmony — 15 March 2007 @ 7:09 PM
Well, I certainly encourage any one who thinks that we can brush aside the apparant finiteness of physical reality to respond to Steve’s points.
However, I really don’t think you’re going to get any takers Steve, at least not any time soon. Those who buy into the myth of limitless “progress” tend to not hang around Anthropik too long. They don’t like being told they’re wrong and they haven’t been able to convince anyone they’re right, so they tend to leave pretty quickly.
As a general rule, I think it’s safe to say that Anthropik regulars think that limitless progress is, at best, a fool’s dream.
If you haven’t already, you should check out John Michael Greer’s blog at: http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/
He’s been trying to tackle why so many people are still clinging to the idea of limitless progress, when it’s so obviously one of the biggest crocks of **** ever.
Comment by jhereg — 15 March 2007 @ 10:10 PM
Dear jhereg,
The time is coming, I suppose, when the politicians, economists and demographers are brought face to face with good scientific evidence of biophysical reality already developed by top-rank scientists. They will unequivocally identify certain distinctly human global overgrowth activities: unrestrained per capita consumption of scarce resources, untethered expansion of large scale production capabilities, and unchecked propagation.
Perhaps the scale and rate of growth of these human activities now overspreading the surface of Earth will be seen approaching a point in human history when additional increases of our consumption, production and propagation activities worldwide are patently unsustainable on the small, finite planet God has blessed us to inhabit.
Always, with thanks,
Steve
Comment by Steven Earl Salmony — 16 March 2007 @ 11:15 AM
Steve,
Perhaps the politicians, economists and demographers [b]will[/b] look the evidence in the eye, but that evidence has been reasonably strong for 30 years, and I don’t know of any politicians, economists or demographers that are fully aware of the true extent of the problem (at least publicly). And even if there were some aware of it, to act on it would be career suicide. (Granted, I, personally think that career suicide would be infinitely preferrable to planetary suicide, but…)
It’s been said before, but it bears repeating: Humans aren’t rational creatures, we’re rational[b]izing [/b]creatures. There’s good and ill in that, and part of the ill is that political solutions just don’t exist for this problem.
The best thing to do is for us all to start with our own backyards and work to improve what we can. I’m starting to push http://www.100milediet.org/ it’s a great whose time has come. Again.
Not that it solves all problems, but it is something concrete that many people can wrap their heads around and can lead to a number of interesting insights, such as the rest of the problems…..
Comment by jhereg — 17 March 2007 @ 10:21 PM
Thanks a lot for your comments. The “100 mile diet” is sure to be a helpful strategy.
If I may offer some additional thoughts on the subject we are discussing.
Every generation faces challenges, it seems. Has it ever been otherwise? Yet, how is it my generation of elders can abrogate its responsibilities to confront looming global challenges before humanity that could adversely impact life as we know it as well as the integrity of the planetary home God has blessed us to inhabit?
In our time I hear too many politicians suggest that addressing the requirements of biophysical reality is political suicide. Too many economists appear to believe they would lose their jobs if they commented on the prospect of a gigantic, ever-expanding global economy soon becoming patently unsustainable at its current scale and growth rate. And some demographers seem to fear their careers would end if apparently unforeseen, good scientific evidence is acknowledged indicating that human population dynamics is common to the population dynamics of other species.
I do not know if these concerns are real or not. But our brothers and sisters in politics, economics and demography are in what appears to me as an unfavorable situation. It seems their determination to consensually ‘validate’ outdated ideas and data supportive of whatsoever is politically convenient and economically expedient, and then to willfully deny emerging scientific evidence of the biophysical world, could be deleterious to the wellbeing of life as we know it and to the world in which we live. To me, such circumstances could sincerely be described as tragic.
On the other hand, we do have great scientists like Elizabeth Holland, Mickey Glantz, Michael Mann, H. J. Schellnhuber, Richard Dawkins, Albert Bartlett, David Pimentel, Helena Norberg-Hodge, Hazel Henderson, Ernst von Weizsaecker, Alan Thornhill, Russell Hopfenberg, Joseph Baker, Tony McMichael, Geoffrey Bowker, Jeffrey McNeely, Partha Dasgupta, David Wasdell, Carl Pope, Chris Flavin, Lester Brown, Amy Coen, Anne Ehrlich, Vivien Ponniah, Charles Fowler, Humam Ghassib, Jan Janssens, Jean-Francois Rischard, Rajendra Pachauri, Don Kennedy, Paul Stern, Caroline Ash, E. O. Wilson, James Zachos, Jeffrey McKee, Jack Alpert, Richard C. Duncan, Peter Salonius, Peter Vitousek, Riane Eisler, Gilbert Fayl, David Blockstein, William Rees, Martin Rees, Paul Ehrlich, Stephen W. Hawking, Chris Rapley, Jerry Glenn, James Lovelock, Seti Shastrapraja, Stuart Pimm, Eric Chivian, Gretchen Daily, Jan Juffermans, Ellen Carnevale, Rosamund McDougald, Ahmed Djoghlaf, John Guillebaud, Robert Correll, Jay Hansen, Bruce Alberts, Val Stevens, Jane Goodall and so many other sons and daughters of Galileo, who will help us widely share an adequate understanding of the world in which we live and plainly recognize the necessity for appropriate behavior change.
With thanks,
Steve
Comment by Steven Earl Salmony — 19 March 2007 @ 2:00 PM
Oh, I believe that today’s politicians, economists and demographers sudden “backbone growth” would lead to a number of career failures!
But you’re right, it’s a damn shame that that would be an acceptable deterent for them, and the epitomy of foolishness to boot. Nonetheless, their “conversion” doesn’t appear to be forthcoming, so all of the good (in terms of minimizing both human and non-human suffering) that could be done via that path will most likely never materialize. Having faced that rather grim prospect, I’ve decided to start locally with myself and my family and my bioregion. It’s where I can have the most impact and I can actively participate. You seem to be of a like mind, Steve, and it’s always good to meet people who are willing to step up and “Hey, [i]here’s[/i] something [i]I[/i] can do…”.
Comment by jhereg — 20 March 2007 @ 8:54 AM
Actually, I very much doubt that there are many politicians, economists, demographers out there who aren’t talking due to the fear of ruining their careers. I mean, you really don’t need to be an expert in order to figure out that our way of life and our current population is unsustainable. If you didn’t figure that out before even starting graduate school, chances are good that you won’t figure it out there because that won’t be discussed, at least not in any unqualified terms. Graduate students might, presumably, be told that high population densities lead to problems A, B, and C, but the chances of their being told that we have overshot our carrying capacity and that a reduction in the size of our population is inevitable, or even of being told that we are in serious danger of overshooting our carrying capacity and crashing, are pretty slim. And if you happen to be a graduate student seriously concerned about overshoot and crash of Homo sapiens, you’ll just get weeded out. Probably not even because you voiced your (unpopular) opinion, but simply because, with overshoot and crash in your mind, you’ll have a hard time taking seriously various ideas, theories, techniques that simply ignore ecological realities (that is to say, just about any idea, theory, technique that you might be taught in graduate school), and will therefore flunk your qualifying exams. So, if you’re seriously concerned about carrying capacity and such, you won’t be warning the world about them as an economist or demographer because you’ll never even get to become an economist or demographer. For those who do become economists and demographers… They don’t keep quiet about these issues due to fear of destroying their careers, but due to the fact that they don’t even think about these issues. Or alternatively, if they ever do think about these issues, they have no expertise to address them because nothing they ever learned in graduate school prepared them for addressing them. Therefore, they might be timid when it comes to addressing these issues as economists or as demographers, because they might feel that, when it comes to this particular issue, they are no better prepared to address it than is the next person in the street. (And this is the big thing with experts, isn’t it? If it’s not your area of expertise you just don’t talk about it.) So that’s what I very much suspect happens with demographers and economists. I’ll leave the case of the politician to you.
Comment by Hasha — 20 March 2007 @ 11:46 AM
Yeah, that’s probably spot on for 99.9% of them. I guess I was looking at the rarer situation of an existing politician/economist/demographer suddenly having an epiphany or something. But you have a good point about the systemic selection of experts and how it fails us all.
Comment by jhereg — 20 March 2007 @ 3:21 PM
I NEED A SUMMARY ON THE BACKGROUD OF MALTHUS THESES ON DEVELOPING ECONOMIES
Comment by JACKYDION2003 — 22 March 2007 @ 7:04 AM
[quote]I NEED A SUMMARY ON THE BACKGROUD OF MALTHUS THESES ON DEVELOPING ECONOMIES [/quote]
So read his work and write one….
Comment by jhereg — 22 March 2007 @ 9:34 AM
Finals week already? How time flies.
- Chuck
Comment by Chuck — 22 March 2007 @ 6:33 PM
Dear Friends,
This is a remarkable discussion. Thanks to all for your contributions to it.
Steve
Comment by Steven Earl Salmony — 24 March 2007 @ 5:46 PM
Dear Friends and Colleagues,
A “thought experiment” follows to which I would like very much to have comments.
IMAGINE for a moment that we are looking at an ocean wave, watching it move toward the shore where it crashes finally at our feet. The wave is moving toward us; however, at the same time, there are many molecules in the wave that are moving in the opposite direction, against the tide. If we observe that the propagation of the human species worldwide is like the wave and the reproduction numbers of individuals or certain countries are like the molecules, it may be inaccurate for the latter to be looked at as if it tells us something meaningful about the former.
Abundant research indicates that most countries in Western Europe, among many other countries globally, have recently shown a decline in their rates of human population growth. These geographically localized data need not blind us to the fact that the absolute global human population numbers are skyrocketing. The world’s human population is like the wave; the individual or localized reproduction numbers are like the molecules.
Perhaps a “scope of observation? problem is presented to everyone who wants to adequately understand the dynamics of human population numbers.
Choosing a scope of observation is a forced choice, like choosing to look at either the forest or the trees, at either the human species (the wave) data or reproduction (molecular) data. Data regarding propagation of absolute global human population numbers is the former while individual or localized reproduction data are the latter.
From this vantage point, the global challenge before humanity could be a species propagation problem. Take note that global propagation numbers do not vary with the reproduction data. That is to say, global human propagation data and the evidence of reproduction numbers of individuals in many places, may be pointing in different directions. The propagation data are represented by the wave; the reproduction data are represented by the molecules moving against the tide.
In the year 1900 world’s human population was approximately 1.2 to 1.6 billion people. With the explosive growth of the global human population over the 20th century in mind (despite two world wars, ubiquitous local conflicts, famine, pestilence, disease, poverty, and other events resulting in great loss of life), what might the world look like in so short a period of time as 43 years from now? How many people will be on the planet at that time? The UN Population has recently made its annual re-determination that the world’s human population will reach 9.2 billion people around 2050, and then somehow level off. No explanation is given for how this leveling-off process is to occur.
We can see that the fully anticipated growth of absolute global human population numbers is about 8 billion people between 1900 and 2050.
Whatever the number of human beings on Earth at the end of the 21st century, the size of the human population on Earth could have potentially adverse impacts on the number of the world’s surviving species, on the rate of dissipation of Earth’s resources, and on the basic characteristics of global ecosystems.
For too long a time human population growth has been comfortably viewed by politicians, economists and demographers as somehow outside the course of nature. The potential causes of global human population growth have seemed to them so complex, obscure, or numerous that a strategy to address the problems posed by the unbridled growth of the human species has been assumed to be unknowable. Their preternatural, insufficiently scientific grasp of human population dynamics has lead to widely varied forecasts of global population growth. Some forecasting data indicate the end to human population growth soon. Other data suggest the rapid and continuous increase of human numbers through Century XXI and beyond.
Recent scientific evidence from Russell Hopfenberg and David Pimentel appear to indicate that the governing dynamics of absolute global human population numbers are indeed knowable, as a natural phenomenon. According to their research, the population dynamics of human organisms is essentially common to, not different from, the population dynamics of other organisms.
To suggest, as many politicians, economists and demographers have been doing, that understanding the dynamics of human population numbers does not matter, that the human population problem is not about numbers, or that human population dynamics have so dizzying an array of variables as not to be suitable for scientific investigation, seems not quite right.
Always,
Steve
Comment by Steven Earl Salmony — 30 March 2007 @ 9:25 PM
Hello, Steven. Welcome to the Anthropik Network. I’m sorry I wasn’t around to greet you earlier; you may have noticed that you’ve come onto the scene in a bit of a lull. The Tribe of Anthropik has fallen on some hard times of late, but we’ll be back soon enough. I regret, though, that this means I haven’t had a chance to answer you until now.
I have to say, you’re a confusing fellow! You make your point very directly, but you seem to say it as if we disagreed, or as if you had to offer a counterpoint or rebuttal, but you so forcefully rebut us with the very things we’ve been saying here. In fact, your resortion to thought experiments appears here, appended to my article where I laid out the very mechanics that prove your thought experiment. I think that goes a ways beyond metaphor, so I’m left somewhat confused as to just who it is you’re trying to refute here?
Comment by Jason Godesky — 2 April 2007 @ 11:43 AM
HI JASON,
If it is OK to do so, I will respond to the “confusion” you are experiencing in another message.
For the moment, some good humor has come to my attention that I would like to share with you and the members of the Anthropik Network.
Enjoy, now, Doonesbury on the subject of “Controversial Science”
http://tinyurl.com/2ucxft
Steve
Comment by Steven Earl Salmony — 2 April 2007 @ 8:59 PM
Hi again Jason,
I have taken some time to review what you are reporting on the topic of “human population numbers is a function of food supply” before responding. What follows is not more or less than an opening gambit.
According to the apparently unforeseen research by Dr. Russell Hopfenberg, perhaps you and I are not in agreement afterall because we do not share an understanding of Hopfenberg’s research or its potentially profound implications.
It also does not seem to me that you have yet grasped the scope of the human predicament looming ominously before humanity in these early years of Century XXI.
As the discussion continues, I trust the research to which I am drawing attention will become widely shared, more rigorously, skillfully and carefully critiqued, and better understood.
Thanks for the remarkably stimulating opportunity for communication that is provided by the Anthropik Network.
Always,
Steve
Comment by Steven Earl Salmony — 4 April 2007 @ 2:13 PM
What exactly do you think my position is? I have consitently predicted on this site the complete collapse of civilization in the next century, entailing the deaths of billions as the human population comes crashing down to a matter of a few hundred thousand, or a few millions on the outside.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 4 April 2007 @ 4:19 PM
Dear Jason,
Please understand that I am not in the business of foretelling the future but rather dedicated to scrutinizing scientific data. That is all.
At least to me, the research of Russell Hopfenberg need not be mistakenly understood as a presentation of evidence that is somehow the OPPOSITE of the fundamental idea of Malthus regarding the relationship between human population numbers and food supply. That is not what the data indicate. {It goes without saying that the famous THEOREM of Mr. Malthus has been repeatedly shown to be incorrect for 200 years. Hopfenberg’s data also indicates that the theorem was not constructed correctly.}
Hopfenberg’s evidence represents nothing more or less than a slight extension of the seminal thinking of Thomas Malthus and the more recent scientific findings of colleagues from Charles Darwin to J.N. “Ding” Darling, Garrett Hardin and the immediate forerunner of Hopfenberg, Paul R. Ehrlich.
Do you know of a top-rank population scientist who would be willing to join our discussion? Such an expert could be helpful.
As ever,
Steve
Comment by Steven Earl Salmony — 5 April 2007 @ 9:31 AM
from:
[url]http://www.fragilecologies.com/mar22_05.html[/url]
[quote]Hopfenberg gives us empirical data of a non-recursive biological problem that is independent of ethical, social, legal, religious, and cultural considerations. This means human population dynamics are essentially like the population dynamics of other species. It also means that world human population growth is a rapidly cycling positive feedback loop, a relationship between food and population in which food availability drives population growth, and population growth fuels the impression that food production needs to be increased. The data indicate that as we increase food production every year, the number of people goes up, too.
[/quote]
This seems to match what Jason has been saying all along, so, not trying to be slow, but where is the contention…?
Comment by jhereg — 5 April 2007 @ 9:53 AM
Interesting discussion. I could be wrong, but my impression is that Steve simply thinks Jason dismissed Malthus a little too completely.
We’re talking about exactly the same thing on my blog right now.
http://growthmadness.org/2007/03/25/youre-an-ape-okay/#comment-512
I haven’t formed a definite opinion yet about Hofenberg and Pimentel’s conclusions. It’s fascinating stuff though.
Your “Thirty Theses” look like very interesting reading, overlapping a great deal with the topics I investigate. I’ll be perusing them as I get the chance.
Comment by John Feeney — 8 April 2007 @ 12:07 AM
Hi to jhereg and all,
Please note that our colleague, John Feeney, has kindly and thoughtfully suggested that Russ Hopfenberg join the discussion to which he refers in his missive just above. Arrangements have been made for Russ to participate as a discussant next month. Details of the plan are available at the link John has provided,
http://growthmadness.org/2007/03/25/youre-an-ape-okay/#comment-512
Mark May 3rd on your calendars.
Sincerely,
Steve
Comment by Steven Earl Salmony — 8 April 2007 @ 1:02 PM
I’d love to hear Hopfenberg weigh in, but he’s a busy man involved with other things, so I won’t be holding my breath.
If we take Malthus broadly enough so that he simply means “overpopulation causes problems,” I could see your point. But Malthus’ argument was that population would outstrip food supply. Malthus’ concern was how to feed so many people. So, Malthus got the problem almost perfectly backwards, providing a premier opening for anyone interested in maintaining the status quo to knock down the Malthusian straw man and avoid and the real problem. While specific circumstances might be able to rip the resource base out from under a population, Malthusian catastrophes cannot, as a rule, happen, because population is a function of food supply. The problem is not how to feed such a massive population, but how to deal with the increasing fragility, decreasing biodiversity, and escalating probability of catastrophe that a constantly expanding population entails. In that, the real problem we face is almost the perfect opposite of the problem Malthus posed. He got the ball rolling, but he got it almost completely wrong. Now we know that, and clinging to Malthus at this point simply opens up an easy way for naysayers to knock it down, with the apparent implication that infinite growth is somehow not insane.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 10 April 2007 @ 10:04 AM
Dear Jason,
To suggest, yet again, that one of the greatest thinkers in the history of Western civilization “got it almost completely wrong” and “almost perfectly backwards” is unjustified and strikes me as silly. I do understand that your view is supported by many people for more than 200 years; nevertheless, if you more deeply grasped what Dr. Hopfenberg is reporting, you would see that the Hopfenberg/Pimentel research is not more than a slight, but powerful extension of work beginning with Thomas Malthus.
Your critique of the research of Russell Hopfenberg and David Pimentel leaves a lot to be desired; however, now is the not the time for me to comment.
Please be assured of one thing. Russell Hopfenberg will be commenting on May 3rd, thanks to the efforts of our colleague, John Feeney.
Let us both consider what Russell Hopfenberg has to say about human population numbers and food supply as well as Thomas Malthus next month. Afterwards, if you like, it will my pleasure to comment more in a dialogue on the unexpected —- and still largely unacknowledged —- “food-population” connection originally made by Mr. Malthus.
Sincerely,
Steve
Comment by Steven Earl Salmony — 10 April 2007 @ 1:51 PM
Most of the great thinkers in Western history have been almost completely wrong: Newton was almost completely overturned by Einstein, Darwin was almost completely wrong about how natural selection worked, etc. They’re the great thinkers in Western history not because they got it all right off the bat, but because they got us thinking in a particular direction. In fact, they usually got most of the details wrong. Darwin believed in Lamarckian inheritance, and thought natural selection was mostly a matter of struggle and starvation. Now we know about Mendelian inheritance, and that natural selection tends to have more to do with slight differences in birth rates than out-and-out starvation.
