Overpopulation plus.....

It seems to me the center piece of just about every broad human challenge is the problem of overpopulation. Certainly with the environment that seems to be the case. You can't finally argue the alternative of lowering average consumption because population growth then subsumes that solution. I'm willing to question the population as center piece idea if someone would make a rational case for an alternative view, say beyond populating the galaxy as a pressure valve release.

Just to push the conversation along, here is a wandering piece that walks us through the detritus of environmental activism and leads ultimately to the simplicity of population and consumption as the destination you finally end up with after you have tried everything else and there is nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/03...-collapsing-edges-of-industrial-civilization/

 

Just FYI, the UN's current median estimate indicates world population will stabilize at about 11 billion early in the next century.

 

Does that make you feel hopeful?. We're already overdrawing our resource base and wrecking our environment at 7.2 billion folks. Where is the turn around point short of reducing the population?

 

Yes, overpopulation is one of the key drivers of the many problems we are now facing.

 

The problem is it is stabilizing by dropping in the affluent and educated and least polluting populations while soaring in the poorest most uneducated and most polluting populations.

 

You do realize you are stepping on the third rail here don't you? People take this personal and think you are attacking them for having kids or worse yet attacking the kids themselves. Put your helmet on.

 

That's the common misperception. It's not true. As education and wealth spreads, births per woman drops to replacement only levels.

[video=youtube;1nvdeEi2mEc]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nvdeEi2mEc[/video]

 

"Western European countries have low fertility rates, below the replacement rate of 2.1. Germany: 1.4 (its total population is 81.9 million, of which 8.2% are foreigners). Holland: 1.8
(16.5 million, of which 4.4% are foreigners). Belgium: 1.8 (10.8 million, of which 9.8% are foreigners). Spain: 1.4 (46.1 million, of which 12.4% are foreigners). Italy: 1.4 (60.2 million, of which 7.1% are foreigners), the Pope’s views notwithstanding. Sweden, which provides deep support for parents, has a high TFR of 1.9 (9.4 million, of which 6.4% are foreigners), but that’s still below the replacement rate. Ireland and the U.K. also have high TFRs, at 2.1 and 1.9, respectively, but these rates are derived from non-European immigrant parents.

 

I agree that over population is the greates threat to this earth.

A farmer has a pasture that will easily hold 20 cows. It is big enough to sustain them and naturally rotate their "pollution" back into the ground as they have lots of room to roam . They have a constant supply of renewable food because it has room to grow, they have a pond that is the right size for 20 cows

Fill that pasture with 200 cows and there is no more room for finding fresh food , they drink the pond dry, and the ground can't recycle all that poop!


It's just common sense.

 

Cherrypicking is fraudulent. Take an hour to educate yourself with Dr Rosling.

 

Western Europe is a very big cherry.

 

People with CoD and Halo and their Moms cooking their meals tend not to procreate as much so the answer is obvious--instead of food, we need to be shipping people game systems.

 

No question birth control brings up lots of issues and feelings. I just tell folks it's either us or Mother Nature. As for the lower birth rate of the rich, they live off the cheap labor of the overpopulated poor, and so in part are population growth generators. Relatedly Americans like to brag about how they have lowered CO2 output since 2007, ignoring all the industrial production and coal we have exported to countries like China.

Just to make it clear no country can put itself in the negative column of population growth until they figure out roughly how much population growth their social and economic policies generate.

 

Good point about the illusion of America being so "green". We have just exported our dirty industries to China which we could have done cleaner and greener right here at home.

 

and within a generation most of those foreigners fall within the norms of their new home and their birth rate falls as well...there was also the myth east asian children are smarter than their new host populations but it's short term because study habits are cultural, within a generation thier test scores fall into the same range as the host population...in netherlands there was a fear of muslimization but here too after a generation children of muslim parents born in the netherlands converted to atheisim at the same rate as native population...

Education/wealth is societies greatest equalizer...

- - - Updated - - -

just swept it under the carpet...going green hurts the bottom line and thats all many corporations think about...

 

No more true today than in 1968 when Paul Ehrlich wrote "The Population Bomb".

 

The economist Herman Daly takes on the myth that growth is necessarily good.

http://dieoff.org/page88.htm

 

you would think it should be obvious that unlimited growth is impossible, its like the mother of all ponzi schemes on a global scale...but the free market forces are willing to close their eyes to the future disaster as long as their short term personal goals are met....

 

The "free market" has become a God expression. Invoke the free market for any and all problems. Too bad because used judiciously, like "growth", with the proper qualifications it is an expression with some use value. But used ideologically it is like a horse with blinders, not having a clue what is coming at them from the side, like the downstream costs.

I found one reason why a lot of economic types don't get the Ponzi nature of their views is their hard to believe but nevertheless true inversion of the relationship between the environment and economic systems. It would seem obvious that an economic system is a subset of the environment. But they will argue vigorously the opposite. In their view the economy is the baseline and the environment is like a man created park, requiring a robust economy. The level of alienation is mind boggling but talk to some of these folks and that's the kind of thing you hear.

 

I noticed on another thread a vigorous argument between nuclear advocates and solar-wind advocates. The truth is both are losers if we don't deal with population growth. Solar-wind for instance run into a problem called EROEI(Energy Return On Energy Investment) which appears to be too low to seriously power the industrial side of a modern society - think manufacturing large trucks. Nuclear does better in the EROEI department if there isn't a Chernobyl or Fukshima waiting in the wings but is very expensive, can't find any commercial interest, screws up spectacularly when it screws up, faces a NIMBY resistance to any burial of nuclear waste and the highly advertised Generation !V nuclear reactors which are supposed to be some kind of answer to all of nuclear's problems aren't due to start coming on line until at least 2030, probably too late to make a real dent in replacing fossil fuel plants and changing the already dangerous climate picture. And of course nuclear power has been in business over 60 years and still hasn't caught on worldwide, just a few countries, many of which are stalled out or retrenching, which suggests it just isn't a technology which sells itself.

My feeling is that much of the technofix obsession is simply a kind of running away from the elephant in the room, the real problem, an expanding population eating up our ecological substance and despoiling our environment. What technofix do you imagine is going to keep up with a daily addition to the world of roughly 200,000 per day? And do you think the poor are going to give up their aspirations to live more like the rich?

I guess I would sum it up rather simply.

MORE TREES, LESS PEOPLE! And no I'm not talking genocide. I'll leave it to those wiser than me to show us how to get there - but clearly we have to get there or it is pretty much over as far as I can see.

 

Define "overpopulation". In "Overshoot" Catton lays out previous instances where humanity has begun outstripping carrying capacity (a definition for overpopulation right there if you have learned what carrying capacity within the biologic sciences means) and worked out the problem, through various mechanisms.

As we know within the climate debate, it began with some anti-population, human-hater types deciding that some macro level reason was needed, and science needed to create, verify or at least scare people towards that reason, to "solve" this problem.

Of course, this happened when "overpopulation" in terms of numbers meant like 2 or 3 billion people. Now we are at 7.

So...what is "overpopulation"?

 

The pressures of rising population, the wasteful excess of market capitalism will force us into a resource based economy, with a foundation upon high technology, and the end of the monetary system.

Unless of course you don't think the earth has finite resources. Ever growing population, finite resources....time to turn on the mental lightbulb. Or you can wait until there is no electricity to turn it on. I would rather do it before the collapse.

 

How about a community based foundation which suggests more of a low tech approach.

Short of going back to barter I don't know how you avoid some sort of monetary system.

There you go, population growth hits a limit. Amazing how many folks are committed to the idea of perpetual growth - About 90% of economists from what I've read and then there are those who see us populating the universe.