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The Forum > Article Comments > Peace in our time, habitat forever? > Comments

Peace in our time, habitat forever? : Comments

By Tim Murray, published 19/3/2010

National parks and wilderness: there is no sanctuary from economic growth.

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Cheryl writes, "We could also feed starving Africa, but strangely, the anti-pops don't seem interested in that."

There is an axiom called Javon's Paradox. The basic premise of this is if you provide a means to conserve energy, you will in fact consume more. This can also be applied to human numbers. The more food you supply to starving peoples, the more they will breed to make more starving peoples. In the 1980's we saw those poor starving Etheopians millions of them. Since then, with the help of food aid, their numbers have TRIPLED! And they are all still starving.

The Canadian Senate wrote a report of exactly that.

http://www.parl.gc.ca/39/1/parlbus/commbus/senate/com-e/fore-e/rep-e/repafrifeb07-e.pdf

The facts are these Cheryl. Yes, the energy coming from the sun makes the planet not a closed system on its own. But that is not the issue. The issue is the rate of flow of that energy. Plants can only process so much of that energy at a time. In fact, because of the low CO2, the lowest in geological history, plants today grow very slowly.

Thus, the animal world that depends on that energy stored in plants is limited in population size. It's called the carrying capacity. All biological organisms suffer from boom and bust cycles. It's one of the major drivers of evolution.

Since we humans are also biological units, we too must eventually adhere to the limits of carrying capacity. The fact that people are starving in Africa and other places is because they have reached that limit due to their shere numbers.

All populations that have exceeded their carrying capacity, or have had the carrying capacity pulled out from under them, collapse. The volume of that collapse can be as high as 99% of the population wiped out.

continued...
Posted by Richard Wakefield, Tuesday, 23 March 2010 12:25:34 AM
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the rest...

We are heading to that collapse, and there is NOTHING we can do about it as long as the population keeps growing, and essential energy sources go into terminal depletion, such as oil now is.

The fact is, we cannot feed 6.5 billion people without oil, and oil is in perminant terminal decline.

Nothing I have presented here is bent on any kind of bias or world view. It's the raw hard reality.
Posted by Richard Wakefield, Tuesday, 23 March 2010 12:26:21 AM
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New report on resource depletion. We are heading to not only a civilization collapse, but a population collapse. And there is nothing we can do to stop it, except prepare for it.

http://www.theoildrum.com/files/Tipping%20Point.pdf
Posted by Richard Wakefield, Tuesday, 23 March 2010 1:49:42 AM
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Thanks, Richard, for adding some light.

Cheryl (a.k.a. the "let's stuff people onto this planet until we're all shoulder to shoulder and knee deep in human excrement" sock puppet)is just a typical clone of the vitriolic overpopulation deniers who would see this planet destroyed for future generations. As such she and her ilk are the true misanthropes in the room here. The only thing that Cheryl has ever "debunked" here is the idea that she may have something of substance to contribute to this discussion.
Posted by Rick S, Tuesday, 23 March 2010 11:22:11 AM
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Thanks for that source, Andrew Wakefield.

The following link is to a nomination by the Australian Conservation Foundation of human population growth in Australia as a key threatening process under the Environment Protection Act.

http://www.acfonline.org.au/uploads/res/EPBC_nomination_22-3-10.pdf

It is indeed fatuous to imagine that the environment won't come last if it comes into conflict with human needs or wants, as Tim Murray wrote. We saw this here in 2007, when a combination of drought with more and more extraction of water for human purposes caused a threat to Ramsar listed wetlands. Drying up of these wetlands would have put Australia in breach of its international obligations under the Ramsar Convention. (Signatories have agreed to protect wetlands that are significant for the life cycles of internationally migratory birds and fish.) As John Howard said at the time, though, "People are more important than wildlife."

A lot of the heat from this debate comes from conflicting world views. To Cheryl and Peter Hume, only people matter. They can't imagine why Tim Murray would care about extinctions or leaving some room for other species, so he must be motivated by racism, misanthropy, or a desire to hog something good for himself. They accept the concept of private property, that Cheryl can exclude random strangers from her house, garden, and car, without being a people hater, but not that of collective property. We thus cannot exclude random foreighers from our job market, health care system, and other infrastructure or public services without being racist, misanthropic, fascist, etc., even if these systems collapse, so that no one has anything. Cheryl has explicitly called for open borders. (cont'd)
Posted by Divergence, Tuesday, 23 March 2010 11:34:02 AM
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And, in the decline following peak oil, not only will there be a desperate grab of any existing energy resources, food shortages will see locals desperately grabbing any available food resources as well. I can just imagine the large scale exodus from uninhabitable cities with empty grocery stores to the countryside and natural reserves in order to hunt down out of desperation that last large mammal for food. As a result, the prospects for the survival of other species will be increasingly dim until human numbers decline to the point where other species have a chance again.

We have created the potential for the decimation of other species on a scale that will make the current Sixth Great Extinction seem rather small in comparison.
Posted by Rick S, Tuesday, 23 March 2010 11:34:51 AM
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