Malthus got people started thinking that there might be such a thing as overpopulation, but the problem he anticipated was that population would outstrip food supply, in other words, “How do we feed so many people?” What we know now is that population is a function of food supply, so it’s impossible for population to outstrip food supply. The problem is almost perfectly opposite of Malthus’: “With so much food, what will you do with all these people?”
Malthus has been quite firmly overturned; admitting that is no more “silly” than admitting that Newtonian physics have been superseded by Einsteinian, or that Darwin was wrong about Lamarckian inheritance. Like so many others, Malthus’ contribution is historical–he’s worth an honorable mention because he got the ball rolling, not because he got it all right.
Perhaps you can enlighten me, then, because the very core of the Malthusian problem lies in his assumption that food production and population are independent. Specifically, that population rises “geometrically” (that is, exponentially), while food production rises “arithmetically.” Quoting “An Essay on the Principle of Population,” book 1, chapter 1, paragraph 28:
This is Malthus’ central hypothesis, and it has been thoroughly overturned and discredited. This is hardly unexpected, because populations do not rise as an independent variable–they are a function of food supply. That turns Malthus’ problem around 180 degrees. Malthus’ problem was how so many people could be fed. The problem we face is simply too may people.
This is the comments section, to the article in which I laid out my synopsis. I did not really critique their views, since I agree with them, and I quoted them here to support my own views. But, if this isn’t the place for you to comment, what is?
I look forward to hearing what he has to say then, but I don’t see any reason why that should impede our own discussions here. He’s certainly very knowledgable about these matters, but there’s nothing rational about an appeal to authority.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 10 April 2007 @ 2:16 PM
Reviewing this, perhaps it would be worthwhile if you explicitly stated what you see as “the fundamental idea of Malthus,” vs. his theorem. What I mean by “the opposite of Malthus” is that Malthus supposed that population grows faster than food supply, so we will inevitably face a crisis wherein we cannot feed our population. This is almost completely backwards, because population is a function of food supply: ergo, the population cannot systematically outstrip its food supply. Rather, we face a crisis because we can arbitrarily increase our population, which means we always will, and humans do more than eat. The ecological weight of billions of apex predators means catastrophic losses of biodiversity and ecological breakdown on a massive scale. The problem is not running out of food, but the ecological consequences of so much food. That turns Malthus on his head, because in a Malthusian crisis, you need to produce more food. Under this understanding, you have too many people, so you need to produce less food.
But if you simply mean by “the fundamental idea of Malthus” that a population too large becomes a problem, then I think you’re playing a bit loose with words, but we’d essentially then be in agreement.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 10 April 2007 @ 2:25 PM
Jason and Steve,
Very interesting discussion. I have no strong opinion at this point on the Hopfenberg/Pimental work or even on whether Malthus was wrong.
(I will host Russell Hopfenberg on my blog not to promote his work, but simply to bring it to others and to generate discussion. To me, the really important thing at this point, with regard to population, is to promote awareness of the general problem.)
Jason, I understand what you’re saying about Malthus versus the Quinn/Hopfenberg/Pimental argument about food supply and population. In Hopfenberg & Pimentel (2001) they say:
“Malthus, in his famous Essay, put forth his ‘principle of population’ which was his assertion that the population has the capacity to grow faster than the means of subsistence (Petersen, 1979, p. 47). However, due to biological realities, the population cannot be sustained beyond the level of food availability.”
So I understand your assertion that it’s kind of the opposite of Malthus. But, what about data that suggest per capita food production peaked in the mid ’80s, despite total food production continuing to increase:
http://www.npg.org/images/tmp1.gif
http://www.acunu.org/millennium/Global_Challenges/Fig-3.jpg
More generally, some experts express concern that food production may not much longer be able to keep up with population, that per hectare crop yields seem to be peaking. (e.g., the authors of Limits to Growth: The 30 Year Update)
Also, though it’s clear population cannot grow *too* far beyond food supply, doesn’t it sometimes temporarily do so to some extent in animal populations causing die-offs? I mean, those are the classic graphs we see of population going up, then crashing down, then working its way back up, etc.:
http://jimswan.com/111/population/populations.htm
Both the per capita food supply data and the conventional theory of populations outstripping resources, dieing off, etc. seem to run counter to the “population is determined solely by food supply” hypothesis. Any help sorting that out? (Again, I have no opinion at this point, and just want to see how others explain these things. Of course these and other questions will certainly come up in the context of Russell Hopfenberg’s visit.)
Comment by John Feeney — 10 April 2007 @ 4:36 PM
What about it? Human population is a function of food supply, but that doesn’t mean it’s the only variable involved. Ecological footprint mediates that number. Obviously, you can support more people on the same amount of food if everyone is poorer, or fewer if everyone is richer. This is one of the primary mechanisms that creates that so-called “contradiction” of local populations booming with little food. So, if per capita food is descreasing, that simply means that there are more, poorer people now than before. Meanwhile, increases in food production remain predictive of human population numbers, suggesting that footprint does not allow us to change the variation by very much.
Yes, this is something I’ve written about extensively in the Thirty Theses. But this isn’t a Malthusian catastrophe: it’s the end of human population expansion. There are massive, society-wide ramifications that go with a contracting population; if you want a biological model of our civilization, look at an algae bloom. See William Catton’s Overshoot.
These are usually governed by effects far less drastic than the disease and starvation Malthus predicted. A lynx that spends more time hunting hares has less time to breed, becomes more infertile, more likely to miscarry, has a harder tme nursing, leaves her children for longer periods of time, all resulting in higher infant mortality, though even that is usually extreme. It usually doesn’t get as far as “less time for mating” before the variance is corrected, and the lynx population goes down as lynxes die of old age, allowing the hare population to rebound, which allows lynxes to rebound in turn. Classic Lotka-Volterra.
In some special cases, like the reindeer on St. Matthew Island, there’s a special circumstance where die-off comes quickly and catastrophically. This is more what humans are probably in for, but this is still no systematic Malthusian catastrophe. It’s the consequences of an unsustainable regime. Once the basis of that regime has been consumed, as it must be, the entire population collapses catastrophically. Catastrophic agriculture provides much the same illusory stability as the grasses of St. Matthew’s Island.
Actually, the Lotka-Volterra cycle, as well as the theory of overshoot, depend on food being the primary variable in determining population. Other variables modify that, like quality of life, but these have a relatively small effect. If there were other variables involved, then lynx populations could continue to grow even while hares were in decline, and the reindeer might still be on St. Matthew’s Island. Both are questions of how populations relate to food.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 10 April 2007 @ 4:53 PM
Jason,
Thanks for explaining. I have some follow-up questions about all this, but don’t have time right now to formulate them. I’ll come back as soon as I can to do that, and will appreciate any chance you have to respond.
Comment by John Feeney — 13 April 2007 @ 12:59 AM
Dear Friends,
Dr. Russell Hopfenberg responds to questions regarding human population dynamics next week.
Questions for Russ are invited between now and then.
Go to link below for details.
http://growthmadness.org/2007/04/15/coming-may-3rd-discussion-with-russell-hopfenberg/
Always,
Steve
Comment by Steven Earl Salmony — 24 April 2007 @ 8:36 AM
Dear Jason,
Evidently, I placed my comments about the research of Russell Hopfenberg in the wrong place. Sorry about that. Please note your inconsiderate and occasionally outlandish remarks related to my commentary on Hopfenberg’s evidence follow immediately. You appear to have no more regard for Hopfenberg’s research than you have for the work of Thomas Malthus. That is unfortunate because scientists like Richard Dawkins, I suppose, would likely find more to appreciate in the work of both men than you do.
Sincerely,
Steve
>>>>>
Jason Godesky wrote:
{SES wrote}With this in mind, please note that Russell Hopfenberg has provided
an elegant model that accounts for the salient factors governing the dynamics of global human population numbers.
…. Huh?
First of all, WTF? Trying to follow your comment damn near made my head ‘asplode. That came out of nowhere! We’re not even talking about population here!
Secondly, you do know that the idea of human population being bound to food supply greatly predates Hopfenberg, right? His study is great because it so clearly shows what’s going on, but he’s nowhere even close to having come up with the idea. It’s been a well-known fact in biology since at least the days of Lotka & Volterra that every other animal population is determined by food supply. We like to think we can get an exemption from that thanks to our “intelligence,” and Hopfenberg—and others—have done an excellent job of showing that isn’t so. Hopfenberg cites some of the many researchers who made this argument before him in his own paper. I mean really, this is a positively common idea with a history long before Hopfenberg’s work. You might as well attribute the idea of evolution to Richard Dawkins!
I appreciate his work, but your hero-worship is rather unseemly. You make it sound as if Hopfenberg’s the first person to ever suggest this; he’s not, not by a long shot……………………..
…………culture is a complex system. Changes in culture are absorbed. The introduction of Christianity did not significantly changed Roman culture; rather, Roman culture absorbed Christianity. Cultures try to maintain their status quo; Quinn anthropomorphized this emergent process as “Mother Culture.” Just like succession in a forest, culture adapts to changes by absorbing them and trying to maintain its normal state.
The available resources determine the point of diminishing returns.
Absolutely–that’s rather the point. Complexity is a function of energy. Whether we’re talking about biological complexity, cultural complexity, or any other kind, the amount of complexity possible is determined by the amount of energy available. Complexity is always an investment, and when it begins to cost more energy than it returns, that’s when you cross the point of diminishing returns, and that’s when complexity stabilizes. If you happen to be talking about cultures, then continuing to push complexity beyond that leads to collapse.
{SES wrote}What appears to be missing from this thread is attention to what is elegant.
Elegance arises from two factors, like complexity: effectiveness, and simplicity. Achieving the same end with less complexity, or achieving more with the same complexity, are both ways of increasing elegance.
Gould selects an arbitrary scale — e.g., the biological — and concludes that there is a minimum threshold of complexity below which evolution does not function. But this is nonsense.
But it does limit our focus. This isn’t a metaphysical assumption, but when we’re talking about the “complexity of life,” then things that are not complex enough to be alive are hardly germane.
If biological succession leads to climax ecosystems in which matter and energy are maximally recycled, what is to say technological succession doesn’t lead to the same?
Because civilizations are created on the assumption of unlimited growth. When they stop growing, they implode. Ecologies have no such dedication to growth for its own sake, so if they stop growing, they’re quite capable of maintaining a dynamic equilibrium. Civilizatons can’t do that……………..
{SES wrote}Perhaps an example of elegant research will be useful here.
Dude. This is not about population. Give it a rest!
Comment by Steven Earl Salmony — 25 April 2007 @ 4:00 PM
>>>>
Steven Earl Salmony wrote:
Hi again,
Perhaps an example of elegant research will be useful here.
According to Hopfenberg, global population growth of the human species is a rapidly cycling positive feedback loop in which food availability drives population growth and this growth in human numbers gives rise to the misperception that food production needs to be increased even more.
Data indicate that the world’s human population grows by approximately two percent per year. All segments of it grow by about 2%. Every year there are more people with brown eyes and more people with blue ones; more people who are tall and more short people. It also means that there are more people growing up well fed and more people growing up hungry. The starving segment of the population goes up just like the well-fed segment of the population. We may or may not be reducing hunger by increasing food production; however, we are most certainly producing more and more hungry people.
Hopfenberg’s evidence suggests that the magnificently successful efforts of humankind to increase food production in order to feed a growing population results in even greater increase in human population numbers.
The perceived need to increase food production to feed a growing population is a widely shared and consensually validated misperception, a denial of the physical reality and the space-time dimension. If people are starving at a given moment of time, increasing food production cannot help them. Are these starving people supposed to be waiting for sowing, growing and reaping to be completed? Are they supposed to wait for surpluses to reach them? Without food they would die. In such circumstances, increasing food production for people who are starving is like tossing parachutes to people who have already fallen out of the airplane. The produced food arrives too late; however, this does not mean human starvation is inevitable.
Consider that human population dynamics are not biologically different from the population dynamics of other species. Human organisms, other species and even microorganisms have essentially common population dynamics. We do not find hoards of starving roaches, birds, squirrels, alligators, or chimpanzees in the absence of food as we do in many civilized human communities today because these non-human species are not annually increasing their own production of food.
Please take note that among tribal peoples in remote original habitats, we do not find people starving. Like non-human species, “primitive” human beings live within the carrying capacity of their environment. History is replete with examples of early humans and other ancestors not increasing their food production annually, but rather living successfully off the land for thousands of years as hunters and gatherers of food.
Prior to the agricultural revolution and the production of more food than was needed for immediate survival, human numbers supposedly could not grow beyond their environment’s physical capacity to sustain them because human population growth or decline is primarily a function of food availability.
Hopfenberg’s research appears to provide virtually irrefutable, uncomplicated support for Jason’s Thesis # 4: Human population is a function of food supply.
As ever,
Steve
April 25th, 2007, at 9:32 am #
Comment by Steven Earl Salmony — 25 April 2007 @ 4:03 PM
The hell….?
I cite Hopfenberg’s work all the time. Well, when it’s relevant. You write with some bizarre hero worship that’s just creepy. But that’s far from having no regard for his work. You’re not too familiar with middle ground, are you? Suggest that Hopfenberg’s work isn’t universally applicable (like in a discussion about complexity), and I have no regard for him at all.
As for Malthus, his model’s been completely overturned. That’s common knowledge. He’s been proven wrong. There’s no question about it. He had an impact on history and brought up the question of overpopulation, but his model is completely and utterly wrong. Population does not outstrip food production. In fact, Hopfenberg’s work is fundamentally incompatible with Malthus’. Hopfenberg shows that human population is a function of food supply; Malthus says population grows exponentially, while food supply only grows “arithmetically,” leading to population inevitably outstripping food supply. That is the Malthusian problem. But Hopfenberg shows that population is a function of food supply, so a Malthusian catastrophe is not systemically possible!
Hopfenberg’s work has really helped shore up that argument, but he’s not the first to suggest this. He cites his precedents in the paper itself. This is a very old idea. Hopfenberg’s done some great work on it, but it wasn’t the first work, and it’s not just Hopfenberg’s idea.
As for reproducing such a large chunk of another thread rather than just linking to it … your comments continue to astound me with their surrealism, Mr. Salmony. Call it inconsiderate adn outlandish if you like, but each comment you post seems more bizarre than the last.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 25 April 2007 @ 4:17 PM
Dear Jason,
In your next comment, why not tell me how you really feel.
Sorry for again not having communicated here in a way you prefer.
My ” bizarre hero worship that’s just creepy,” as you put it, is something I want to think about and discuss it with respected colleagues. Perhaps you would do yourself a favor by thinking about what you are doing as the leader of this blog.
You take note above of the “surrealism” in my comments. I will think about this, too. I do hope that you consider evidence of overweening narcissism in your statements.
It appears to me you simply do not know that which you do not know and, furthermore, have no interest in finding out.
Always,
Steve
Comment by Steven Earl Salmony — 26 April 2007 @ 9:32 AM
But … I … that’s … WTF?
Blogs don’t have leaders—this one in particular. But how do you get “overweening narcissism” from … nevermind.
You’re going to discuss your hero worship with “respected colleagues”? You have heard of “argument from authority,” right? You know it’s a logical fallacy, right?
“…in a way I prefer”? I think most people have written you off already because they can’t figure out what the hell you’re trying to say, because everything you write it so bizarre. Silly me, I keep trying; I’m usually the last one to give up in situations like these.
My head ‘asplode.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 26 April 2007 @ 9:46 AM
Don’ as’plode. Just Breathe, J
Janene
Comment by janene — 26 April 2007 @ 9:49 AM
Steve,
To be honest, I’m often kind of baffled by your comments as well. This is not to say that I don’t understand the importance of Hopfenberg’s research. And I certainly understand your desire to think about the implications of said research. However, I feel like I feel safe in saying that members of Anthropik (Jason, Giuli & Mike) as well as the vast majority of regulars here have reached the conclusion that: 1) population (including humans) is a function of food supply, 2) the Earth is currently overpopulated, 3) producing more food will not solve “the hunger problem”, 4) due to a collection of growing problems (including peak oil, climate change, population overshoot, etc) a collapse is inevitable in the near(-ish) future, and 5) as horrible as it’s going to be, a lot of people are going to suffer and die in the coming collapse.
Since we have already reached agreement that the issue is an important, we’re having some difficulty knowing how to take the discussion any further. It’s difficult to debate someone you agree with
and there’s only so many times you can say “Yup, that’s important…”. I really think the biggest difference of opinion here is that we expect a collapse to happen, and I’m not sure that you do.
Note that this blog is not limited to issues regarding human population, and the focus tends more likely to be in one of the following: collapse, what happens afterwards, what has worked for humans in the past. This is not to say that comments regarding human population are unwelcome, but that there should be a clear connection between any comments and the topic in question. Obviously, this is an ideal, and tangential comments occur anyway.
Comment by jhereg — 26 April 2007 @ 9:52 AM
Dear Jason, Janene and lhereg,
Despite the stridence in my comments, I do appreciate the fact that we agree about something vital.
Let me try again, but this time with a question.
Can one or more of you, or else others, explain to me why scientists like Paul Ehrlich, Jared Diamond, Wolfgang Lutz, John Cleland, Joel Cohen and virtually every other demographer and population scientist on the planet are not discussing Hopfenberg’s work? This research seems to pass by professionals in the fields of human demography and human population science without their notice. At one and the same time, the evidence from Hopfenberg appears virtually irrefutable and also almost unbelieveable to me.
By the way, I do believe the discussion we are having here is of great value………in part because of the fact so many of the population science professionals, especially the ones in positions of responsibility, appear to have been rendered willfully blind, hysterically deaf, or else have become electively mute when presented with Hopfenberg’s data.
Sincerely, and with thanks to each of you,
Steve
Comment by Steven Earl Salmony — 26 April 2007 @ 11:50 AM
I think someone has a man-crush on Russell Hopfenberg…
Which I feel is shooting a little low because, frankly, have you seen Dr. Alan Thornhill? Me-ow!
Comment by Giulianna Lamanna — 26 April 2007 @ 12:26 PM
Steve,
Unfortunately, I won’t be able to provide a particularly academic answer to this question. Actually, I probably won’t be able to provide [b]any[/b] kind of [i]satisfying[/i] answer to your question; I almost believe that none exist.
I’m sure the specific individual reasons are many, certainly one of the more common is simply the sentiment of “What can I do about it? Nothing….”. And,to an extent, it can be hard to argue with that. I don’t see collapse as avoidable anymore. I don’t see suffering and mass die-off as avoidable anymore. Mass extinctions aren’t avoidable anymore. Climate change isn’t avoidable anymore. Failure of our current food supply isn’t avoidable anymore. So the system that is our civilization is going to die, and a lot of people are going to go with it. And human population will be reduced… to something. A million?
A hundred thousand? Tens of thousands…?
Comment by jhereg — 26 April 2007 @ 12:34 PM
Hey –
Ditto. They aren’t talking about this work, I suspect, because no one *wants* to wrap their heads around it. If true (which I do believe, of course) then the *only* possibility is massive de-population. Most people reject that out of hand in favor of *any* alternative. Maybe, eventually, they will be forced to look the bull in the face, but until then, they will continue seeking pipe dreams.
