Guest post: The obvious answer never occurs to them
Originally a comment by iknklast on The scale of the future problem.
The obvious answer never occurs to them. I’ve had this conversation with a lot of people, and it’s hard to get them to understand. If we destroy the earth, the economy won’t matter, will it?
Since the economy is man-made and the environment is evolved (and orders of magnitude more complicated than the most complicated economic system or corporate hierarchy), it makes sense to make changes to the economy that do not rely on constant growth, and can handle population declines.
I talk to people who think it doesn’t matter if we have forests and deer and birds and insects anymore. What the flying fuck do they think we rely on to survive? Even couching it in strictly human terms, forgetting all the arguments about aesthetics and morality and so forth, it is simply ignorant and foolhardy to contemplate the world without an environment. A world with a destroyed environment would be a world we couldn’t live in.
It’s the same thing for the goofs that think we need to get all the chemicals out of the environment. The environment IS chemicals. We are chemicals. Our food is chemicals. Our water is chemicals. Go learn a little bit of science, then maybe come back and lecture me on how things work. If you really educate yourself, you’ll learn enough not to lecture me.
The environment is so much a tangled, interwoven system that we can’t change one thing without changing something else, something we may not be aware of. We can fix one thing while breaking another, especially using the blunt tools we usually use. Fix emissions! But don’t worry about endangered species; we can continue destroying habitats, we just need to do it in cars that burn clean.
And then there is the other trope, which I despise. “Don’t point out problems if you don’t have the solution!” WTF? Sorry, nope. If someone sees a problem, they should point it out. Someone else may have the solution. Maybe no one has the solution, but if we work together we will find it. Maybe I do have the solution but no one will listen because it isn’t what they want to hear.
I’ve occasionally heard people saying that “only 5% [or whatever] of England is built up”, as if that is a nice little knock-down argument and the UK could support the population density of Singapore. I have no idea what these people are thinking, given the great depletion in wildlife at our current level of habitation, and the difficulty we have in providing ourselves with enough clean water to support our way of life.
People put enormous pressure on the environment, even though our biomass at 8.1b population is relatively small (0.01%). There are some solutions, but people generally don’t give a hoot — not enough to do anything about it anyway. The Earth could theoretically support a much larger population, but why? Biodiversity loss is a thing, and I, for one, am not keen on the idea of more people and less biodiversity.
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
Working against nature is unsustainable in the long term, and increasing human population growth is one of the stupider ideas out there, but there are advocates with money and pulpits (like Elon) who promote such things.
That’s really questionable. That depends on (1) how long we want the population to survive and (2) what sort of quality of life they would have.
A lot of people think if there is land that is not holding people, we can put people there. Unfortunately, they’re wrong. Some of that land is already converted to human uses – farmland, rangeland, industrial land, government land, etc. Some of it can’t support human life. I’ve heard people say we could fill up the Grand Canyon with people. Really? Think again.
If we want to live sustainably, and allow the poverty stricken countries room to expand their lifestyle so that they aren’t starving and destitute (and poverty stricken areas of wealthy countries for that matter), we need to cut our population down to about 1960 levels (or lower; I think that estimate is high) and find more sustainable ways of living. If everyone’s footprint was the size of France (only about half the size of the US, and with a decent life), we could maybe support about 3 billion people worldwide.
See also: Canada. Canada is mostly empty. Physically it’s enormous while in population it’s very small. There’s a reason for that.
I think ideally that the population would slowly decrease and stabilize, but that’s not a popular idea, and ultimately it’s a tough thing to predict. Genesis 1:28 is one of the major reasons that I can’t stand the bible.
Some people seem to think that this is no more than a warehousing problem, that all we have to account for is the volume of space taken up by a human body and as long as we can account for that, the job’s done. It’s all well and good for Hamlet to claim to be a king of infinite space while bound in a nutshell, but Hamlet’s gotta eat. Among other things. The existence of every living human entails the sequestration of a minimum amount of water to drink, and cultivable land, air, and water to grow the food they need to eat (or for infants, food to support its lactating mother at least). At the other end of this process is waste disposal. Add to this the requirements of clothing and shelter, and you need more space and stuff. The global supply chains and production and delivery infrastructure is another stratum of material and energetic needs. And all of this rests on the fundamental planetary systems of physics, chemistry, and biology, geology, climate and biosphere the origins and evolution of which we played no part in, but over which we now hold the power of destruction. To put it in the simplest terms, the more humans there are), the less there is of everything else. It’s a zero sum game. More humans? More cropland. More cropland, less non-human biodiversity. Ultimately the continued existence of humanity is entirely dependent on the continued existence of a base level of everything else. Pushing beyond that level is a Bad Idea that will lead to inevitable disaster.
Our current civilization has arisen (and depends upon) a certain set of stable conditions, primarily those climatic conditions required to grow the food that feeds our numbers. We’ve done a remarkable job (so far) of dodging the Malthusian bullet, but remove that climatic stability (as we’re also currently doing a good job of) , turn agricultural zones into chaotic, continent-sized roulette wheels, and all bets are off. Without reliability, this year’s field turns into next year’s desert, and your growing zone shifts northwards into the Canadian Shield. There goes your food, here comes trouble.
Exactly. Try growing wheat on bare continental crust. Where’s your King of Infinite Space now.
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