Discuss: Altar Call for True Believers

Drew, I don’t know why this irritates me, but something feels particularly sinister about a human being having a desire to control the farting of other human beings, say in a crowded elevator.

There are simply too many people. If we don’t figure out how to limit our own numbers, nature will do it. It’s been that way for hundreds of millions of years, but despite our high-falutin’ opinion of ourselves, we show no more understanding of this than yeast cells, which multiply beyond their resources and die in their own excrement, just as it looks like humanity is about to do.

And I’m not only talking, I’m walking. I had myself fixed before ever having children. I’m hoping someday there will be a “cap ‘n’ trade” system for procreation, and I can get rich off my unused fertility credit. :-)

I’m not only walking, I’m running! I seem to have “adopted” a number of young adults the age my children would have been, who are interested in learning Permaculture and sustainability. All in all, not a bad trade—didn’t have to change diapers, can hand off the “grand children” when their diapers need work, didn’t have to put up with teens, and I get these kids right about the time when they’re thinking maybe the older generation has something to offer, after all… :-)

Jan

Congratulations. I don’t agree there are too many people. It’s a Malthusian scare tactic. Read the link I sent, better yet, read the book it refers to. You’ll be enlightened.

Hi Drew. I read the link. Sounds like character assassination. I could make similar arguments against Jesus Christ, based on the behavior of many of his followers. The link seems to have more issues with what people do in Malthus’s name than with the man’s theories themselves.

Malthus was right about population. He just didn’t know about fossil fuel. Can’t blame him for that, can you?

Population has risen in lock-step with energy availability. Energy availability has peaked, and will soon go into decline. Population must follow. This is how all trophic systems work, and fossil fuel is certainly a trophic system for H. sapiens—ten calories of fossil energy go into each calorie of food produced. The “Green Revolution” should more rightly be called the “Brown Revolution,” because none of it would have been possible without fossil fuel.

But perhaps you haven’t noticed the recent rise in food prices, echoing nicely the recent run-up in energy prices?

Since you’re fond of books and enlightenment, I’d suggest the Club of Rome report, Limits to Growth, and Beyond the Limits, by Donella and Dennis Meadows.

Of course, Malthus couldn’t know about fossil fuel, and A Miracle Might Occur, and some deus ex machina could supply another increment of energy to humanity that will enable more growth.

What happens when that energy resource becomes depleted? Aren’t we simply delaying the inevitable? Garrett Hardin wrote: “Given an infinite source of energy, population growth still produces an inescapable problem. The problem of the acquisition of energy is replaced by the problem of its dissipation.” and Steven Hawking notes: “By 2500 or so, people will cover the entire land mass of the world shoulder to shoulder, and the earth will glow a dull red with the energy they dissipate.”

So, where do you draw the line? Do you even believe there’s a line? It not, then we must part and agree to disagree.

But if you do agree that endless growth in a finite world is not possible, surely we should obey the Precautionary Principle, and err on the side of caution?

Bob - Simplifying one’s lifestyle, becoming more aware of where one’s food is coming from, buying locally, living closer to the earth - these are good things to do anywhere. We got our water from a well and a few times a year we went into the city (San Antonio - plenty of culture there) fifty miles away. And I have to say I lost my respect for Stewart Brand when he came out in favor of nuclear power. Too bad.

Jan, I don’t see character assassination in the paper. I’m also not contending there are absolutely no limits to growth per se. I’m not a capitalist aristocrat. The biggest threat to natural limits is not precisely the population. Yes, population is a problem if we “assume” the math alone and that populations in developing countries are being groomed to inevitably join the butchering of the planet that western capitalists so ably and actively promote. I am not that pessimistic, hysterical, or deluded into missing how aggressive western economic principles are to a great degree, the primary culprit behind the smokescreen defining population growth as a undeniable threat.

“Attributing conflicts arising from resource scarcity to population pressures, rather than neo-colonialism or neo-liberalism, meanwhile serves the function of making Western interventions appear more benign.”

Whatever danger is posed by population growth is made so by the spread of unchecked, out of scale predatory materialistic ideologies. In my opinion it is predictable, if not at least despicable, for those who sit so comfortably on the throne of fossil fueled infrastructures, to want to target human procreation in so called developing countries. And make no mistake, they are the primary target. And that is the focus of this way of thinking….control the poor, reduce their numbers and many can maintain a semblance of our extravagant gluttony.

All this talk of controlling population just reduces one into a “survival of the fittest” mindset. It’s school yard bullying prompted by the promises made to little warlords acting as agents for the greed of little tyrants who only want the dollars they can squeeze out of the land that belongs to real, honest, hardworking people.

If the population in North America, for example, could rely less on the resources from global markets, maybe global populations would strike a balance. If developing countries would stop being a battle ground for transnational corporations - hungry to get their labor and resources, maybe those populations would have a chance to return to the ways they naturally have for supporting themselves.