Hey Giuli… like that Alan action, eh? He’s such a good boy
Janene
Comment by janene — 26 April 2007 @ 12:44 PM
Oh, human population is definitely germane here. Of course, not every post is about population, just like not every post is about collapse. But it’s the argument from authority that makes my head spin.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 27 April 2007 @ 11:33 AM
Hi,
Please take note that Russell Hopfenberg responds to questions regarding his articles at the following link.
http://growthmadness.org/2007/05/03/special-guest-dr-russell-hopfenberg-on-food-supply-carrying-capacity-and-population/#more-166
Thanks,
Steve
Comment by Steven Earl Salmony — 3 May 2007 @ 12:08 PM
Hello all. Reading this thread, I wonder what you think of the idea that it’s the education of women - not food supply - that will limit population growth. There’s evidence that this is already happening. Mathis Wackernagel - originator of the
Ecological Footprint quiz - makes a comment about that in a recent radio show from the Earth & Sky radio series (of which I’m the exec producer):
Will women lead the way to sustainability?
It seems there is evidence that when women in the developing world become more educated and have more opportunities, they begin to limit the size of their families.
Comment by Deborah Byrd — 6 May 2007 @ 9:26 AM
I think that the evidence for this neglects the difference between correlation and causality. They’re definitely correlated, but not causal. As I wrote upthread:
Women become educated as societies grow more complex and such education becomes necessary. Such complexity also increases the cost per child, because they also need to be educated. That also diminishes their economic value, since time in school is time not spent in the fields. Thus, the marginal value of having a child plummets as social complexity increases. You end up in the same position as the West, where having a child has not only become no longer profitable, but has become a severe economic burden that must be undertaken for purely sentimental reasons.
Logically, consider the argument Garett Hardin makes in the quote above:
Simply educating women will not stop overpopulation, any more than wearing shorts in January will make the flowers bloom faster. But increasing complexity doesn’t help much, because then you’re limiting the number of people simply by increasing the ecological burden per capita, i.e., the ecological footprint. In the final analysis, while we can shift between more people with lighter footprints or fewer people with heavier footprints, no society can ever voluntarily “scale back” and limit their overall burden. They will use anything and everything available to them, just like any other animal. It may be that we do have free will, but that would be precisely why societies don’t. For every person who limits themselves to one or two, there’s a Duggar. As Charles Galton Darwin said:
In the end, population is always a function of food supply.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 6 May 2007 @ 10:11 AM
Jason, your knowledge and ability to use logic are admirable. But I think you underestimate the power of a woman’s heart.
As a woman, and as a mother, I have faith in the ability of women to act in the best interests of their children, and all children … assuming those women are empowered to act.
Comment by Deborah Byrd — 6 May 2007 @ 2:11 PM
Well, it would be a first in human history if it happened. Even egalitarian cultures grow as large as they can. Because while you think like that, Michelle Duggar has a very different view. It’s not a question of education; educate a woman in Mali and what’s she’ll learn is that the best thing she can do to secure a good life for herself is have seventeen kids. All education does then is show her mathematically what she already knew intuitively. Of course, in order to educate her, you’d need to increase the complexity of her society, which would change that economic reality and the marginal return of each child, so … there you are.
That’s the thing about women’s hearts, because that’s the thing about people’s hearts in general. They’re all over the map. Your heart says we need to rein in overpopulation, and there’s certainly plenty of other hearts that agree. But there’s also other hearts that are equally certain that overpopulation can never be a problem because you can never have too many beautiful babies—citing the kind of loopy logic you recently blogged about. So the power of the human heart to have any kind of society-wide effect is cancelled out by the fact that each one beats to a different tune.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 6 May 2007 @ 8:13 PM
So glad you checked my blog. Here’s our website. Did you happen to check out the map of the blogosphere? When has that ever happened before?
Michele Dugger is an example of a woman in a patriarchal system. She’s not the kind of woman I’m talking about, although I do think you should all stop picking on her.
You are very logical and have knowledge. But I would bet on my knowledge of women’s hearts against yours, especially the hearts of women with respect to children. If women were able, their hearts would guide them to the benefit of their own children, and all children. That love would be more powerful than all your intellectual arguments.
In your formulation, you’re also ignoring the fact that the 21s century world is going to be a predominantly urban world, not a predominantly rural world. We don’t have a data set by which to judge that sort of world, because it has never happened before.
And of course it would be “a first in human history.” Exactly!
No one knows what will happen. I don’t know, and you don’t know. I have faith, though.
Comment by Deborah Byrd — 6 May 2007 @ 9:08 PM
It’s actually pretty common. I used to work with maps like this back when I was studying graph theory: you can do it with websites in general, airports, you name it. Around here, I’ve mostly been doing it with our culture.
I don’t know if I’m “picking on her.” Giuli’s article was certainly a snarky one, but that’s because she feels wronged by her. After all, all of her responsibility and care is being undone by one woman making the opposite decision.
But she is in a patriarchal system, though I think we should take her at her word that this is what she wants and that she values and loves her family, rather than assuming it’s because she’s simply too ignorant to know better. After all, women in egalitarian societies have made similar decisions. Tribal, oral, hunter-gatherer and permacultural societies have all grown to their carrying capacities. All other species grow to their carrying capacities. No species has ever been able to restrain itself from that. You’re essentially talking about a cartel, after all: the possibility is there, but you’re invoking the “common good” as a reason not to satisfy your own, personal desires. The urge to cheat is too great, and that’s why economists so confidently predict the breakdown of any cartel in the long run, because eventually, someone will cheat, and the way a cartel works, the first person to cheat, wins. Homo progenitivus wins out over Homo contracipiens.
Well, my assumption is that women’s hearts don’t differ too greatly from men’s hearts, all things considered. Maybe I’m wrong in that assumption, but I know plenty of women who’d agree with me, and while you might doubt my knowledge of the female heart simply because I’m a man, would you similarly doubt another woman? Or are you simply saying that I don’t understand the human heart in general?
That’s why I don’t put much stock in appeals to the heart, male, female or otherwise. We can talk about hope and faith all we like, but at the end of the day, you’re just insisting that everyone else must feel as you do, and that’s simply not true. I think most people, most of the time, are trying to do the right thing, but we have some very different perspectives on what that is. For a lot of people, saying that overpopulation is a problem is like saying that people are too happy. In your article, you quoted someone putting that sentiment thus, “Large cities are the source of their problems and they are the source of the solutions to their problems.” Babies aren’t problems, they’re solutions. More babies mean more geniuses and inventors who will innovate and inspire and solve the so-called “problems of overpopulation.” Or, in Julian Simon’s words, “The ultimate resource is people — especially skilled, spirited, and hopeful young people endowed with liberty — who will exert their wills and imaginations for their own benefit and inevitably benefit the rest of us as well.” (I also like to cite another quote from Simon that I think exemplifies and shows what’s wrong with his thinking: “Copper can be made from other metals.”) From their perspective, trying to limit population growth is simply denying us the ability to solve our problems, so it must come from nothing more than a deep-seated misanthropy that hopes to stop humanity from achieving the glorious, divine destiny of conquest and apotheosis (whether by Rapture, Singularity, or the ennobling Enlightenment victory of Reason) that we have been promised. We are simply the heretics trying to poison the faithful, trying to lure them away from the True Path of Progress. No, for the sake of our own children, and children everywhere, we desperately need more children!
The 21st century will not be a predominantly urban world, at least not for very long. Cities can only exist by taking resources from outside themselves, so you can only have the majority of your population living inside the cities if you have some kind of vast energy store you can tap, allowing a few farmers to wield enormous amoutns of energy to make up for some ten times the number of people living in cities. In our case, that’s fossil fuels. We’ve been pursuing this strategy since we ran out of arable land to expand into, around 1960. Since then, we’ve instead been using fossil fuels to bend other bioregions to the task of cultivation indirectly, a setup which allows a small rural population that basically just has to press the buttons.
But as vast as the fossil fuel store is, it’s not infinite, and it’s being exhausted. Long before you worry about running out, though, you have to worry about running low: peak oil, the point at which oil production peaks because what remains is more difficult to extract, refine, and produce, so the cost of extracting a barrel of oil begins to approach the energy value of a barrel of oil. At that point—with plenty of oil still in the ground—the usefulness of oil ends. It doesn’t happen overnight; production peaks, and then falls, with prices rising along the way.
That’s where we’re at. Take a good look around and remember this so you can tell your children and grandchildren, because this is as urban as this world will ever be. The high water mark of urbanity is right about now. The trend from here on will be less urban. If any cities survive at all in 2107, they will be fading, nightmarish outposts on the fast track to decline and fall.
Well, I remain convinced that what’s happened before will continue to be a pretty good indicator of what will happen next. Not that new things are impossible, they’re just damnably unlikely. So far, “nothing new under the sun” is really batting a thousand.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 6 May 2007 @ 9:38 PM
We will see, my friend. We will see.
Thanks for the good conversation.
Deborah
Comment by Deborah Byrd — 6 May 2007 @ 9:43 PM
Speaking as a woman, all this talk of “hearts” and “love” add up to exactly nil for me. I don’t feel like I have a fundamentally different way of viewing the world than my husband does—or at least no more so than any human has a fundamentally different way of viewing the world than any other human. Frankly, cultural materialism is the only interpretation of human motivation that really makes sense to me. Who cares what your emotions are? For all the time that life has existed on earth, its growth has been based on resources. This goes for every species that has ever existed. The possibility that this will instantly change, say, next year, for no good reason, just because you think it should, doesn’t really resonate with me.
So what if Michelle Duggar is in a “patriarchal system”? We all are. Your original suggestion wasn’t to destroy the patriarchy in order to curb overpopulation; your suggestion was to educate women. Educated women are still in a patriarchal system. The “kind of woman [you’re] talking about” is not the same woman who’d ever be in the position of having a ton of kids, because she’d be in the kind of culture we’re advocating.
I also disagree with your stance that a mother will always do right by her child. There are tons of neglectful and downright abusive mothers out there. Even if there weren’t, as Jason pointed out, oftentimes the right thing to do for your child is the wrong thing to do for the planet. If you’re living in a culture where the more children you have, the more money you have, then there’s no excuse to have only one child who has to do all the farmwork by himself and in return have little to eat. Why would you expect someone in that situation to have a wider perspective? “Well, if you and your family suffer and possibly starve, you’ll help curb overpopulation!” It’s not that they’re too stupid to know what’s best for themselves and the planet; it’s that what’s best for themselves is at odds with what’s best for the planet. Ultimately, that’s the basic problem of our entire culture.
Comment by Giulianna Lamanna — 6 May 2007 @ 9:50 PM
Aren’t these arguments over future population growth a moot point anyways, considering we’re already in ecological overshoot?
Comment by Locke — 6 May 2007 @ 10:03 PM
Well, that very much depends on your view of the things we’re discussing here, really. If you take the view that humans are animals, with all the biological and ecological ramifications that go with that, then yes. If you believe that even though it didn’t work last year or the year before that or the year before that, or any of the ten thousand years before that, but this is when we’ll finally show that our capacity for reason/caring/insert other humane virtue here makes us uniquely exempt from such basic biological principles as overshoot, then no.
For me, the choice is obvious, yet people like Julian Simon not only persist, they’re actually accorded respect and treated as if they’re sensible, and not insane.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 6 May 2007 @ 10:09 PM
[quote] Frankly, cultural materialism is the only interpretation of human motivation that really makes sense to me. Who cares what your emotions are? For all the time that life has existed on earth, its growth has been based on resources.[/quote]
I thought that was slightly over the top. People’s emotions matter a great deal, they influence (to a large extent determine) people’s actions. Cultural materialism, as I understand it, simply says that people’s emotions are determined by their material conditions.
Now, I personally don’t think that people’s feelings/actions are determined by material conditions, but I certainly would expect any plan of action based on an abstract theory of feelings, divorced from material conditions, to fall flat on its face.
Comment by Hasha — 7 May 2007 @ 8:43 PM
Emotions, beliefs, thoughts, they’re like genetic variation.
Material forces, they’re like selective pressures.
Everybody feels and thinks differently. The ideas with the most prominence are shaped by those material forces.
See “Memetics & Materialism.”
Comment by Jason Godesky — 7 May 2007 @ 11:03 PM
Well, if you’re completely convinced there’s nothing we can do at this point to avert a fairly total collapse of civilization as we know it, it comes close to being moot. But even then, I don’t think it’s totally moot. In fact, depending on how you value human life, it may not be moot at all. If we can take action to bring down fertility rates (before such a collapse, say) , reducing population growth, then fewer people are born and fewer die. The numbers would be very significant. Am I overlooking something?
Comment by John Feeney — 22 May 2007 @ 2:42 PM
What you’re overlooking is how one would go about reducing fertility rates. The notion that you can slow down overpopulation by educating women is akin to thinking you can make summer appear by wearing shorts and sandals. What brings down fertility rates is rising ecological footprint, variously kown as increasing social complexity, economic growth, industrialization, or simply “development.” Then, the cost per child grows so large that you have fewer children, but the ecological impact remains more or less the same.
So, how do you stop population growth? Ultimately, while you can shift between more, poorer people or fewer, richer people, the overall human footprint will sink as deeply as our energy levels allow. To limit energy, you need collapse. Massive mortality is the result of collapse, because the energy such a population once required is no longer available. This is tempered by people learning to make do with less, which leaves more room for more people to survive.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 22 May 2007 @ 2:54 PM
What about stopping increasing the global food supply?
Comment by John Feeney — 22 May 2007 @ 3:31 PM
That’s Daniel Quinn’s suggestion, too, but how would you go about that? The energy exists to grow more food. Let’s say that somehow, you manage to silent the majority of Americans brought up in the Christian tradition about feeding the hungry, and convince them that images of starving children on their television sets notwithstanding, you really can’t stop world hunger by growing more food. You put even more money into farming subsidies to get American farmers to stop increasing yields. You achieve all of these impossible, Herculean efforts, and the United States that once supplied most of the world’s food now stops increasing its output.
Great. What about China? India? Africa? How are you going to stop them from stepping into the gap and taking advantage of the situation by increasing their own production?
You have a Prisoner’s Dilemna all the way down: between regions, between countries, between industries, between corporations, all the way down to between individual farmers. You’re asking them all to forego the advantage over their opponents they’ve been looking for. You’re essentially creating a cartel, and cartels always fail, because cartels create systemic rewards for cheating and breaking the cartel.
If the energy is available, it will be used. There’s no changing that.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 22 May 2007 @ 3:37 PM
Jason,
Sorry for my sporadic comments and replies. I do want to continue this discussion, and will get back to do so ASAP. You make a good case for your expectation of big-time societal collapse, but I think there may be room for a little more optimistic view. Along those lines there’s more I want to dissect here. To be continued…
Comment by John Feeney — 23 May 2007 @ 7:37 PM
I got this off the VHEMT site.
Q: What about the human instinct to breed?
Humans, like all creatures, have urges which lead to reproduction. Our biological urge is to have sex, not to make babies. Our “instinct to breed” is the same as a squirrel’s instinct to plant trees: the urge is to store food, trees are a natural result. If sex is an urge to procreate, then hunger’s an urge to defecate.
Culturally-induced desires can be so strong that they seem to be biological, but no evolutionary mechanism for an instinct to breed exists. Why do we stop breeding after we’ve had as many as we want? If the instinct is to reproduce, how are so many of us able to over ride it? There are too many who have never felt that urge: mutations don’t occur in this high a percentage of a population.
Looking to our evolutionary roots, imagine Homo erectus feeling the urge to create a new human. He then has to understand that a cavewoman is needed, sexual intercourse must be engaged in, and they will have to wait nine months.
Considering how often our species has the urge for sex, it’s likely human sexuality serves primarily a pair-bonding function rather than procreative. Human infants are vulnerable for so long that their survival, in prehistoric times, may have depended on a strong pair bond between parents. Bonobos, perhaps our closest biological relative, engage in sex for social reasons far more than for reproductive reasons.
Taking this into account, contraception may very well be able to limit population, once the “Be fruitful and multiply” complexm is gone from our culture.
Comment by Anonymous — 3 July 2007 @ 9:21 AM
That’s rather silly, don’t you think? People in Mali aren’t having children because they lack birth control, but because having a lot of children makes them wealthy. That’s the fundamental problem that so many of these arguments miss. Without changing the underlying economic system—i.e., without the end of civilization and agriculture—then asking a farmer in Mali to not have children is asking him to subject himself and his family to poverty, disease and early death in order to sooth your liberal, white conscience.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 3 July 2007 @ 9:37 AM
Is it really that silly?
This:
would seem to account for the large families of agrarian cultures.
Am I missing something?
Comment by jhereg — 3 July 2007 @ 9:48 AM
No, that’s not what accounts for large families at all. The cultural factors are invented to justify what is economically advantageous. Agrarian families have lots of kids because in agrarian societies, the cost of raising children is fairly low, particularly compared to the amount of food they bring in as laborers. Consistently, the richest men in any agrarian village will be those with the most children. Thus, agrarian cultures codify this and make it a cultural directive, just like the “sacred cow” in India (see Marvin Harris’s essay on that for reference).
Comment by Jason Godesky — 3 July 2007 @ 10:08 AM
I’m not saying it should be tried everywhere. Just where it can be tried without causing more misery. That obviously excludes countries that’s populace can’t afford not to have children. But if it can be managed, why not?
Comment by Anonymous — 3 July 2007 @ 10:09 AM
Where would that be? Everyone has methods of birth control. Contraceptives have been used since the Paleolithic. There’s nowhere with a major lack of means of birth control. Population is rising because of the consequences of our economic systems. Notice how quickly “be fruitful and multiply” ceases to be a major cultural concern, even in countries like Italy where religious conviction runs deep and there’s a long-standing tradition of huge families, the very moment it ceases to be economically advantageous. Now Italy faces population decline. It really highlights that there’s nowhere where lack of birth control or even cultural convictions are the driving forces of overpopulation. In every case, everywhere around the globe, it’s because overpopulation is advantageous.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 3 July 2007 @ 10:23 AM
I read a wikipedia ariticle on a book of Aldous Huxley’s called Island. Just from that I got the idea for some of it. What do you think
Comment by Anonymous — 3 July 2007 @ 10:25 AM
I haven’t read it, but Jeff Vail certainly seemed to enjoy it.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 3 July 2007 @ 10:27 AM
What I’m talking about is small communities set up in an area prepared for when the collapse happens. I’m thinking something like a cross between an agrarian society and a hunter one, modeled somewhat after Thomas Jefferson’s ideal.
Comment by Anonymous — 3 July 2007 @ 10:38 AM
There’s a lot of parallels there to what we’re talking about, absolutely.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 3 July 2007 @ 10:39 AM
Sorry,my mistake. But my main point is, I wasn’t talking about birth control to preserve our current society , but as a factor in a new one, with an economic system that consumes less, much like Island. (at least I hope so)
Comment by Anonymous — 3 July 2007 @ 10:50 AM
Ah, well, yes, obviously. Birth control has been a part of every wild human society, so it would naturally be a part of feral societies, as well.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 3 July 2007 @ 11:08 AM
O.K. Here’s another thing: Since it is more an urge to have sex than an urge to reproduce, and an increased food supply so often results in an increase of population growth, would it be theoretically possibly to direct the aforementioned urge into a surrogate activity in a case where there is a food surplus, try when population reaches a certain level?
Comment by Anonymous — 3 July 2007 @ 10:50 PM
From: Live Earth [mailto:community@liveearth.org]
Sent: Monday, July 09, 2007 4:06 AM
To: Steven Earl SALMONY
Subject: Live Earth: Grow the Movement for a Climate in Crisis
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Comment by stevenearlsalmony — 9 July 2007 @ 10:36 AM
Theoretically, I s’pose, but most “surrogate activities” fail to be sufficiently “surrogate,” if you know what I mean.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 10 July 2007 @ 2:43 PM
Steven, did you realize you made that comment mere minutes after Giuli published this?
