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The Forum > Article Comments > 'Populate or perish'? > Comments

'Populate or perish'? : Comments

By Peter Curson, published 24/7/2008

In the years to come the world will be swept up in a demographic transition never before experienced.

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Passy,

If you take a look at the various environmental footprint sites, such as Redefining Progress, it is clear that the Earth, with present technology, doesn't have the resources to give everyone a decent standard of living, even if all the wealth were divided equally. This is made explicit in a graph that appeared in New Scientist last year (p. 10, 7/10/07 issue): the resources of three Earths would be required for a modest European standard of living and 5 or 6 Earths to give them all our standard of living. This graph from Wikipedia plots environmental footprint, i.e. consumption, against rank on the UN Human Development index, i.e. decent health, education and living standards plus human rights.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Highlight_Findings_of_the_WA_S0E_2007_report_.gif

It is obvious that even the most frugal country any of us would want to live in (as an ordinary person) consumes well above the global average. Not that any of this goes to excuse the senseless waste we often see here. However, I wonder if you or Reality Check would be willing to put up with cramped, noisy accommodation with no privacy in some polluted urban or rural slum, a joyless limited vegetarian diet, one shower or change of clothes a week, neighbourhood monitors and secret police to ensure no one criticises the Great Leader or otherwise rocks the boat, etc., etc.

Reality Check,

You should live up to your name and read "Constant Battles" by Steven LeBlanc, an archaeologist at Harvard. He documents a recurring pattern in history and prehistory, with people outbreeding their resources, overexploiting their environment, then murdering their neighbours to take what they have, over and over again. He describes excavating the American Southwest to find fortified communities, collections of trophy heads, whole villages massacred and left unburied, a large proportion of the men dead as a result of war wounds, and so on, with all of this happening before the arrival of the evil white man. This is what the lack of greed and "selflessness" of people like you leads to. It is just fortunate that you are balanced by people with more sense.
Posted by Divergence, Tuesday, 29 July 2008 10:46:55 AM
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Now for Passy's argument that technology will magically expand the carrying capacity. There is a web business called Retrocity that sells T-shirts with science fiction art from the Art Deco period. One of my favourites has the caption, "I still want my flying car". Go back and see what they were predicting in the science fiction and popular science magazines of the 1940s and 1950s, then compare it with what you see around you: No colonies or even bases on the Moon or Mars. No flying cars. No medical technology that can regrow amputated limbs. No electricity too cheap to meter. Hunger and poverty still very much with us...

If you were sick this winter, like some of the rest of us, you might ask why the superscience that you expect to solve daunting problems, including the pumping dry of aquifers and shortages of essential plant nutrients, such as potassium and phosphorous, can't even find a way to cure or prevent the common cold. We were lucky with the Green Revolution, but now we are up against a lot more problems than the low productivity of grain crops. Why push our luck?

Ludwig has proposed the only wise course of action.
Posted by Divergence, Tuesday, 29 July 2008 11:01:43 AM
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This has been cross-posted to the forum at http://candobetter.org/node/673#comment-1039, which is a discussion of Sandy Irvine's 20 page essay "Trotsky's Biggest Blindspot" at The essay is a very detailed discussion of the gravely flawed treatment of the environment by most socialists (even anti-Stalinist socialists) through the 20th century and into the 21st centuries. Further comments, either there or here, are welcome.

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In the very broadest sense, when Passy implies that there is no conclusive evidence that the earth's human population is in excess of its carrying capacity, he is correct. But I would hasten to add that one can't definitively disprove the existence of the Tooth Fairy or the Easter Bunny, either.

No-one can definitively prove, that is, until it is too late, that the planet is over-populated to the point, where some theoretically better society than the one we have now, cannot rise to overcome all the problems that now seem intractable - exhaustion of fossil fuel reserves, exhaustion of stocks of rare metals, global warming, destruction of rainforests, extinction of other species, destruction of agricultural land, destruction of river systems, the lowering of underground water tables upon which much of the world's agriculture depends, the destruction of fish stocks, etc, etc.

However, on the basis of overwhelming data, it seems to me intuitively unlikely that even the most perfect, equitable and democratic possible form of social organisation would not be sufficiently superior to capitalism as to be able to easily solve all of these problems, particularly if thery were to be compaounded by the addition of over two billion more to the human population.

All the advances in human productivity in recent centuries have correlated very closely to our unsustainable and accelerated rate of consumption of finite non-renewable natural resources, particularly fossil fuel energy, so it seems far more likely that that, rather than advances in human knowledge, is the major driver of seemingly improved human productivity.

(tobecontinued)
Posted by daggett, Tuesday, 29 July 2008 1:45:04 PM
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(continuedfromabove)

So, as Divergence, Ludwig, ozideas and others have suggested, it would be extremely reckless not to assume that humanity's numbers have overshot the carrying capacity of our biosphere, regardless of what form of social system we eventually adopt and and it would be extremely reckless not to begin, as a matter of utmost urgency, to stabilise human numbers without any further delay.

As I have made clear elsewhere, I agree with Passy think we can do a lot better than we are we are with the rapacious, inefficient and grotesquely iniquitous globalised system of capitalism that we now live under, but unlike Passy, I won't be placing my faith in claims of the virtually unlimited capacity of human intelligence made by most socialists as well as by neo-liberal apologists for our current economic system.
Posted by daggett, Tuesday, 29 July 2008 1:48:11 PM
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Thanks for the responses.

Ludwig, you say:

“Is there any evidence we have passed our so called optimal population level?”

Yes, abundantly so.

Is there any evidence we HAVEN’T passed our so called optimal population level?

You can’t assert that we haven’t. The best you can do is say that you don’t know."

OK, I don't know. So what makes the prediction we have reached (or passed) our optimal population level valid now but not 200 years ago when Malthus said much the same thing?

People have mentioned hunger as an example of us having passed this optimal level. I understand we produce enough food to adequately feed everyone on the planet. The fact that 3 bn people can't afford to buy food is the problem, not our inability to produce enough.

I am not some sort of technological determinist, least of all under the apparently decaying system of capitalism. But I do see production for profit as the major road block to feeding everyone now, and into the foreseeable future.

As to sci fi and alternative futures, perhaps the reason these sometimes sensible solutions haven't occurred is because although they might satsify human need (such as growing asparagus on Mars,)it is not profitable to do so. Just as it is not apparently profitable to develop alternative energy spources like solar power, geothermal power etc. Of course the solution that capitalism offers us as oil prices increase may be a (too?) slow move to those alternative supplies, or to dirty oil from oil sands in Canada and other places.

A society where production is decided democratically to satisfy human need could address this issue of renewable energy sources without waiting for determining if something is profitable or not before it happens.
Posted by Passy, Tuesday, 29 July 2008 8:18:53 PM
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Passy

The critical question in my last post is;

“Why on earth would you want population to continue increasing?”

Why wouldn’t we very strongly plan to ‘err’ on the side of caution if there was ANY feeling that we were dangerously overstepping the mark?

With respect, you’ve passed right over this fundamental issue.

As Divergence points out, the history of technological advancement has been quite chequered and certainly not up to expectations.

And…the other really big facet of our technological evolution is that it has greatly facilitated population growth and hence facilitated the horrendous grossly unsustainable pickle that we are now in.

So let’s support technological advancement all the way, but let’s for goodness sake also strive to stabilise the population…. and make sure that technological improvements actually lead to improvements in quality of life instead of just to more people with same old low or lower QOL.
Posted by Ludwig, Tuesday, 29 July 2008 9:07:01 PM
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