It might seem like a little thing but somebody said it a few posts back. Buy less America! and to that I’‘ll add - Buy Local!

”... it is predictable, if not at least despicable, for those who sit so comfortably on the throne of fossil fueled infrastructures, to want to target human procreation in so called developing countries. And make no mistake, they are the primary target.”

Ah, now I know where you’re coming from.

I agree that not everyone who advocates reduced population has pure motives. NPG (for one) is pretty racist in its policies. I don’t support any population reduction group who has “immigration” as one of its issues, or who specifically targets the third world.

But I think you’re jumping to conclusions about those in this forum who advocate population reduction. Each American baby will have at least twenty times the impact of an Indian or Chinese baby, and perhaps 100 times the impact of an African baby.

I think population is a problem, period—north, south, east, west, rich, poor—you name it.

Donella Meadows presents the following equation in Beyond the Limits, which I think she stole from HT Odum:

I = P * A * T

Impact equals Population times Affluence times Technology.

I consider “Affluence” to be essentially energy consumption.

You can reduce impact by reducing any of the terms.

But in your zeal to not be in favor of reducing population, would you reduce the affluence or access to technology of the population?

That seems to me to be just as arrogant and barbaric—tell people in the third world that they can’t have modern medicine or electric lights, just so they can procreate at will.

Wouldn’t it be much simpler if we could all just agree to reduce our numbers? Would you go along with this if it were proportionately applied to all countries, regardless of wealth?

I = P * A * T

Impact equals Population times Affluence times Technology.
You can reduce impact by reducing any of the terms.

Ah! Now this I can relate to. How about this? In the San Joaquin Valley of California (a formerly rich ag zone over a hundred miles wide) new growth is re-doubling city areas at mind-numbing rates. So if people won’t, darn them, become less numerous to reduce the IMPACT of this growth, we can simply make them poorer, right? Boy, if that tactic will make the impact ‘less’ I’m all for it, although in exactly what terms that would e less escapes me at the moment.

But OK! Become poor and your impact will be reduced! The back-to-the-landers deserve a round of applause. Oh, by the way, the horny-thorny question nags its way back on to the table still: WILL IT SCALE?

In fact I rather enjoyed the San Joaquin Valley when I was a kid and it was about equal parts cropland and riparian wetland as far as the eye could see. Lots fewer people, rich and poor. Dangit. If there have got to be more people, let them be richer than poorer, I say. The numbers who have come by now would spread out even more and make an even lousier mess of the place if they hadn’t the props of technology—and affluence—to keep them bunched up and off the grass, so to speak.

To those who shoot the messenger—Stewart Brand in this case—because he doesn’t perfectly fit their pieties, may I draw the attention back to the message: that it is essential as never before to take full advantage of every resource, technological, managerial, societal. MIT reports progress in bio-engineering bacteria to make gasoline from grass. ‘The solution’? We’ll see. Might help.

Well water is fine, but no Permaculture farm is an island, as John Donne wrote the song. Who coordinates this well, if it is deep, with drawdowns over the region? And if shallow, to balance local users, and organize measures to prevent nasty infiltrations from surface waste? Those are technological, administrative, and societal issues. Comfort is or soon will be engulfed in the sprawl of San Antonio, one of the fastest-growing regions in the US. What then?

The Malthus article is nothing more than a screed for someone with an ax to grind, the fulminations about capitalism, semantic head-tripping, I’m afraid. Historically there is one proven positive correlation with reduced fertility. It is NOT capitalist exploitation, it is NOT widespread famine, epidemic, war, or natural disaster, it is NOT externally-imposed government (or foreign NGO) policy.

It is education. For women.

Culture is a helluvalot MORE than driving 50 miles a few times a year to see a movie. And munch a drive-thru burger. It encompasses science, technology, government, communications, education and debate—AND Don Giovanni plus Pirates of the Caribbean, thank you, whether or not at walking distance from where the viewer rests his head. Something more than scuffles over the bar tab on the Titanic, including win-win’s to foreshadow declining fertilities. Note the plural, it might have done to have added ‘of rich and poor alike’. But the awful truth IS ‘racist’, if we’ve just got to be prisoner to coded rhetoric. The vast majority of the earth’s population, who are poor, don’t live in the wealthy, technoratic ‘west’ and are not ‘white’.

Every current college graduate in India speaks English. Shall we open debate with a few of them to see what they would suggest?

Dear Bob,

Perhaps you have overlooked at least one other correlation: No food equals no people. No exceptions.

I have seen many examples of thoroughly well-educated females of the highest socioeconomic standing having large families, even in these days.  However, I have never seen, heard, read or found a single shred of good scientific evidence—- in all of recorded history—- of a human being surviving long periods of time without food.

ALL the scientific evidence indicates that human beings cannot survive long absent food.

The education of women in our time is important, for sure; but, a precondition for education is food.

Thanks for your comments and for those of others to this stimulating discussion.

Sincerely,

Steve