Comment by Jason Godesky — 10 July 2007 @ 2:44 PM
Dear Jason,
Thanks for bringing Gulianna Lamanna’s view to my attention. While her view differs from mine, I like both presentations. Perhaps, in the course of time, at least some of our leaders will pay attention to what all of us are trying to communicate.
While I would prefer NOT to diss politicians, many of them who are primary beneficiaries of the ‘first’ world’s political economy appear to suffer from what has been named a “nature deficit disorder.? Indeed, many too many leaders among us in the developed world seem to have lost touch not only with the natural world but also with good science and humanity. Who knows, perhaps the empire-builders and politicians and mass media moguls of the dominant, industrialized culture of conglomerates have become utterly mesmerized and generally misdirected in their relentless, unbridled pursuit of the golden calf.
After all, we know that several hundred leaders, often serving on multiple executive committees and boards of directors in quasi-secret organizations like The Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg Group and Council on Foreign Relations, exert extraordinary influence upon politicians and minions in the mass media through their billion dollar bank accounts. They manage the world’s interlocking national economies and direct the course of economic globalization. At least to me, these leaders appear to be leading a charge that could inadvertently squash and utterly subordinate the sacred of this world to the profane………… with potentially intolerable consequences for the future of life on Earth.
At its current scale and anticipated rate of growth, the continuous expansion of the world economy we see today may be approaching a point in human history when unbridled production, unchecked per human consumption and skyrocketing human population numbers could overwhelm the limited natural resources and frangible ecosystem services of Earth, upon which life itself depends for it very existence.
Is it not the circumstances of unrestrained, human-driven “overgrowth? activities worldwide that need to change? Perhaps leaders are now called upon to lead by regulating the global growth of human numbers, per capita consumption and endlessly expanding production capabitities so that we find a balanced relationship with nature and, consequently, give this marvelous planetary home God has blessed us to inhabit the time it requires for self-renewal. In our time, people are dissipating more resources than can be restored by the Earth for human benefit.
Or we could choose to stay the current “business as usual? course by maximally increasing production and recklessly dissipating limited natural resources, thereby causing economic globalization to continuously grow in a patently unsustainable way. Then distinctly human over-consumption, overproduction and overpopulation activities would commandeer remaining original wildlife habitats, massively extirpate biodiversity, degrade fragile ecosystems and, very shortly, engulf the planet, would they not?
One primary concern of mine — that needs not to be bound up in silence — is that politicians, their billionaire club business benefactors and their minions in the mass media have themselves introduced a “code of silence? regarding what is being discussed in this blog and similarly situated vehicles of communication. They will NOT openly discuss one topic: the maintenance of the integrity of Earth’s ecosphere, its biodiversity and its natural resources. They do not speak publicly about good scientific data indicating that the current scale and rate of growth of seemingly endless economic expansion could become a patently unsustainable enterprise in the next decade of this century. Can you find public presentations by these self-proclaimed masters of the universe on the potential threats of biodiversity extinction, environmental collapse and, perhaps, human endangerment that could soon be posed by their willful determination to continue the unbridled, maximal extension of BIG business activities worldwide?
Until now, such discussions as this one could not be maintained and, for the moment, remain marginalized from mainstream, mass media communication. Even so, the times………..they are changing, thanks to people like Jason Godesky. More and more people are speaking out loudly and clearly for good science, humanity and the preservation of the Earth, and being heard despite the deafening silence that still surrounds us.
This is only a guess, but one day soon the word ECOLOGY will be spoken in mainstream, public discourse as freely, forcefully and often as the word ECONOMY. One day I believe many leaders among us will substitute the word ECOLOGY for the word ECONOMY in the following sentence.
DO NOT DO ANYTHING THAT HARMS THE WORLD’S _______.
Comment by stevenearlsalmony — 15 July 2007 @ 10:42 AM
To quote Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
Comment by Jason Godesky — 16 July 2007 @ 4:56 PM
Dear Jason,
Please consider the following essay from a friend, Paul Chefurka,
http://www.paulchefurka.ca/Population%20Decline%20-%20Red%20Herrings%20and%20Hope.html
Your thoughts and those of the members of the Anthropik Network are valued.
Sincerely,
Steve
Comment by stevenearlsalmony — 16 July 2007 @ 8:48 PM
That’s pretty awesome right there. I liked how he even brought in resiliency.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 16 July 2007 @ 9:16 PM
Dear Jason,
The human predicament we are discussing here is made more intractable day by day because many too many wealthy and powerful people in my generation (not in your generation) are evidently unwilling to say anything about the formidable situation in which humanity finds itself in these early years of the twenty-first century.
As I see it, THE PROBLEM is simple and has already been presented succinctly elsewhere, years ago. Rarely is the “code of silence? broken by the leadership of the global political economy. But let me provide at least one crystal clear example from a leader I have met face to face and for whom I have great respect. He is Prince el Hassan bin Talal of the great country of Jordan. Of course, many other leaders assisted him in the presentation of “The Report of the Independent Comission on International Humanitarian Issues,? from which I will quote not more than a single sentence. The Commission’s entire report is over 200 pages in paperback and entitled, WINNING THE HUMAN RACE?
One has to read carefully not to miss the following sentence on page 17,
“The problems of over-population and rapid population increase are largely being left for future generations to tackle.?
Humbly, I would submit to you that our good leaders are not doing their best because they are leading in a manner that is intellectually dishonest, ethically unwise and potentially ruinous of human and environmental health.
My not-so-great generation of elders and its leaders can do better and I trust we will.
Comment by Steven Earl Salmony — 18 July 2007 @ 10:29 AM
More to the point, to address the problem would mean to address the very basis of hierarchy itself. The crisis we face is the systemic consequence of the cultural system that gives them their power. Thus, they are systemically incapable of addressing it, much less fixing it. Ultimately, they will always be part of the problem. Hence my quote of Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
Comment by Jason Godesky — 18 July 2007 @ 10:35 AM
Just wanted to say thanks for the wonderful and extremely helpful thesis, as I am working on my college thesis dealing population growth in developing countries.
Ditto to those who have responded with their own ideas, they too have been helpful.
Peace
Audi
Comment by Audi — 26 July 2007 @ 4:17 PM
Dear Friends,
As a first of a two-step thought experiment, please imagine for a moment that climate change is not more than a symptom of a problem, not the problem itself, and that at least one of the primary causes of certain pernicious and intensifying effects of climate change is the current huge scale and fully anticipated growth rate of absolute global human population numbers.
The second step calls for your careful consideration of an apparently unforeseen technical solution to the global human overpopulation problem from Jack Alpert, Ph.D., which follows,
“…………… I have found a behavior (that if implemented) would be powerful enough to prevent extinction of the human experiment. I have even come to a plan for implementing it. (that reflects the delays of implementation and response of the present global system.
It follows this line of reasoning.
1) Maulthus’s argument holds true with important additions.
a) technology can put an upward slope on carrying capacity,
(overload can put a downward slope on carrying capacity.)
b) it’s not total population but total human footprint (population times per capita footprint)
that is constrained by carrying capacity.
c) when these two curves come together, starving to death is not as serious a problem as
loses of well being of a class of individuals who do not die because they live above subsistence.
d) these losers create what I have called “and ever increasing crisis of conflict.”
e) This conflict brings down civilizations (turns Londons into Baghdads)
wasting the wealth of a civilization and the earth to deal with these kinds of crisis
sends populations back to being camel jockeys or worse.
f) The next back sliding will not be regional but global. It will not be serial but simultaneous.
These differences between the crisis we have faced and what we are facing are caused by
everyone sharing (at least in the next 30 years)
common resourvors of resources and common sinks for our wastes.
2) Since these changes in the Malthaus argument now make the collision depend on the product of two variables, population and per capita footprint, (and I accept as a given “ever increasing per-capita footprint,”) the solution space becomes one of varying degrees of human population decline.
3) Certainly if there are no more children born starting today, then the human population would reduce on average by 63 million a year and in one hundred years humans would be gone from the earth. That would be the end of the human experiment.
4) we also know that if we capped population (nominally 2 kid per family behaviors) the total human footprint which is already too big would continue growing because of per capita increases.
5) We would have total human footprint increases even if we put an additional cap on the max footprint of each individual of the 6.3 billion. Just letting the have nots catch up with what ever cap we make, (e.g. the haves of middle america) would require at least 4x increase in total global human footprint.
6) Now the question is, What number between 0 and 2 will allow per capita foot print to rise and the total human footprint fall enough to avoid
a) the personal loss of well being that creates the crisis of ever expanding social conflict, and
b) allow the environment to repair and balance.
7) I came to an estimate of this number:
a) rapid population decline, probably at a rate greater than that created by
universal one child per family behaviors was a minimum requirement to
ensure the viability of the human experiment. The rate of decline
would have to be greater if f Ray Kurtzweil’s longevity predictions are correct.
b) this rate of decline would have to be in place at least for 300 years
if not longer. Leaving a global population of well under 100 million
c) All of the economic and social disruptions caused by such rapid population decline
(aging of pop, changes in family structure, diminishment of the powers of existing groups
(national, regional, religious, race, sex, ethnicity) are small
relative to the benefits that accrue to the people in the future.
(Yes it requires a deep discount of some of the faith based benefits.)
Finally I have formulated a plan to implement universal one child per family behaviors in the next 3-5 years…………”
Comments are invited and sure to be appreciated.
Always with thanks,
Steve
Comment by Steven Earl Salmony, Ph.D., M.P.A. — 20 August 2007 @ 9:48 AM
Tell Dr. Jack good luck with implementing that. Might as well wish for a magical human sterilization epidemic - that lasts for a dozen generations, then disappears.
But, really, civ would then just get right back on with the growth program - unless it was materially constrained to do so…
-Jim
Comment by JCamasto — 20 August 2007 @ 11:11 AM
Making the case for the reduction of absolute global human population numbers……..
2007 World Population Data:
http://www.prb.org/pdf07/07WPDS_Eng.pdf
Comment by stevenearlsalmony — 23 August 2007 @ 7:57 PM
Making the case for a reduction in per human consumption of limited resources.
The Wealth Report: Living Large While Being Green —- Rich Buy ‘Offsets’ For Wasteful Ways; Noble, or Guilt Fee?
24 August 2007
The Wall Street Journal
It’s not easy being green — especially if you’re rich.
With their growing fleets of yachts, jets and cars, and their sprawling estates, today’s outsized wealthy have also become outsized polluters. There are now 10,000 private jets swarming American skies, all burning more than 15 times as much fuel per passenger as commercial planes. The summer seas are increasingly crowded with megayachts swallowing up to 80 gallons of fuel an hour.
Yet with the green movement in vogue, the rich are looking for ways to compensate for their carbon-dioxide generation, which is linked to global warming, without crimping their style. Some are buying carbon “offsets” for their private-jet flights, which help fund alternate-energy technologies such as windmills, or carbon dioxide-eating greenery such as trees. Others are installing ocean-monitoring equipment on their yachts. And a few are building green-certified mansions, complete with solar-heated indoor swimming pools.
Some people say the measures are a noble effort on the part of the wealthy to improve the environment. Eric Carlson, executive director and founder of the Carbon Fund, a nonprofit that works with companies and individuals to offset emissions, says the wealthy are taking the lead in alternative-energy markets such as solar technologies just as they take the lead in consumer markets.
“Obviously these people have different lifestyles from yours or mine,” Mr. Carlson says. “At the same time, they’re not obligated to do anything. We praise those who are doing things. We’re trying to get to a market where the superwealthy are leaders in reducing their [carbon dioxide] footprint and playing a major role in changing this market.”
Others say the efforts are little more than window-dressing, designed to ease the guilt of the wealthy or boost their status among an increasingly green elite. Environmentalists say that if the rich really wanted to help the environment, they would stop flying on private jets, live in smaller homes, and buy kayaks instead of yachts.
“Carbon offsets and these other things are feel-good solutions,” says Lester Brown, founder and president of the Earth Policy Institute. “I’m always interested in people who buy a carbon offset for their jet to fly between their four big homes. These kinds of programs postpone more meaningful action.”
Either way, an increasing number of companies are launching programs designed to help the rich live large while staying green. Jets.com, a private jet service, plans to start a program in early September in partnership with the Carbon Fund. After they take a trip, customers will get a statement on their bills telling them how much carbon dioxide their flight emitted and what it would cost to buy offsets from the fund.
The offsets are a bargain compared with the flights: A round-trip private-jet flight between Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and Boston costs about $20,000. The offsets for the 13 metric tons of carbon dioxide emitted would cost about $74, the company says.
V1 Jets International, a jet charter company, rolled out its “Green Card” program that it says accentuates “the positive effect your flight emissions will have on the environment.” The company calculates the total emissions from the trip and then buys a carbon offset from the Carbon Fund. “From a jet perspective, we have a responsibility to look after the damage that these planes do,” says Andrew Zarrow, V1’s president. The company also has created technologies designed to make flights more efficient by selling seats on “deadleg” trips — flights that are returning empty from one-way trips.
Yacht companies also are getting into the act. Trinity Yachts, a Gulfport, Miss., builder, this month announced it will pay for part of the cost of installing special oceanographic and atmospheric monitoring systems in all of its new boats.
The system, called the SeaKeeper 1000, measures water temperatures and salinity, as well as air temperature and wind speed. The data are sent to scientists who monitor the earth’s oceans. Trinity’s program is in partnership with International Sea-Keepers, a nonprofit marine conservation group founded by a group of yacht owners concerned about the environment.
“The caliber of client we have is very aware of what’s going on in the environment,” says William S. Smith III, vice president of Trinity Yachts. Still, the system doesn’t reduce emissions from the yachts themselves, which can burn hundreds of gallons of fuel a day.
Some wealthy people are going green with their houses, too. The U.S. Green Building Council has certified at least three mansions for being leaders in environmental design, including one owned by Ted Turner’s daughter, Laura Turner Seydel, and her husband, Rutherford, in Atlanta. The 7,000-square-foot-plus house, called EcoManor, is equipped with 27 photovoltaic panels on the roof, rainwater-collecting tanks for supplying toilet water, and “gray water” systems that use water from the showers and sinks for the lawn and gardens. The top of the house is insulated with a soy-based foam that is more efficient than fiberglass. The home has 40 energy monitors and a switch near the door that turns off every light in the house before the family leaves.
Mr. Seydel says the couple’s energy bill is about half that of comparable homes. While he acknowledges they could have built a slightly smaller house, he said all the space is well used, between kids and visiting friends and in-laws.
“The wealthy have always been the early adapters to technology,” he says. “I’m hoping that we can pave the way and show that you can have something that’s luxurious that also makes a lot of sense from an energy and convenience point of view.”
Making the case for a reduction in the seemingly endless economic globalization activities of BIG BUSINESS now overspreading Earth.
In Praise of Mother Nature
By Bret Schulte
Posted 7/15/07
US News & World Report
Science writers generally don’t do whimsy, particularly those who have witnessed the aftermath of Chernobyl or the plundering of Latin America’s resources. But in his provocative new book, The World Without Us, Alan Weisman adds a dash of fiction to his science to address a despairing problem: the planet’s health. Weisman wonders how Earth would fare if people simply disappeared. With help from experts, Weisman discovered that, untended, humanity’s achievements would stand little chance against Mother Nature, even in her weakened state. Sans electric pumps, the New York subway would flood within days. Pretty flowers would quickly crack sidewalks. And the life span of your house? About 50 years. Weisman spoke to U.S. News.
Environmental books are often depressing reads. Does framing a message around a hypothetical make it more approachable?
I would say so. I was looking for some way to seduce readers to keep following along so they could see what is going on in the world and how it all connects. Ultimately, once we take humans out of the picture we see how the rest of nature could flourish. We think, “Wow, if nature could do all that, then is there a way that this could happen that does not depend on our extinction?”
Your book takes us to a 14th-century European hunting preserve and demilitarized zones where nature has a free hand. Were you surprised by what you saw?
It was pretty weird. This fragment of primeval European forest on the Poland-Belarus border literally feels like it’s out of Grimm’s fairy tales. That’s what it looks like, that’s what it sounds like, that’s what it smells like. But the incredible thing is that it doesn’t feel exotic. For someone growing up in Europe or North America, it feels familiar. It feels right.
How did your visit to Chernobyl lead to this book?
I got a call in 2003 from an editor at Discover magazine who read the 1994 story I wrote after the explosion at Chernobyl, where I described how abandoned houses were being taken over by their own landscaping. Roots and trees and even flowers were breaking up sidewalks. A population of radioactive deer kept growing, and radioactive wolves kept coming after them. In 1994, she thought the article was depressing, but as she was editing all these depressing environmental stories, she said it had become one of the most hopeful stories: that no matter how badly we screw up, nature will find a way to overcome it.
What did you take away from these places?
I wasn’t really expecting to realize the history of architecture is kind of like a bell-shaped curve. Our first dwellings were caves, then we started making caves-houses out of rock-and as we got more refined, our buildings grew higher and less permanent. Engineers tell me that our oldest buildings will outlast the newer ones…because we don’t make them the way we used to, out of material from the Earth. The World Trade Center collapsed and St. Paul’s Chapel, which is made out of Manhattan schist, is still standing. Other buildings around the World Trade Center that did not get hit by the airplanes collapsed anyhow.
Is this book a cold splash of water for humanity’s many triumphs?
In some ways it’s a wake-up call, but at the same time humans have done some beautiful things, things you have to admire. One of the surprises for me is coming away with so much respect for the people who maintain our infrastructure. If it wasn’t for these guys keeping the bridges from rusting, or who keep our subway tunnels pumped, or who show up every day at our nuclear plants, stuff would start to disassemble rapidly. We live on the backs of some unsung heroes who are keeping it all together.
Three things: One of them is lovely, the Voyager spacecraft carrying our artwork, our music. I talked to John Lomberg, who put all that together for Carl Sagan, and it was beautiful to talk to someone who thought about what the message to posterity should be. On the darker side: nuclear waste. Depleted uranium has a 4.6 billion-year half-life. The planet is only going to last about 5 billion years before the sun expands. The other thing is plastics. No one really knows how long it will take for plastics to break down because they’re relatively new. Plastic isn’t filling up landfills; it’s blowing into rivers and flowing to the ocean. It’s breathtaking how much plastic we’ve generated.
Your book ends on a controversial note.
I ask: What if we tried one child per family for everyone? I don’t want to deprive people of siblings, but I don’t want to deprive people of species that are wonderful and part of our life. We can’t live without them. If we could bring our numbers down, that would buy us some time to clean up our act.
Comment by stevenearlsalmony — 2 September 2007 @ 9:31 AM
Somehow we, the generation of elders, could conceivably do our children a good service 1) by “passing the word” regarding some kind of plan like Jack Alpert’s proposition for “Rapid Population Decline” and by employing our intelligence, science and technology to begin a process of humanely doing as Reiel Folven of Norway is suggesting: fitting the size of the human population to the size of the Earth 2) by downsizing/rightsizing the global economy to fit Earth’s carrying capacity, perhaps using a model like the one from Aubrey Meyer in England, “Contraction and Convergence” and 3) by figuring out the fair and just ways to cap per capita consumption of resources so that human consumption realistically fits with what can be sustained in our planetary home.
Obviously, a huge challenge is posed to humanity by the unbridled growth of the human population; however, there appears to be a powerful synergy at work in the interplay of humankind’s propagation, production and consumption activities now appearing to threaten life as we know it and the integrity of Earth. As we begin to move in other directions, I am supposing that there would be some kind of beneficial synergy that would help us back down and away from the edge of the ledge at the top of the highest cliff where we seem to have thoughtlessly, inadvertently and unintentionally driven our species.
Somehow, some ways will be found that safeguard the children, their children and coming generations from their experienced elders’ adamant, relentless and patently unsustainable pursuit of the endless wealth to be acquired along a primrose path, the one that could soon take the innocent children beyond ‘the end of the world’ and into the abyss.
Comment by stevenearlsalmony — 2 September 2007 @ 9:34 AM
My generation appears to be mortgaging and threatening the future of coming generations by remaining religiously focused upon the endless accumulation of material wealth, the unrestrained increase in consumption of limited resources, and the continuous consolidation of political power. Despite all the rhetoric to the contrary, we need not look far to see that money, power and privilege for ourselves, for our bought-and-paid-for politicians, and for our newly-made rich minions are the primary object of life. Regardless of the human-driven calamities—derived from per human over-consumption, unbridled economic globalization and skyrocketing global human numbers—that might befall coming generations, we live on in a patently unsustainable fantasy world (we call it reality) of effortless ease, conspicuous consumption, exotic hideaways and thousands of private jets, having abandoned our regard for the less fortunate among us, for the maintenance of life as we know it, and for the preservation of the integrity of Earth. Think of the single-minded pursuit of dollars, political power and privileges to consume and ignore the requirements of practical reality as our raison d’etre.
When my not-so-great generation of elders has completed its mission on Earth, I fear young people will look back in anger and utter disbelief at the things we have done and failed to do…… all the while proclaiming ourselves “masters of the universe” in the performance of uniform exercises of virtue.
Comment by Steve Salmony — 8 September 2007 @ 2:49 PM
Perhaps there is a need for the introduction of “the feminine” to be widely shared in public discourse. As I hear from the females in this network, I have come to realize that the need for their input is becoming crystal clear.
Hear now from Naomi Klein,
http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/2007/200709/20070904.html
Comment by stevenearlsalmony — 9 September 2007 @ 7:44 PM
Children, teach your parents well !!!
In newspapers worldwide, seven days a week, we find ubiquitous presentations regarding the accumulation of wealth in the world economy….now valued at 30 to 40 trillion dollars. It is easy to see how economic globalization is carefully tracked and watched over. Perhaps economic activity is ultimately prized in our time. Nothing quite compares to more money, money, money, money. We seem never to possess enough wealth and the political/military power that is underwritten by people with the most dollars. At least that is what I am seeing and hearing from people like me in the elder generation.
The interlocking national economies of the world economy are also so singularly significant to us because economic systems are impressive, distinctly human inventions. Elders run them. We usually ignore the realization that the global economy is not a part of the natural world per se, nor does it operate like the economy of nature (one we know works), but rather is an artificially designed, faulty human construction.
A question for us today could be, “Is the huge scale and rapidly growth rate of the global economy sustainable through the 21st century or is it to become patently unsustainable in the foreseeable future?”
In my humble opinion, there can be no such thing as economic globalization if there is not a healthy planet from which national economies can derive natural resources and ecosystem services.
In a most remarkable role reversal, our children are teaching their parents that the economy is supported by the natural world in the sense that the world’s human economy and living things depend upon nature for existence. They also are teaching us that the human species depends on the Earth for its survival, too. Our children understand that there cannot be a successful economy without a planetary home capable of supporting business and other activities of human life.
In light of what our children teach us today, we can more deeply appreciate the meaning of their recognition that there will be no such thing as a adequately functioning human economy without a living Earth. Let the elders invite our wealthiest captains of economic globalization to make more redirected investments into the preservation of Earth’s biodiversity and global ecosystems and to eschew unbridled, large-scale business activities that dissipate limited resources, pollute the environment and ravage this wondrous planet we are blessed by God to inhabit.
By so doing, perhaps we can fulfill the hope of each and every parent: to leave our children a world fit for human habitation.
Comment by Steve Salmony — 12 September 2007 @ 7:50 AM
Hello to all,
In light of the many astute understandings being presented in this thread, perhaps the paper that follows could be considered for your REQUIRED READING LIST.
http://getresponse.com/t/9345316/631522/186452485
On the other hand, perhaps I overestimate the importance of the paper, in which case you are invited to comment on its weaknesses.
Always,
Steve
Comment by Steve Salmony — 13 September 2007 @ 7:36 AM
Subject: Press Release: Are We Ignoring Our Planet’s Future?
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Rachel Friedman, 727-443-7115, ext. 206
Rachel@emsincorporated.com
Are Short Term Financial Gains Killing Our Planet?
How Reforms to Capitalism Can Save the Environment
The polar ice caps are melting, species are facing extinction and our climate has become more erratic than ever before. It is impossible to deny the need for intense change in the face of today’s gathering ecological crises. Now that scientific facts support the theories behind global warming, why aren’t more people paying attention—and how do we stop the damage?
Jonathon Porritt, adviser to the UK Prime Minister and author of the new book, “Capitalism as if the World Matters,” (Earthscan 2007) says the first step towards implementing change is to alter the approach to conventional environmentalism. To win people over and get them on board, he suggests focusing on the positive. “Change will not come by threatening people with yet more ecological doom and gloom,” says Porritt. “The necessary changes have to be seen as good for people, their health and their quality of life – and not just good for future generations.”
As the book title suggests, the biggest players in the game- businesses and politicians- must undergo a paradigm shift. “Anything vaguely resembling ‘business-as-usual’ is no less than a death warrant for the highest ideals of contemporary civilization,” says Porritt. “And that means we have to dig a lot deeper than today’s superficial, febrile political debates seem inclined to do.”
While Porritt acknowledges the big picture can be very threatening, he believes positive and profound change is possible. Through his work with Forum for the Future, an organization that works with a very wide range of some of the world’s biggest international companies, Porritt acts as an adviser to a number of chief executives. Porritt says the message that capitalism can be a change-agent for our future is starting to resonate. “Like it or not (and the vast majority of people do), capitalism is now the only economic game in town,” says Porritt. “And that, of course, means that the emerging solutions have to be fashioned with the embrace of capitalism.”
Porritt suggests that today’s model of capitalism is more and more dependent upon liquidating our necessary natural resources. This in turn has a ripple effect of magnifying divides between the rich and the poor worldwide. Porritt suggests that there are three ways we can transform capitalism in order to stop this from getting worse:
Pay real prices for the things that we take out of nature
Get the balance right between the short and long term
Promote responsible consumption (energy, food, travel, etc)
“This combination is the most likely to provide a serious political alternative to today’s economic and political beliefs,” say Porritt. “Sustainable growth is understood as answering the inescapable challenge of living within our “natural limits,” providing unique opportunities for responsible and innovative capital creators, and offering people a more equitable and more rewarding way of life.”
“Capitalism as if the World Matters” offers real-world solutions to the ‘destruction of the world’ problems that our global society faces. Porritt has put his experience to work, outlining frameworks for sustainable capitalism and pointing to the initiatives some governments and businesses are already beginning to follow. As Porritt so adroitly points out, unless conventional environmentalism throws its weight behind this type of progressive political agenda, the planet will continue to face steep decline.
###
To interview Jonathon Porritt or for a review copy of Capitalism as if the World Matters by Jonathon Porritt (Earthscan, 2007; 356pp. paperback, $24.95) contact Rachel Damien-Friedman at 727-443-7115, ext. 206 or email rachel@emsincorporated.com Please include your name, publication, and mailing address with your request. Visit http://www.forumforthefuture.org.uk for more information.
Paperback: 356 pages
Publisher: Earthscan
Available at: http://www.amazon.com http://www.earthscan.co.uk
About the author:
Jonathon Porritt is Co-Founder of Forum for the Future (the UK’s leading sustainable development organization) Jonathon is an eminent writer, broadcaster and commentator on sustainable development.
Porritt was appointed by Tony Blair as Chairman of the UK Sustainable Development Commission in July 2000, the government’s principal source of independent sustainable development advice. In addition, he has been a member of the Board of the South West Regional Development Agency since December 1999, and is Co-Director of The Prince of Wales Business and Environment Program which runs Senior Executive’ Seminars in Cambridge, Salzburg, South Africa and the USA.
Porritt was formerly Director of Friends of the Earth (1984-90); co-chair of the Green Party (1980-83) of which he is still a member; chairman of UNED-UK (1993-96); chairman of Sustainability South West, the South West round Table for Sustainable Development (1999-2001); a Trustee of WWF UK (1991-2005). For his services in environmental protection, he was made Commander of the British Empire in January 2000, which is the highest honor one can receive that does not confer a knighthood.
Rachel Friedman
Print Campaign Manager
Event Management Services, Inc.
1127 Grove Street · Clearwater, Florida 33755
Phone: 727-443-7115 ext. 206
Fax: 727-443-0835
http://www.emsincorporated.com
Comment by Steve Salmony — 13 September 2007 @ 10:12 AM
A growing and now pervasive UNWILLINGNESS exists to do what is necessary to save life as we know it and the integrity of Earth’s body.
People in the very best positions to do meaningful things are lost to this cause, it appears.
For example, Forbes Magazine indicates in their latest list of the 400 Richest People that, for the first time, all the billionaires will not fit on the list of 400. Apparently 82 billionaires had to be left off the list. At least to me, it looks as if too many of our “brothers-with billions” are so singlemindedly focused on the accumulation of wealth and power, in feathering their own gigantic nests, frequenting exclusive clubs, flying private jets, sailing yachts and visiting exotic hideaways, that they have forgotten how human life depends upon Earth’s limited resources and frangible ecosystem services for its very existence.
These “powers that be” have evidently also forgotten what words mean when we say that the Earth is not flat and endless but round, finite and relatively small. One consequence of their widely shared and consensually validated denial of the requirements of practical reality is that the scale and rate of conspicuous per capita consumption is dissipating natural resources faster than the Earth can restore them for human benefit. So great is per human overconsumption by a minority of people in our time that biodiversity is being extirpated, the environment degraded and humanity itself endangered.
Is the fulfillment of the insatiable wishes of unrestrained consumers unexpectedly and perversely tangled up with unbridled big business interests relentlessly pursuing a course of endless economic expansion? Are we fecklessly consuming the very resources needed for our survival? Is humankind being taken for a ride along a primrose path the ends up with our species inadvertently eating itself out of house and home?
Thanks for your consideration and comments.
Sincerely,
Steve
Comment by Steven Earl Salmony — 21 September 2007 @ 9:18 AM
It could be helpful if the holders of great wealth and power in our time would begin doing things differently…..by setting examples through expressions of more moderate, sustainable, self-regulated behavior. Whether rich or poor, not one among those in the humanity community is free from personal responsibility for making necessary behavior changes required for assuring a good enough future for our children. Every preceding generation has accomplished this goal. Had they failed, we would not be now here. We would be nowhere.
Despite many current examples of leadership-without-vision, that imagine a future in which “WE’LL ALL BE DEAD,” many other people fully anticipate a future for coming generations and are working to ensure that future. Perhaps my not-so-great “ME-generation” has not been doing what is necessary to preserve life as we know and the integrity of Earth.
At least to me, the challenges before humankind appear huge. Although not one of us is responsible for the problems we face, of necessity every member of the human community is called upon to help meet these challenges.
What if our leading elders, the ones who have assumed positions of leadership and accepted requisite responsibilities for human and environmental health, choose to do new, different, self-limiting and life enhancing things….some things that, in the predominant culture, are likely to be politically unpopular and economically inefficient?
Comment by stevenearlsalmony — 1 October 2007 @ 2:12 PM
Dear Friends,
The comments in this discussion are wonderful and, I believe, they have to grow in their numbers at a growth rate similar to that of economic globalization today. Of course, the scale and rate of economic globalization needs NOT to continue increasing as it is now. Such unchecked growth of big-business enterprise is soon to become patently unsustainable on a planet the size of Earth.
In this discussion we have shared an adequate enough understanding of the distinctly human-derived predicament with which humanity is soon to be confronted.
Despite the remarkable efforts of deniers, naysayers, and those suffering from hysterical deafness, willful blindness and elective mutism, the good scientific evidence we have shared about human population dynamics is sufficient for us to see our predicament.
How do we transmit our awareness and understanding to people who are simply unaware of what is communicated here so persuasively?
No sane human being could stand idly by in the face of such daunting challenges to life as we know it and the integrity of Earth as we are witnessing.
That silence about the global challenges looming before humanity as a result of certain unrestrained human overgrowth activities has been allowed to thrive while good science, reason and common sense have been ignored, is a sign of some kind of serious mental disturbance within the human community.
Evidence for the next statement is everywhere but not yet seen by many people.
THE HUMAN SPECIES IS DANGEROUSLY OUT OF BALANCE WITH THE NATURAL WORLD OF WHICH ARE AN INTEGRAL PART AND, EVEN WORSE, SUFFERS FROM A POTENTIALLY LETHAL LOSS OF MENTAL BALANCE REQUIRED FOR HUMAN SELF-PRESERVATION, I SUPPOSE.
A torch has got to be carried by all of us to the rich, the powerful and the famous, the ones who organize public opinion, form government policy and direct the talking heads in the mass media, to get the word out. The time to widely share the necessity for ubiquitous, self-limiting behavior change is at hand. Indeed, it is long overdue.
Hopefully too much time has not been wasted, too much of the environment irreversibly degraded, too many species massively extirpated, many too many resources recklessly dissipated and too much of the world we inhabit utterly compromised by our unbridled consumption, production and propagaton activities.
If you know people who can and will make a difference, simply describe the world’s problem and tell them the time for action is now.
Thank you.
Comment by stevenearlsalmony — 2 October 2007 @ 2:44 PM
Two remarkably sound responses follow in the link just below to the ubiquitous commentaries we see in the mass media day after day that extoll the virtues of economic globalization.
http://www.youtube.com/profile_videos?user=policyalternatives&p;=r
If time does not permit the viewing of the complete presentations by Naomi Klein and David Suzuki and you have not more several minutes to view a single part, let me tentatively say that the part I find most helpful and responsive to the many climate change DENIERS and NAYSAYERS can be found in Part 5 of the six part series presented by David Suzuki.
Comment by stevenearlsalmony — 6 October 2007 @ 9:21 AM
For me, there is something supremely ironic in the awarding of a Nobel Prize to a banker named Muhammad. There are plenty of successful bankers in New York City alone. Has one of them ever been nominated for such a prize? Why is Mr. Muhammad Yunus from Bangladesh, a banker described by many people worldwide as a “banker to the poor,” selected for the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize?
I suppose it is because nowhere else on the surface of the Earth can anyone find another banker who is not servicing the rich and powerful and, therefore, willing to say something like, “Everybody is busy buying, everybody is busy consuming, but they don’t realize how much of the exhaustible resources that we are using up by this wasteful way of living, the lifestyle. So we need to look for a new kind of lifestyle, which will be consistent with the resources that we have in this world.”
The successful bankers I have met in the course of time uniformly display a certain imperious reserve associated with excessive wealth and power as well as a willful religiosity that forbids them from speaking out loudly and clearly about such things. Perhaps they will tell you what I have been told for many years, SILENCE IS GOLDEN.
Comment by stevenearlsalmony — 9 October 2007 @ 5:02 PM
12 posts in a row… Steve, are you trying to start your own blog here - embedded at the tail end of the comments section of this thread?
-Jim
Comment by JCamasto — 9 October 2007 @ 8:48 PM
I think he got the idea from Led Zeppelin.
Steve, sing your song.
- Chuck
Comment by Chuck — 9 October 2007 @ 9:41 PM
Whew, well we dodged a bullet there.
That old dirtbag malthus. We are HUMAN above all creation and not bound by reason nor form. All Hail the new messiah Jason and the endless bounty for all forever hurah!. Our beliefs desires and wants are now reconciled with our new bold view of reality. WE are gods not bound like the rest of nature, we stride like colossus into the infinite cornucopia of plenty for all and as many as we want. A hundred hundred billions souls all bursting to the seems with cake.
um why is the price of oil so high? surely there can’t be a “supply” issue.
look dudes, logic sucks, but none of us live for ever, the night comes and even stars exhaust their fuel. This essay explains nothing and is fantasy. Dangerous at that.
Comment by daeran gall — 18 March 2008 @ 9:12 PM
That confuses the ever-loving crap out of me, Daeran. What exactly do you think this article says? I thought it was all about how humans don’t live in some cornucopian fantasy….
You did make it to the third paragraph before commenting, didn’t you? Did you get as far as this paragraph?
If you did—how does that differ from your position?
Comment by Jason Godesky — 18 March 2008 @ 9:20 PM
oops. I guess i should have read the WHOLE essay. I thought it was another “aren’t we sooooo clever now” and malthus was wrong type of essay. I grew up on a farm and i know for a fact resources limit population. Only urban dwellers do not see the impact our temporary production increase has wrought.
Comment by daeran gall — 19 March 2008 @ 2:34 PM
OK, that makes more sense. I thought the essay might make more headway if I started off ceding the points where cornucopians do generally get it right. And Malthus did get it wrong–just not in the way the cornucopians would think. I agree, though, it takes a specially cultivated ignorance of the living world to hold the notions we find so prevalent in civilization.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 19 March 2008 @ 4:19 PM
well, ok. Of course the means to feed the current population exists, otherwise they wouldn’t exist.
I don’t quite think its that simple though, there are exponential growth and decay, Malthus was looking into our times from his own.
Overshoot and collapse, is a recurring biological phenomena. We have overshot soon the collapse will begin to really bite.
I think that you imply that.
But the brillaint statement is the “there is no solution”. That is inspired. I totally agree.
We should not be looking to “solutions” .. to what not being human.
We do have some degree of control of how fast we reach certain points. But our virtues doom us.
Rather we should look past the end point, where a new cycle, with less energy will begin.
Comment by daeran gall — 19 March 2008 @ 9:00 PM
The solutions or rather stabilizing forms might be found in new ideas or really old ones.
One things seems clear to me.
Capitalism does not contract well with nature.
The Sheep look up.
What are our objectives?
Perhaps the future will be just fine, as in 6 to 10k from now. The ice ages will be gone, possibly for a million years. No oil to mess things up, a naturally limited society.
Perhaps our goal should be to end this with as little future “echo” as we can muster.
There is no stopping it now, like the passengers on a train that has arrived at its stop. We are hesitant to disembark, but we have arrived at the station so to speak. It clearly is the end of the world as we know it.
Read Halocene. Welcome to the Anthropocene or whatever it is to be called.
The human population will implode within 100 years.
and possibly in 10, very likely in 30.
The Fish, OIl, Food and biological implosions are all around us.
Breathe and enjoy the show. It has to end.
Personally and collectively. What do we leave behind that i think is what we should be looking at.
Comment by daeran gall — 19 March 2008 @ 9:15 PM
2007 EXCHANGE OF IDEAS BETWEEN FRIENDS (and perhaps timely in 2008)
__________________________________________
Dear B,
In the light of E. O. Wilson’s comments about small creatures and today’s report from the World Conservation Union (IUCN) that more than 41,000 species of animals and plants are now on its ENDANGERED SPECIES LIST, do you think it is too early to consider that the evolutionary success of the human species may not be guaranteed? Perhaps it is not too late to consider how the human species in our time could inadvertently precipitate a “Human Community Collapse” by adamantly insisting upon more unbridled growth of business enterprise and human numbers now overspreading the Earth.
I am concerned that after threatening biodiversity with extinction and the environment with irreversible degradation, and also dissipating the limited resources of Earth, humankind will become an unexpected threat to its own survival.
Sincerely,
Steve
____________________________________________
Hi Steve,
You bring up a very good point, and one that is foremost in the minds of everyone with environmental awareness. The notion of sustainability does not seem to have been infused in equal value to progress made in both the industrial and technological revolutions. When we look closely, it is as if we are but children playing with new toys, not grasping just what they mean nor thinking very far into the future. Anyone who studies simple biology knows that unchecked growth cannot last, that eventually the system that supported whatever it is gets out of balance, and then…well…things change. So at the very least we are looking for sweeping change. How much of it we will see in our short lifespan is uncertain, but what is certain is that even now we are observing first-hand some negative effects of our actions in the past. Nature is very efficient, and certainly will take care of things one way or another. I agree with what you suggest, that we could benefit from applying caution and implementing the enlightened consideration of experts in our approach to the future. Application of knowledge requires official sanction and public policy, which as you know is not so easy to achieve. Hopefully, the brightest minds among us who post their knowledge and recommendations in research & books and who broadcast their views and information on things like TED TALKS will encourage our policy makers to get on the same page, i.e., as stewards of the earth and its abundance rather than exploiters. Ultimately, I have hope, and think a hopeful attitude can have a snowball effect. I’m pretty sure hope is the official stance of this organization, by the way, and why a forum such as this is so encouraging.
Thanks, Steve, for your posts here and elsewhere on our blogs.
___________________________________________
Dear B,
Sometimes it looks to me as if some of our brothers and sisters are so focused on the accumulation of wealth and power, in feathering their own gigantic nests, frequenting exclusive clubs, flying private jets, sailing yachts and visiting exotic hideaways, that the “powers that be” have overlooked the certain requirements necessary for the maintenance of our planetary home, which is soon to become endangered by certain unbridled, distinctly human enterprises now overspreading the Earth.
How do things look to you?
Always,
Steve
___________________________________________
Steve,
I like the idea of everyone coming to see that we are definitely interconnected. Just as the bees and flowering plants need each other, so do we humans need the environment. The sooner we get truly sustainable in our stewardship of the environment, the better. The last 50 years have seen unprecedented wealth and technology, and a few have enjoyed advantages never dreamt of in the past. Hopefully, we will all start doing our part, even the very insulated among us. I’m actually quite optimistic, as I think there is so much positive focus for new energies coming along in young people, and a rededication to creative efforts to make the world a better place in those of us who are older. I certainly can imagine these things building on themselves. It starts right here, wherever we are.
B.
____________________________________________
Dear B,
I share your optimism. With good science as our guide and the adequate use of intelligence and other splendid gifts granted to human beings by God, we can choose to respond ably to the requirements of reality, whatsoever they may be.
Elders like me will hopefully be open to guidance of our young people, as you suggest, and also of the mothers of children, rather than holdfast to the outworn creeds of the children of men among us. The self-proclaimed masters of the universe in my not-so-great generation appear to have lost their way.
On the other hand, we cannot rule out the possibility that I am one of those unfortunate elders about whom I report, who has lost touch with good science, the natural order of living things, and the limitations imposed upon human life by the very nature of the biophysical world we inhabit.
I and my generation can and will do better. Of that I am certain.
Sincerely,
Steve
___________________________________________
ONWARD!
B.
___________________________________________
Dear B,
I believe this is one way to begin. We have to speak of topics that are taboo, just as we do here.
My greatest concern is that the undoing of the human species, and life as we know it, could inadvertently occur as a result of the adamant and relentless maintenance of SILENCE.
Silence is something to be feared. Silence is especially terrifying and potentially ruinous when it is actively employed as a tool for denying good science.
Thank YOU,
Steve
__________________________________________
Steve,
I don’t mean to be flip, but the old saying comes to mind: “The more the merrier!” We can hope more voices will speak up for beneficial uses of our stunning technologies to forge a path to a wise, efficient, and fittingly sustainable paradigm for the future world. There is another saying that comes to mind should we fail to understand what we need to do, and that is, “That way lies madness.” I am so looking forward to the tipping point, where all accept as a given the need to create and live in a balanced world. I know it is coming.
B.
____________________________________________
Dear B,
You make wonderful points. Let me see if I understand you well enough.
Would it be correct to say that we have a choice: either we can choose to accept the knowledge derived from the best available, good science and deploy that knowledge to maintain a sustainable world, one fit for human habitation, or we can fail to do what is necessary by holding fast to an unsustainable paradigm for the future world…and by continuing to defend flawed data derived from politically convenient and economically expedient mad science?
Always,
Steve
__________________________________________
…and having the wisdom to know the difference.
B.
__________________________________________
Dear B,
At least in my humble opinion, THIS IS COMMUNICATION!
Perhaps humanity has global challenges in the offing, challenges that are formidable, even as we begin to take the measure of them.
As we steady our focus on these challenges, it becomes evident that there may be no quick fixes to the problems with which we are presented. Business-as-usual brought us to this moment in human history, but cannot take us to the future we picture for our children.
Contemplate and picture in your mind the business-as-usual activities with which we are familiar. We can see that the unbridled growth of economic activities is overspreading the Earth.
Now for the hard part: questions.
Can the seemingly endless growth and the astonishing success of unregulated human production and consumption activities continue in the same old business-as-usual way and at their current scale on a relatively small, finite planet the size of Earth?
If the Earth is round and has physical limitations, is it reasonable and sensible to consider that there are limits to the unrestricted global growth of human activities on Earth?
Are there no alternatives to untethered economic globalization?
Are there no options to the unchecked per capita consumption of Earth’s limited resources?
Who knows, before long questions like these will become a part of open discussions at international conferences, in governing bodies and spoken of by those in the mass media.
I and my generation are going to do better, much better.
__________________________________________
Steve,
Your questions almost answer themselves and wholly appeal to common sense. I believe that love of humanity, passion for life and a strong will to survive will eventually corral all of us into the same camp, which is good because we must work together to solve our problems. We may be lucky that things are getting so blatantly out of hand, because a cry for better will eventually emerge. Hat’s off to any who can keep their heads while some around us are losing theirs. Like a teenager on a joy ride, flagrant environmental abuses cannot have good results and therefore cannot last that long. The trick will be coming to the tipping point. I believe we are very very close. I hope others will participate in this inspiring conversation. We believe in the exchange of ideas and invites it with these blogs. Thanks so much for participating.
____________________________________________
Dear B,
Thanks to you, D., Al and the great scientists of the IPCC, it does appear more and more people are beginning to awaken, finally, with the coming of each new day, to something that is fresh and unforeseen about the world we inhabit.
I and our dearest colleagues have only become awakened just a matter of days earlier than those who are soon, or else eventually, to be released from their slumber.
Once awake, people are going to be able to see that while nothing about the surface of the Earth has changed, not really; everything about the wondrous landscape is different in unexpected ways.
When many in the human community perceive what you and other leaders are saying and doing, it will be as if they are seeing the world God blesses us to inhabit for the first time, I suppose.
That is going to make a difference.
All the best to you,
Steve
Comment by stevenearlsalmony — 5 April 2008 @ 6:39 AM
Dear Dr. L. B.,
I am imagining that your questions above are rhetorical ones.
You ask,
“Why are politicians and skeptics so willing to risk their future and everyone else’s future on blindly clinging to a course of action that has a high probability of leading to a seriously crippled future? If you even suspect that global warming represents a serious risk to your survival (and we have far more than suspicion these days), why wouldn’t you do everything protect and conserve your planet?”
It would please me to hear from others; but from my humble perspective the “answers” to your questions are all-too-obvious.
First, the leaders in my generation of elders wish to live without having to accept limits to growth of seemingly endless economic globalization, of increasing per capita consumption and skyrocketing human population numbers; our desires are evidently insatiable. We choose to believe anything that is politically convenient, economically expedient and socially agreeable; our way of life is not negotiable. We dare anyone to question our values or behaviors.
We religiously promote our shared fantasies of endless economic growth and soon to be unsustainable overconsumption, overproduction oand overpopulation activities, and in so doing deny that Earth has limited resources upon which the survival of life as we know it depends.
Second, my not-so-great generation appears to be doing a disservice to everything and everyone but ourselves. We are the “what’s in it for me?” generation. We demonstrate precious little regard for the maintenance of the integrity of Earth; shallow willingness to actually protect the environment from crippling degradation; lack of serious consideration for the preservation of biodiversity, wilderness, and a good enough future for our children and coming generations; and no appreciation of the understanding that we are no more or less than human beings with “feet of clay.”
We live in a soon to be unsustainable way in our planetary home and are proud of it, thank you very much. Certainly, we will “have our cake and eat it, too.” We will fly around in thousands of private jets and live in McMansions, go to our secret clubs and distant hideouts, and risk nothing of value to us. Please do not bother us with the problems of the world. We choose not to hear, see or speak of them. We are the economic powerbrokers, their bought-and-paid-for politicians and the many minions in the mass media. We hold the much of the wealth and the power it purchases. If left to our own devices, we will continue in the exercise of our ‘rights’ to ravenously consume Earth’s limited resources; to expand economic globalization unto every corner of our natural world and, guess what, beyond; to encourage the unbridled growth of the human species so that where there are now 6+ billion people, by 2050 we will have 9+ billion members of the human community and, guess what, even more people, perhaps billions more in the distant future, if that is what we desire.
We are the reigning, self-proclaimed masters of the universe. We have no regard for human limits or Earth’s limitations, thank you very much. Please understand that we do not want anyone to present us with scientific evidence that we could be living unsustainably in an artificially designed, temporary world of our own making…… a manmade world filling up with distinctly human enterprises which appear the be approaching a point in human history when global consumption, production and propagation activities of the human species become unsustainable on the tiny planet God has blessed us to inhabit….. and not to overwhelm, I suppose.
Third, even our top rank scientists have not found adequate ways of communicating to the family of humanity what people somehow need to hear, see and understand: the reckless dissipation of Earth’s limited resources, the relentless degradation of the planet’s frangible environment, and the approaching destruction of the Earth as a fit place for human habitation by the human species, when taken together, appear to be proceeding at a breakneck pace toward the precipitation of a catastrophic ecological wreckage of some sort unless, of course, the world’s colossal, ever expanding, artificially designed, manmade global economy continues to speed headlong toward the monolithic ‘wall’ called “unsustainability” at which point the runaway economy crashes before Earth’s ecology is collapsed.
Sincerely,
Steve
Comment by stevenearlsalmony — 14 April 2008 @ 6:39 PM
There are two questions I would like to ask members of the Anthropik Network.
As almost everyone knows but few openly discuss, wealth and power buy freedom. What is all too obvious but often cloaked in silence is this: A small minority of individuals in the human family with great fortunes and virtually all large corporations exercise their great wealth and the power it purchases in ways that allow all of these self-proclaimed masters of the universe to live lavishly as well as to willfully refuse assumption of the responsibilities which necessarily come with freedom.
1. How do rich and famous people, who live large and have huge ecological footprints, as well as corporate `citizens’ that cast giant shadows over the Earth today, so easily get away with socially irresponsible behavior?
2. The exercise of freedom without the requisite assumption of responsibility by citizens can lead to psychopathic behavior; the exercise of freedom by those individuals and corporations with great wealth who consensually-validate each others refusal to accept responsibility for their excessive, pernicious and amoral behavior is sociopathic, is it not?
Sincerely,
Steve
Comment by Steve Salmony — 3 July 2008 @ 10:23 AM
Two notable errors in this otherwise excellent article:
1) Quantity of global cultivated land actually fell following the Green Revolution, per USDA figures, not rose. It was now possible to produce more food per acre, thanks to the greater conversion of fossil fuel calories into food via pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, synthetic fertilizers, and hybridized seeds, so much so that 90% of the calories in wheat can now be directly attributed to fossil fuels, not photosynthesis. As a former USDA employee (1996-2000), let me just say that Dr. Heinberg is quite correct, modern agriculture is the industrial process in which topsoil is used to convert fossil fuels into food.
http://www.richardheinberg.com/museletter/188
2) Malthus was correct, and it is Mr. Godesky who has it backwards. It is quite possible, and in fact even quite common in the ‘natural’ world for animal populations to temporarily grow beyond the ability of their environment to feed them. Any biologist knows this, it is called overshoot, and is followed by a self-correction, usually initiated by some natural variation (drought, famine, disease, etc).
Two well documented examples included the US Coast introduction of deer to St. Matthews Island,
http://www.greatchange.org/footnotes-overshoot-st_matthew_island.html
and the Rapa Nui population overshoot that occurred on Easter Island, where the ever-growing human population exceeded the carrying capacity of the island, eventually destroying it in the process.
http://www.mc.maricopa.edu/dept/d10/asb/anthro2003/origins/eastersend.html
Comment by fallout11 — 7 July 2008 @ 6:44 AM
Sorry, neglected to mention in #1) above that the formerly cultivated land taken out of production following the Green Revolution was used for other purposes, namely housing and commerce for the burgeoning population. Here in America you can easily find former farmland now paved over and covered in urban sprawl, tract housing, and strip malls.
Much the same occurred elsewhere, even in the Third World. For example, Lagos, Nigeria, Mexico City, Mexico, and Sao Paulo, Brazil all tripled in size just since 1970, with the surrounding countryside now covered in favelas and similar poverty-ridden high density development.
Comment by fallout11 — 7 July 2008 @ 6:50 AM
Their populations wouldn’t have grown to that size if their environment couldn’t feed them. Once a population overshoots carrying capacity, they eat up the rest of their food supply very quickly, and *that* leads to the subsequent population crash. The deer were eating quite well, which led to their meteoric rise… Just as the Rapa Nui before they wiped out their forests (and their food supply along with it).
Comment by Heretic — 7 July 2008 @ 6:59 AM
Steve,
I have taken the liberty of eliminating the fiery rhetoric in your post to more clearly highlight the questions that you ask.
To an extent wealth IS freedom. Wealth is the ability to take care of oneself without (over)reliance on others. If you need a job to have a house and food then you are not wealthy.
Why do you think freedom comes with responsibilities? Who or what imposes those responsibilities on them? Isn’t freedom, literally, the ability to do what one wants without regard for consequences?
Comment by JimFive — 7 July 2008 @ 8:38 AM
fallout,
Malthus makes the assumption that population can grow in the absence of food. This is clearly incorrect. It may be true that in the presence of excess food the population grows faster than the food supply but that leads to either an equilibrium point or an overshoot and collapse, not systemic, long-term starvation.
–
JimFive
Comment by JimFive — 7 July 2008 @ 8:41 AM
Dear JimFive,
Thanks for your incisive comments.
I have just now consulted the DSM concerning the term, sociopathic, which, as you likely know, is not a diagnostic category in DSM.
Let me be a bit more precise now.
The diagnostic category to which I would like to draw your attention is ADULT ANTISOCIAL BEHAVIOR. This is a condition not attributable to a specific mental disorder, but is characterized by irresponsible, criminal or other aggressive or antisocial behavior that occurs in people who do not meet the full diagnostic criteria for Antisocial Behavior Disorder.
Your comments lead me to ask you a question. It appears to me that the culture in which I have always lived appears to ‘breed’ people with personality disorders. If you could choose a diagnostic category for people found generally in the culture who exhibit distinct patterns of irresponsible and antisocial behavior such as are found in ADULT ANTISOCIAL BEHAVIOR, which category among the Specific Personality Disorders would you pick?
If I chose one of the Personality Disorders, the category of Borderline Personality Disorder appears to describe one form of psychopathology that I see among many people in the culture. Please note that my conceptualization of the borderline personality disorder rivets attention on a level of personality organization that is marked by psychic “splitting.”
Your comments as well as thoughts from others in the Anthropik community are welcome.
Sincerely,
Steve
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on the Human Population, established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php
Comment by Anonymous — 7 July 2008 @ 12:38 PM
As I mentioned in my previous response, this type of labeling doesn’t seem useful to me.
I think it is more accurate to say that the culture of psychological practice appears to create disorders and then diagnose people with them. It is a tenet of psychology that everyone is disordered. Psychology, in an effort to appear scientific, rates individuals by how far they are from some idealistic mean. So to the Psychologist, the question isn’t “Are you antisocial?” the question is “How antisocial are you?”
I would tend to argue that the classification of actions as “anti-social” is biased enough as to lack utility in actually understanding the individual.
It is interesting to look at Anti-Social Personality (APD) and Borderline personality(BPD) next to each other. APD basically describes a person who gives his own desires significantly more weight than the desires of others or of the heirarchy. That is, enough more weight that the individual performs actions that are condemned by the hierarchy without regard for the consequences. BPD describes a person who gives so much weight to social opinion that they fail to form a coherent idea of their “self”. APD and BPD are basically opposites and, as above the question isn’t “Do you have APD, BPD?” The question is “Where are the scale (Locked up for APD)(Locked up for BPD) do you fall.”
–
JimFive
Comment by JimFive — 8 July 2008 @ 10:34 AM
Dear JimFive,
Thanks for more remarkable comments. I am only guessing, but it appears to me that Thomas Szasz, along with myself and others, would enjoy your perspective immensely.
Whether we see eye to eye on points of discussion matters little, but I would be remiss by not expressing my appreciation for your clarity of vision and coherence of mind.
As you put it so well, my words are “fiery.” That is so. My “fiery” purpose is to shed some light on what look to me like human-induced global challenges that are posed to humanity by the unregulated propagation, unrestricted consumption and unbridled production activities of the human species which can be seen overspreading the surface of Earth in our time.
As ever,
Steve
Comment by Steve Salmony — 8 July 2008 @ 12:56 PM
Dear JimFive,
Do you think the children will ask those in my not-so-great generation of elders, “When did you see the good scientific evidence of what everyone knew? Why did you not say anything, even though you did not know precisely what to do? How on Earth could you stand by, as if hysterically blind, willfully deaf and electively mute, and allow “…the greed….of a thousand little kings…” who arrogantly see and proclaim themselves “masters of the universe” to precipitate the destruction of life as we know it and God’s Creation in the early years of Century XXI?”
Sincerely,
Steve
Comment by Anonymous — 16 July 2008 @ 12:55 PM
Steve,
No.
–
JimFive
Comment by JimFive — 16 July 2008 @ 1:30 PM
Dear JimFive,
For my sake, I hope you turn out to be correct.
Any other thoughts regarding the questions I fear will irresistably be presented to those of us who have exercised our ‘freedom’ in such conspicuously unrealistic and obscenely irresponsible ways?
Comments from others are also welcome.
Always,
Steve
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php
Comment by Steven Earl Salmony — 17 July 2008 @ 8:28 AM
Steve,
Those questions won’t be asked because they will be (and are) irrelevant. Those are the same basic questions that the Gen Xers ask the Boomers. If those questions are being asked then society will not have collapsed. And if society has not collapsed then those questions won’t need to be asked.
In addition, children know only what they grow up with. The children won’t be asking questions about the ancient past.
But apart from that, the alleged questions that you propose aren’t really questions. They are rhetorical on their face and presume the answers that you want to hear.
If you wish to have a legitimate conversation would you care to address the questions I posed on 7/7 reproduced below:
–
JimFive
Comment by JimFive — 17 July 2008 @ 10:38 AM
JimFive, I believe Steve has given up on trying to converse with you since your logic has, in all honesty, become something of a Mobius strip.
However, what you describe as “freedom” is in fact a clinical (DSM-III) hallmark of sociopathy, or Antisocial Personality Disorder (DSM-IV), Freud’s and Jung’s ID in its truest form, unfettered by morals or values or external inhibitions.
No action is without consequence, and thus to willfully disregard such in the interest of self requires a narcissistic mind at best, a consciousless one at worst.
See also Robert Hare’s seminal work, “Without Conscious” and Cleckley’s “The Mask of Sanity” for more details.
Oh, and I want a pony! For freedom, of course.
Comment by fallout11 — 30 July 2008 @ 2:21 PM
Fallout,
I never claimed that freedom was an ultimate good. It seems clear to me that freedom can be taken to just as much of an extreme as any other ideological tenet (see The Libertarian Party).
However, claiming that freedom comes with responsibilities is disingenous. Responsibilities constrain freedom; not enhance it. Responsibility is a constraint on freedom that we accept in order to be members of a society. It is not freedom that comes with responsibilities, it is society that comes with responsibilities. A member of a society has responsibilities to other members of the same society. Rarely, if ever, does society impose responsibilities outside of the society.
If you view freedom, responsibility, and society in this way then the answer(s) to Steve’s questions become apparent. Corporations and the extremely wealthy are not (do not see themselves as being) in the same society as the rest of us. Therefore, they do not see themselves as having responsibility to the rest of us.
–
JimFive
Comment by JimFive — 31 July 2008 @ 9:52 AM
Dear Fallout11 and JimFive,
Consider the words Garrett Hardin wrote in his famous essay, “The Tragedy of the Commons” (Science, 162(1968):1243-1248), “Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.”
Perhaps freedom without responsibility is fool’s gold.
As ever,
Steve
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php
Comment by Steve Salmony — 4 August 2008 @ 8:41 AM
I Wonder What Galileo Is Doing Tonight…..
I find it irresistible not to at least take a moment to wonder aloud about what Galileo is doing tonight. My hope would be that the great man is resting in peace and that his head is not spinning in his grave. How, now, can Galileo possibly find peace when so many top-ranking experts refuse to speak out clearly regarding whatsoever they believe to be true about the distinctly human predicament presented to humanity in our time by certain unbridled “overgrowth” activities of the human species that loom ominously and threaten to engulf our planetary home?
Where are leaders willing to support solid scientific observations and adequate empirical evidence?
What would the world we inhabit be like if scientists like Galileo had adopted a code of silence or else selectively ‘mined’ data bases, manufactured controversy by misrepresenting science, passed along disinformation to spread uncertainty, and acknowledged evidence as somehow scientific only if the evidence passed the litmus tests of political convenience, economic expediency and social correctness?
Comment by Steven Earl Salmony — 15 August 2008 @ 8:13 AM
When I was a boy, we were taught that each generation had responsibilities to assume and duties to perform with regard to the acknowledgement and acceptance of the challenges that are present at that time, so that the next generation can have a chance at a better life. Under no circumstances, would it be correct to pose as willfully blind, hysterically deaf or electively mute in the face of any challenge, as many too many in my not-so-great generation are doing in these days.
What has happened to the misguided leaders of my generation? So many in the elder generation have determined to let the looming challenges in our time fall into the laps of our children. At least to me, today’s leaders show an astonishing unwillingness to examine the dimming prospects of a good life for those who directly follow us, let alone coming generations.
After my single, not-so-great generation finishes the `missions’ (ie, fools’ errands) the leading, self-proclaimed “masters of the universe” among us have set before the human community, what resources will be left for our children to consume; how many more people will have to share what remains of Earth’s dissipated and degraded resources; where will they find clean air to breathe, clean water to drink? I shudder when thinking about what our children might say about what we have done so poorly and failed to do so spectacularly, all for sake of selfishly fulfilling our insatiable desires for endless material possessions and freedom to live without limits…..come what may for the children, coming generations, global biodiversity, the environment and Earth’s body.
How could one generation go so wrong? Here are some of the ways.
First, the leaders in my generation of elders wish to live without having to accept limits to growth of seemingly endless economic globalization, of increasing per capita consumption and skyrocketing human population numbers; our desires are evidently insatiable. We choose to believe anything that is politically convenient, economically expedient and socially agreeable; our way of life is not negotiable. You are not to question our values or ways of behaving. We know the only right way to live.
We religiously promote our widely shared and consensually-validated fantasies of `real’ endless economic growth and soon to be unsustainable overconsumption, overproduction and overpopulation activities, and in so doing deny that Earth has limited resources and frangible ecosystems upon which the survival of life as we know it depends.
Second, my not-so-great generation appears to be doing a disservice to everything and everyone but ourselves. We are the “what’s in it for me?” generation. We demonstrate precious little regard for the maintenance of the integrity of Earth; shallow willingness to actually protect the environment from crippling degradation; lack of serious consideration for the preservation of biodiversity, wilderness, and a good enough future for our children and coming generations; and no appreciation of the vital understanding that humans are no more or less than magnificent living beings with “feet of clay.”
Perhaps we live in unsustainable ways in our planetary home; but we are proud of it nonetheless. Certainly, we will “have our cake and eat it, too.” We will own fleets of cars, fly around in thousands of private jets, live in McMansions, exchange secret handshakes, frequent exclusive clubs and distant hideouts, and risk nothing of value to us. We will live long, large and free. Please do not bother us with the problems of the world. We choose not to hear, see or speak of them. We are the economic powerbrokers, their bought-and-paid-for politicians and the many minions in the mass media. We hold much of the world’s wealth and the extraordinary power great wealth purchases. If left to our own devices, we will continue in the exercise of our ‘inalienable rights’ to outrageously consume Earth’s limited resources; to recklessly expand economic globalization unto every corner of our natural world and, guess what, beyond; and to carelessly consent to the unbridled global growth of human numbers so that where there are now 6+ billion people, by 2050 we will have 9+ billion members of the human community and, guess what, even more people, perhaps billions more in the distant future, if that is what we “free wheelers and dealers” desire. Afterall, we are free and you surely value freedom.
We are the reigning, self-proclaimed masters of the universe. We are entitled to enjoy freedom and living without limits; of course, we adamantly eschew any talk of the personal responsibilities that come with the exercise of freedom or any discussion of the existence of biophysical limitations of any kind.
We forthrightly deny the existence of human limits and Earth’s limitations and dare anyone to question these views.
Please understand that we do not want anyone presenting us with scientific evidence that we could be living unsustainably and ‘freely’ in an artificially designed, temporary world of our own making…..a manmade world filling up with gigantic enterprises, virtual mountains of material possessions and human waste, and boundless amounts of filthy lucre.
Third, most of our top rank experts and the people in many places who refer to each other as “the brightest and the best” {and point to each other as the “smartest guy in the room”} appear not to have found adequate ways of communicating to the family of humanity what people somehow need to hear, see and understand: the rapacious dissipation of Earth’s limited resources, the relentless degradation of the planet’s environment, and the approaching destruction of the Earth as a fit place for human habitation by the human species, when taken together, appear to be proceeding at breakneck speed toward the precipitation of a catastrophic ecological wreckage of some sort unless, of course, the world’s colossal, ever expanding, artificially designed, manmade global political economy continues to speed headlong toward the monolithic ‘wall’ called “unsustainability” at which point the runaway economy crashes before Earth’s ecology is collapsed.
Who knows, perhaps we can realistically and hopefully hold onto the expectation that behavioral changes in the direction of sustainable production, per human consumption, and propagation are in the offing…..changes that save both the economy and the Creation.
What a shambles is being constructed out of hubris and a willful disregard for human limits and Earth’s limitations. How great is the material sham to be cleaned up by our children? What a shame.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, est. 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php
Comment by Steven Earl Salmony — 19 August 2008 @ 2:07 PM
Political Will, Political Won’t
————————————————–
The accepted wisdom of today’s environmental reform movement is founded on two core assumptions. The first is that most of the technical solutions we need to address the world’s various crises are available, or at least could be swiftly developed by sufficiently intelligent, hard-working people. The second assumption is that all that’s lacking for a successful outcome is the political will to put these technical solutions into effect.
Whether the discussion turns to replacing coal-fired power plants with wind turbines and using electric cars instead of gas-driven SUVs, converting industrial agricultural practices to organic permaculture, or reversing the decline of ocean life though international regulations, it is an article of faith in the reform movement that we know what we need to do and all that’s lacking is a sufficiently visionary leader to put more planet-friendly solutions in place.
Both those assumptions ignore significant aspects of the situation – aspects that must be addressed for the envisioned reforms to be successful. This article examines those two assumptions with an eye to uncovering the confounding issues.
The array of problems
As the following laundry list of negative trends clearly illustrates, the scale and diversity of the problems we face are significant.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is approaching 400 parts per million.
We are emitting carbon dioxide 10 times faster than one of the world’s largest known volcanic eruptions (the Deccan Traps) that was implicated in the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event 65 million years ago.
Ice caps and glaciers are disintegrating.
World oil production is on a 4 year plateau despite prices that have quadrupled during that time.
In our oceans the coral reefs are dying, dead zones are expanding, and predatory fish species (the ones we eat) have declined by 90% in the last 50 years.
The biomass of prey fish in the Great Lakes has fallen by 92% since 2000.
The estimated extinction rate for plants and animals is at least 75 species per day.
The Great Pacific Garbage Dump is full of plastic.
Over 75,000 square miles of arable land is lost each year to urbanization and desertification.
A billion people in over 110 countries are seriously affected by desertification.
Nearly a third of the world’s cropland has been abandoned since WW II because of damage by intensive agriculture and erosion.
On the American Great Plains, half the topsoil has been lost in the last hundred years.
The Ogallala aquifer in the western United States is being drained up to 100 times faster than it is being refilled.
Indian farmers have drilled over 21 million water wells using oil-well technology. They take 200 billion cubic tonnes of water out of the earth each year for irrigation.
We have eaten more grain than we have grown in 7 of the last 8 years.
World carry-over grain stocks were 130 days of consumption in 1986 – today, it’s only 53 days.
The global per capita grain supply has fallen from 340 kg in 1984 to 300 kg today.
The world price of fertilizer is rising exponentially.
The IPCC predicts that climate change will cut African food production in half by 2020.
The cost of food is skyrocketing world-wide. Some countries have responded by banning exports of wheat or rice.
We are in the beginning stages of a global financial crisis that could result in either a deflationary or hyper-inflationary depression lasting for a decade or more.
These sorts of problems are known as wicked problems. That means they are messy, circular, aggressive and interlinked, so that trying to solve one may worsen others. Each problem shows a trend, and all the trends appear to be worsening inexorably. In some cases the trends have been visible for centuries (for example the loss of arable land and desertification), sometimes for decades (as with the loss of aquatic biomass), and some like Peak Oil for a scant few years. In all cases the global trends show no signs of reversing, however much effort has been expended to alter their local or regional trajectories . As their effects become more pronounced, it becomes easier to see their potential to hit our globalized industrial civilization like a planet-sized version of Hurricane Katrina.
As daunting as the individual problems are, the key to understanding the importance of this list is recognizing the degree of the linkages between them. In many cases, trying to solve one problem can inadvertently make others worse. One prominent example is the attempt to address global warming through the use of ethanol as a vehicle fuel. While there may have been some merit to that primary intention, the secondary effects – increasing dead zones in the oceans due to fertilizer runoff, and rising food prices due to the use of food crops as fuel – eliminated the overall benefit of the effort, and even created a net negative outcome.
Similar knock-on effects have occurred in in other areas. The attempt to raise food production through irrigation and the use of petroleum-based fertilizers has depleted water tables and reinforced a style of agriculture based on a finite resource. The attempt to increase global living standards (and thereby reduce population growth) by exporting production facilities to regions with lower wage and environmental standards has backfired by increasing levels of water, air and soil pollution – increases that have been felt well beyond the boundaries of those regions. One dark quip that addresses this sort of backfire is, “Around every silver lining there is a cloud.”
When viewed from this perspective it becomes obvious that dealing with the panoply of problems besetting our world involves considerably more than just knocking them down one at a time. If we don’t apply holistic, system-level thinking to the converging crisis, our well-meaning efforts stand an excellent chance of making the overall situation worse.
I have concluded that it is a mistake to think of “solving” these problems in any global or final sense. Some of them may be improved regionally, especially if they are not in local conflict with other competing problems. The logical corollary is that there will be other regions where those same problems cannot be solved, due different local circumstances.
The big question, however, concerns those problems that are not contained, that do not respect national or regional boundaries. Global warming and the death of ocean biomes affect us all, and failures to address these problems in any region can make the situation worse for everyone. In these cases, it’s obvious that a collective global response is called for – a response that brings together the political, economic, industrial and opinion-making institutions of our world. If these institutions acted together they might have a chance of implementing the deep and wide-ranging changes the situation calls for.
Unfortunately, until now we have seen precious little evidence of such a collective response. For example, we have repeatedly seen climate change conferences break down or issue watered-down statements that fail to address the scale of the accelerating crisis. While individuals, citizens’ groups and even some governments are obviously aware of the urgency, collective action repeatedly fails to gain the required global traction.
This state of affairs is no accident. This is not because of some dark and sinister cabal or conspiracy to hold back change in the name of personal profit, though there probably are some instances of that. The real reasons are at once more banal and more worrisome than the Bilderberg watchers assume. In the next section I will examine the structural reasons for this sorry situation.
Politics, the high art of civilization
In order to understand the role that politics plays in our collective failure to address the predicament described above, we need to examine the nature of modern civilization.
Now, when I use the term “modern civilization” I’m not just talking about the growth of industrialism over the last two hundred years. I’m not even talking about the growth of Western culture over the last two thousand years. What we usually think of as “modern civilization” is the development, refinement and culmination of cultural changes that began ten thousand years ago.
In turn, in order to understand modern civilization, we need to look even farther back, at how humans lived before we became “modern and civilized” and what happened to push our species across that threshold.
Human beings have been around in one form or another for two and a half million years, first as homo habilis, then as homo erectus, and finally as homo sapiens. For virtually all of those 2.5 million years, we lived in harmony with our environment. While it may not always have been a comfortable life (how could it have been, without color cable television or cars?), we were nonetheless perfectly adapted to our habitat. This statement is supported by two facts: over most of that period our presence caused little or no damage to the planetary biosphere; and during that time the human population was essentially stable, growing to only 5 million or so in two and a half million years, for a net addition of a scant two people per year.
Recently there have been some remarkable discoveries about the quality of life in the times before modern civilization. We have always known that society back then consisted of hunter-gatherers, organized as tribes. The classical impression was that the lives of these savages were, in the words of Thomas Hobbes, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”. Recent investigations have shown that in fact hunter-gatherer societies enjoyed a remarkable quality of life characterized by low levels of effort, plenty of leisure time, good nutrition, low levels of disease, egalitarianism, very low levels of suicide, homicide and warfare, a high degree of personal autonomy and close-knit communities. In the words of Marshall Sahlins, hunter-gatherers were “the original affluent society.” In one of our more damaging semantic restatements we have defined “subsistence” living as bad and “sustainable” living as good – even though in the context of a hunter-gatherer society, they mean exactly the same thing.
So here we have a species that was exquisitely adapted to its environment, living an affluent yet sustainable life, treading lightly on the earth, never outgrowing or overrunning its habitat, at least in terms of the species as a whole. We lived in this harmony with our world for two and a half million years, or 99.6% of the time we have been on the planet. Then suddenly, in the last ten thousand years – a mere 0.4% eye blink of time – our population increased over 1000 times, we decimated the earth’s stocks of non-renewable resources, we cut down over 90% of the planet’s forests, we fished her oceans to the edge of extinction, and we live in a near-constant state of conflict with each other. In this grievously short time we have brought about all the wicked problems listed above. Pardon my French, but what the hell happened?
In a word, it was agriculture.
About 10,000 years ago humanity developed organized, settled agriculture. Over the next couple of thousand years our predominant social model changed from hunter-gatherers to cultivators. We settled down (as one has to, to raise crops), and started to form larger social structures – villages, towns and cities. Nobody is precisely sure why we developed agriculture, when our previous ways of life had been perfectly satisfactory for millions of years. It may have been precipitated by climate changes, or growing populations in some areas, or it may have been just one of those things. There is no doubt that the threshold of radical human change is clearly demarcated by fields of grain.
Hierarchy
The shift to settled cultivation entrained a host of other changes. Our diet was dramatically impoverished. Levels of chronic disease and malnutrition increased. Levels of social violence escalated. However, the most significant change was the introduction of hierarchies that had not previously existed in our social systems.
Why the development of agriculture resulted in the simultaneous appearance of social hierarchies is still a matter of debate. My opinion is that it happened because the risk to farming communities from crop failures was very high. If the crops failed, these communities contained too many people to survive on local foraging or hunting – both because population densities were so high and because the habitat destruction caused by farming had reduced the amount of local wild food. There was also no way to bring in food from some other unaffected region. Therefore the risk of crop failures had to be mitigated. This mitigation involved many activities. For example, local hunting kept larger crop-eating pests at bay, irrigation helped in times of drought, and shamanic intercession took care of storms and blights.
Each of these activities of hunter, irrigation engineer and shaman was highly specialized in comparison to the more generic farming skills required for planting and harvesting. Such specialization conferred power on the holders of those skills. This was especially true in the case of shamans, whose power could not be entirely learned, but was said to emanate come from a mysterious connection with the supernatural. Their attempt to exercise control over nature gave the shamans the real ability to exercise control over other people however (”Obey me or the gods will frown on us, and the crop failure will be your fault!”), and the first systematic hierarchies were born.
Surplus
The other significant change introduced by organized agriculture was the psychological effect of reliable surpluses of food. While the previous two and a half million years of our existence had been shaped by sustainable subsistence, agriculture introduced the possibility of producing more food than we needed, letting us distribute the required amount to the members of the community and store the excess.
Centralizing the production of food and managing its distribution reinforced the development of hierarchies. Since some of the food was needed by people who had no direct hand in producing it (such as weavers, shamans and granary guards), some means had to be found of giving them equitable access to it. This meant coming up with a way of defining relative values for different kinds of work, and establishing a medium of exchange. In one stroke the concepts of money and wages appeared, resulting in a further transfer of power to those who established the value of work and controlled the money supply (and indirectly the access to food).
As important as that development was, there was yet another fundamental cultural change brought about by the simple existence of a food surplus. For the previous two and a half million years, human wants had been satisfied by the concept of “enough”. People worked until they had enough, then they stopped. Now there was almost always “more than enough”. The perception that there was more than enough food caused a radical change in how we looked at the world.
Food surpluses and the development of a medium of exchange made trade for non-food goods possible. The continued trade of ongoing food surpluses enabled a continuous growth in the material comfort of peoples’ lives. It did not take long for people to become accustomed to this new state of affairs. As memories of the past faded over just a few generations, the new conditions of growing abundance were rapidly accepted as the “natural” order of things.
Modern Civilization
We now have the two critical preconditions for “modern civilization”. The first is the belief that a continuous growth in material prosperity is the natural order of the human universe. The second is the belief that a power hierarchy is essential for the smooth functioning of the system.
As always happens with hierarchies, power flows uphill. Along with it go the perquisites of power, the most important being the right to higher levels of material abundance than those lower in the pecking order. In order to ensure that this comfortable situation is maintained, part of the accumulated social power is used to protect the situation. This is done by strongly defending the two fundamental preconditions: the idea that both material growth and the need for hierarchy are natural, essential and unquestionable. Indeed, the status quo is best served if the rest of the community sees this situation as simply part of the matrix of the universe, the only possible way life could work, and that any suggestions to the contrary are the result of either some nefarious agenda or outright insanity.
Guardian Institutions
Over the centuries an interlocking system of guardian institutions has grown up to protect and defend the two key ideas of growth and hierarchy.
Our economic and financial institutions cooperate with business and industry to set the value of work and control the money supply (thereby controlling access to food). In this role it doesn’t make any difference whether an economy is capitalist, socialist or communist. The core belief it guards is always the same one.
Our educational institutions teach successive generations how the system works, giving them the tools to integrate into it and manipulate it at the same time as training them to see this as the only possible way the world could work.
Our communications media reinforce this message by enlisting people in the growth paradigm. They do this both though overt messages like advertising and covert messages embedded in the story lines of entertainment.
Our religious institutions (as distinct from the religions they purport to enshrine) are primarily normative social structures. Many incorporate an overt message that one should be content with things as they are. There are often injunctions against questioning authority, as all authority is seen to devolve from the supernatural – just as it did for the shamans of the early agricultural era.
Our legal institutions enforce the norms of hierarchy in ways too numerous to count. These range from the protection of privilege (one law for the rich, one for the poor) to the preferential defense of property rights over human rights.
Our political institutions sit at the tip of the pyramid. Political institutions encode, enshrine and manage the application of social power. Politics is the institution that legitimizes all the others. Because of its unique ability to make laws and its access to the legalized violence that defends those laws, politics is the fullest expression of the power hierarchy of modern civilization.
At the base of the hierarchy, supporting it all, are an ever-diminishing number of farmers who apply ever-increasing amounts of knowledge, technology and petroleum to ensure an ever-expanding supply of food. Because at the core it is their food that makes the whole edifice possible.
So where does that put us in relation to the array of wicked problems we listed at the beginning? Simply put, every one of these problems is the result of unbridled growth. They are the logical results of the continual exercise of the first precondition of modern civilization, the drummer we have been marching to for ten thousand years since the invention of agriculture.
Why politics is the problem, not the solution
In light of this analysis it should be obvious why we are repeatedly failing to address any of these wicked problems. The only permanent “solution” to any of them is the secession of growth. That idea is anathema to our guardian institutions. And as the occupants of the pinnacle of power, our politicians have every reason to derail efforts in that direction, no matter how small.
Politics, regardless of party or ideology, is part of the problem and can never be part of the solution. While it may be easier for the average person to live under the rule of a more humane parcel of rogues, at its heart politics is the primary guardian institution of modern civilization. The role of all politics is to ensure that power is managed, and power is always managed for the benefit of the holders of power. It doesn’t matter whether the power managers are Democrats, Republicans, Tories, Grits, Social Democrats, Communists or a military junta. They all fulfill the same role in service of the same beneficiaries.
In order to fulfill that role they unite with the other guardian institutions – the economic, industrial, legal. religious, educational and communications organizations. Together these institutions create, maintain and guard a noetic milieu (a globalized intuitive, non-rational consciousness) in which any values that challenge the two fundamental preconditions to modern civilization are seen as incomprehensible, self-evidently absurd, dangerous or even insane. Since the primary value system these guardians protect is the paradigm of continuous material growth, the most dangerous of all radical ideas are any proposals to limit, halt or reverse that growth.
Conclusion
The influences of our guardian institutions are firmly embedded in our global culture. They have such power and such general support at all levels of society that it is ultimately fruitless to try and remove them from power by either direct or indirect confrontation. The penalties for trying this are severe and ruthlessly applied.
In light of this, is there any hope for a return to a sustainable, egalitarian, interconnected, considerate and just civilization? I strongly believe that there is, but getting there will be neither sure nor easy.
The institutions that stand between us and such a future are trapped by their dependence on the very paradigm they are sworn to protect. They defend the belief that permanent material growth is natural, possible and inevitable. While they defend that belief with laws, guns and television, ultimately their power comes from people who accept that premise. If people stop believing that such growth is possible the institutions’ power declines, no matter how many defense mechanisms they engage. If growth falters, the people lose faith and the institutions crack and crumble.
Look back at the list of problems that led off the article. Every single one of them is the result of our growth encountering limits. While we may be able to figure out ways to temporarily circumvent some of these limits, the pattern is now clear. The growth of modern civilization is slowing down, and is even showing evidence of coming to a halt. For a guardian institution that depends on growth for its very survival, this is like a diagnosis of terminal cancer.
What that means is that these institutions will inevitably start losing their monolithic top-down power. This dis-integration will leave “cracks in the sidewalk of civilization”. And just as grass grows through cracks in real concrete, small communities and individuals will start to appear through the metaphorical concrete of our industrial civilization.
No one can predict when, where or how the dis-integration will appear. It will take different forms in different places. The response of the guardians will probably be violently draconian in most cases. But there are places where communities have already formed in anticipation of such an opportunity. Like “Gaia’s antibodies” they will work to heal the wounds, widen the cracks, and let the sunshine and fresh air revitalize the hidden earth. As the seed stock of the next phase of civilization they will spread their values on the wind.
The next cycle of human experience on this planet will be very different from any that has gone before. We will have fewer resources, but more knowledge. We will have to deal with toxic landscapes, a warming climate, shifting rainfall patterns and the emergence of new diseases. To balance that we will have better communications and longer memories than any civilization that has gone before us. We will not fall back into the stone age, but neither will we motor off happily into the sunset in our electric cars. There will be hardship and misery, but there will also be joy – the joy that comes from looking forward, from participating in our communities, from the love of those around us. Above all, there will be the future.
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Acknowledgments
I’m indebted to the writing of Daniel Quinn and John Zerzan, as well as to Riane Eisler for her book “The Chalice and the Blade”. I’d also like to acknowledge the philosophy of Anarcho-Primitivism for its critique of civilization (though perhaps not for its suggested solutions).
September 3, 2008
© Copyright 2008, Paul Chefurka
This article may be reproduced in whole or in part for the purpose of research, education or other fair use, provided the nature and character of the work is maintained and credit is given to the author by the inclusion in the reproduction of his name and/or an electronic link to the article
Comment by Steven Earl Salmony — 5 September 2008 @ 7:50 AM
FINDING ADEQUATE ENOUGH WAYS OF WARNING EACH OTHER IN THE HUMAN COMMUNITY OF IMPENDING DANGER.
We in the family of humanity are going to be forced to do better in our efforts to communicate in a more reality-oriented way about ominously looming threats of an human-driven, global calamity of some kind. If we keep doing precisely what our leaders are saying and doing now, the future for our children looks bleak. We can surely do more and do it better. After all, human beings are remarkably intelligent, ingenious and adaptive.
Before we can determine what new and different to do, perhaps a brief analysis of our current, distinctly human-induced, global predicament is in order. Consider for a moment some of the ways in which my generation of leaders has gone so terribly wrong.
First, the leaders in my generation of elders wish to live without having to accept limits to growth of seemingly endless economic globalization, of increasing per capita consumption and skyrocketing human population numbers; our desires are evidently insatiable. We choose to believe anything that is politically convenient, economically expedient and socially agreeable; our way of life is not negotiable. We dare anyone to question our values or behaviors.
We religiously promote our widely shared and consensually-validated fantasies of `real’ endless economic growth and soon to become unsustainable overconsumption, overproduction and overpopulation activities, and in so doing deny that Earth has limited resources and frangible ecosystems upon which the survival of life as we know it depends.
Second, my not-so-great generation appears to be doing a disservice to everything and everyone but ourselves. We are the “what’s in it for me generation.” We demonstrate precious little regard for the maintenance of the integrity of Earth; shallow willingness to actually protect the environment from crippling degradation; lack of serious consideration for the preservation of biodiversity, wilderness, and a good enough future for our children and coming generations; and no appreciation of the vital understanding that humans are no more or less than magnificent living beings with “feet of clay.”
Perhaps we live in unsustainable ways in our planetary home; but we are proud of it nonetheless. Certainly, we will “have our cake and eat it, too.” We will own fleets of cars, fly around in thousands of private jets, live in McMansions, exchange secret handshakes, frequent exclusive clubs and distant hideouts, and risk nothing of value to us. We will live long, large and free. Please do not bother us with the problems of the world. We choose not to hear, see or speak of them. We are the economic powerbrokers, their bought-and-paid-for politicians and the many minions in the mass media. We hold the much of the world’s wealth and the extraordinary power great wealth purchases. If left to our own devices, we will continue in the exercise of our `inalienable rights’ to outrageously consume Earth’s limited resources; to recklessly expand economic globalization unto every corner of our natural world and, guess what, beyond; and to carelessly consent to the unbridled global growth of human numbers so that where there are now 6+ billion people, by 2050 we will have 9+ billion members of the human community and, guess what, even more people, perhaps billions more in the distant future, if that is what we desire.
We are the reigning, self-proclaimed masters of the universe….. the thousands of greedy little kings of capital concentration, big business potentates and governmental sinecurists. We enjoy freedom and living without limits. Of course, we adamantly eschew any talk of the personal responsibilities that come with the exercise of personal freedoms or discussions of the existence of biophysical limitations of any kind.
We deny the existence of human limits and Earth’s limitations.
Please understand that we do not want anyone presenting us with scientific evidence that we could be living unsustainably in an artificially designed, temporary world of our own making….a manmade world filling up with gigantic enterprises, virtual mountains of material possessions, and boundless amounts of filthy lucre.
Third, most of our top rank experts appear not to have found adequate ways of communicating to the family of humanity what people somehow need to hear, see and understand: the rapacious dissipation of Earth’s limited resources, the relentless degradation of the planet’s environment, and the approaching destruction of the Earth as a fit place for human habitation by the human species, when taken together, appear to be proceeding at breakneck speed toward the precipitation of a catastrophic ecological wreckage of some sort unless, of course, the world’s colossal, ever expanding, artificially designed, manmade global political economy continues to speed headlong toward the monolithic `wall’ called “unsustainability” at which point the runaway economy crashes before Earth’s ecology is collapsed.
Who knows, perhaps we can realistically and hopefully hold onto the expectation that behavioral changes in the direction of sustainable production, per human consumption, and propagation are in the offing…..changes that save both the economy and the Creation.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php
Comment by Steven Earl Salmony — 20 September 2008 @ 7:46 AM
Um. Did you read the thesis you’re commenting on, Steven? Your suggestion that the economy is saveable at this point is in direct contradiction of the Thirty Theses as I understand them, and while you’re of course entitled to your opinion, simply denying the theses, in their own comments, without any detailed explanation isn’t entirely helpful :/
You’ll find little disagreement here about our problems of overpopulation, climate change etc. but a great deal of the Thirty Theses deals with the question of whether a massive die-off can be averted, and concludes that it cannot. As you’ll see at , Jason created these theses in order to avoid having to re-state his case over and over (which he has ended up doing anyway in these comments :/) so it would be polite to read them before commenting.
(not affiliated in any way with Anthropik BTW, just have read through too many… oh boy, too many… comments here that ignore the theses they’re posted on)
Comment by karln — 21 September 2008 @ 3:34 PM
akk I’m out of practice with HTML. There’s no “edit comment” button so please accept my apology for that mess.
Comment by karln — 21 September 2008 @ 3:37 PM
I found this while looking for Paul Chefurka’s site. An I’m glad that I did - even though reading through it has been a serious chore!!
Assuming (for a moment) a microsecond of rationality in our governing elite….. we could take a page out of the 2nd world war - or one of the various options touted for carbon emission reduction… rationing.
OK - this w/could work in the ‘developed’ countries - that is - each person, male or female (under 50) is given a ration - which is 1 reproductive unit or 1/2 a child. These can be traded, if the recipients don’t want children, at whatever the market commands, or bought, if that person wants more kids. If a woman is pregnant and she has no ration coupons - abortion is mandatory (Oh Dear!!!!!) - contraception is free. Abortion is free, and the social mileau is such that having a child before 35 is heavily socially censored.
Simple demographics tells us that the later a child is born in the mother’s life - the lower its demographic impact and the relation is a negative exponent.
OK - maybe we’d have to go the Brave New World way and have regular orgies to keep the libido away from procreating (as someone on the group said .. reproduction is just a side-effect of having sex.)
Could this be translated to other cultures?? probably not - one comment I have heard repeatedly about the benefits of education for 3rd world women - was from central africa - educated women will have 5 children, because they “now know enough to ensure that all 5 will survive”…..
Comment by Hugh — 27 September 2008 @ 5:37 AM
Dear Hugh,
Thanks for your comments about the work of Paul Chefurka. He possesses that rare combination of clear vision and farsightedness.
Your thoughts on what follows are sure to be appreciated.
For a long time, I have been haunted by the words of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) that are emblazoned in a sonnet about Ozymandias.
” I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away. ” —Schelley
What was the “colossal wreck” this “king of kings” observed and how had it happened? What caused the destruction of the world?
The calamity Ozymandias witnessed may not have been more or less than the incredible consequences of human greed having exceeded limits to its growth. That is to say, the adamant and relentless greediness of kings and self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe precipitated the gigantic, distinctly human-driven catastrophe to which The King of kings makes reference.
A billion members of the human family exist on resources valued at less than one dollar per day. Africa is suffering from “slow drip” problems. Europe is getting warmer fast. Arctic ice is retreating and the arctic coast of Alaska is eroding.
Where are the new ideas, the financial backing, and the innovations needed to address these problems? There are tens of trillions of dollars in the global human economy. Where has all that money gone?
The front page of the NYTimes tells the family of humanity that we are on the verge of a global economic catastrophe. Are the taxpayers, acting alone, to become responsible for the problems now presented to the human community by the greed of a small group of rich and powerful people worldwide?
Why are an astonishingly small number of greedy people, holding hundreds of billions of dollars of ill-gotten gains from what are now recognizable as patently unsustainable business models and Ponzi-like financial schemes, not taking responsibility for their avarice?
Who are the people behind the mess we see splashed across the front pages of newspapers around the world this morning? Perhaps they need to be named, shamed and held to account.
Some greedy people are easy to identify. They are ones who have proclaimed themselves “Masters of the Universe” or Bohemians or the Greedy Boys of Greenwich or the Bilderbergers or members of The Trilateral Commission or the many too many outrageously enriched ‘experts’ and politicians who say and do anything to enhance wealth and power of themselves and their benefactors.
At least to me, it appears the problems in the global economy we are seeing today are the results of greed having reached its limits or, to put it another way, having “hit the wall” of unsustainability. That is to say, greediness of self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe and their minions has reached the point of greed’s unsustainability. The global economy can no longer support the conspicuous, patently unsustainable behavior of a small segment of the family of humanity.
Yes, definitely yes, something new and different needs to be done. Bold action is needed; but, more of the same, old business-as-usual behavior appears insufficient. Limits need to be placed on patently unsustainable behavior. People who are responsible for the global economic mess need to account for their behavior.
The family of humanity is not responsible for the world’s economic mess; but at the moment taxpayers worldwide are being held solely accountable. There is something not quite right about such unfair and inequitable circumstances.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php
Comment by Steven Earl Salmony — 2 October 2008 @ 7:47 AM
You may actually find the theses quite interesting, Steven. Take a look sometime.
Comment by karln — 2 October 2008 @ 7:55 AM
Could many members of our culture be “fixated” on the fantasy of limitless economic growth? Are we suffering from a sort of illness, something like amnesia, that is resulting in our forgetfulness with regard to the necessity of the finite Earth and its frangible environs to the preservation of life as we know it, a functional global political economy and the human species? Alternatively, have we been mesmerized by a modern rendition of the ancient Tower of Babel? Or have all of the above somehow been occurring?
Perhaps we are forever forgetting about Earth and its environment because too many people, especially the economic powerbrokers, their bought-and-paid-for politicians and their minions in the mainstream media, are worshipping a “totem”. At least to me, there appear to be many too many people for whom the economy, in and of itself, is the primary object of their idolatry. This behavior is observable, obvious and flagrant. In many instances, these worshippers make what they evidently believe are rational arguments that suggest manmade financial and economic systems are somehow essential to, and an integral part of, God’s Creation; that indicate the growth of the global economy will occur from now on, even after the Creation is ravaged and its frangible climate destabilized by unbridled overproduction, unchecked overconsumption and unregulated overpopulation activities of the human species. Aside from the “Economic Colossus” nothing else matters much to them.
Today, it appears that the financial system of the economic powerbrokers is collapsing like a “house of cards” and the real economy of the family of humanity is threatened. Experts in political economy are saying internally inconsistent and contradictory things. Communications about financials and the economy are generally confused and in disarray. Confidence and trust in the operating systems of finance and the global economy have been undermined by the invention of dodgy financial instruments and unsustainable business models as well as by the promulgation of con games and Ponzi schemes. Transparency, accountability and honesty in business activities have been largely vanquished. A great economic system is being undone by con artists, gamblers and cheats. In such circumstances, does the manmade colossus we call the global political economy remind you in some ways of a modern Tower of Babel?
Comment by Steven Earl Salmony — 4 December 2008 @ 7:44 AM
On the need for scientific education regarding the human overpopulation of Earth in these early years of Century XXI………..
Dear Friends in the Anthropik Network,
I want to at least try to gain your quick help. I’m not sure if you’ve heard, but yesterday the “AWAREness Campaign on the Human Population” submitted an idea for how we think the Obama Administration could change America. It’s called “Ideas for Change in America.”
I’ve submitted an idea and wanted to see if you could vote for it. The title is: Accepting human limits and Earth’s limitations. You can read and vote for the idea by clicking on the following link:
http://www.change.org/ideas/view/accepting_human_limits_and_earths_limitations
The top 10 ideas are going to be presented to the Obama Administration on Inauguration Day and will be supported by a national lobbying campaign run by Change.org, MySpace, and more than a dozen leading nonprofits after the Inauguration. So each idea has a real chance at becoming policy.
Thanks.
Sincerely yours,
Steve
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on the Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1176
Comment by Steven Earl Salmony — 12 December 2008 @ 7:55 AM
Does anyone have the feeling that our communication, here now and elsewhere in other moments, appears to be convoluted and confused because many too many of us do not yet recognize that the family of humanity literally lives within a modern version of an ancient edifice, the Tower of Babel? The new leviathan-like, distinctly human construction is not made of stone, but instead built out as a “house of cards”. This colossal, artificially designed structure is noticeably pyramidal in shape, organized as a patently unsustainable pyramid scheme, and named the global political economy.
For the people who are the primary beneficiaries of such a scheme, the global economy is effectively an object of idolatry. Nothing else really matters to them. These people are the self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe among us. They could not care less about the natural world, life as we know it for the children and future generations, the integrity of Earth. You can readily recognize the idolaters as the leading, self-righteous elders of my “Not So GREAT GREED GRAB Generation”. Endlessly consuming and hoarding resources as well as power-mongering are regarded as religious rituals.
Any thoughts?
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1176
Comment by Steven Earl Salmony — 23 December 2008 @ 4:05 PM
QUESTION: Can we share an understanding of the attacks on Earth and climate scientists by saying loudly and clearly that their assailants’ activities are venal efforts to spread garbage and junk science, based upon nothing more or less than the duplicitous promulgation of ideological idiocy?
ANSWER: The many hostile efforts toward Earth and climate scientists are for the sole purpose of shoring-up and building trust in a con game; to support the most colossal pyramid scheme in human history…..a modern version of the ancient Tower of Babel called the Global Political Economy. Only this modern Economic Colossus is not made of stone, but rather built out as a “house of cards”. All of it is a patently unsustainable, gigantic ruse perpetrated by a tiny minority of outrageous consumers, reckless consolidators and relentless hoarders of wealth and power.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population
established 2001
http://sustainabilitscience.org/content.html?contentid=1176
Comment by Steven Earl Salmony — 28 December 2008 @ 11:02 AM
Verry Good
Comment by Rahimuddi — 14 January 2009 @ 6:32 AM