Guest post: Hamlet’s gotta eat
Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on The obvious answer never occurs to them.
The Earth could theoretically support a much larger population, but why?
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.
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.
Canada is mostly empty. Physically it’s enormous while in population it’s very small. There’s a reason for that.
Exactly. Try growing wheat on bare continental crust. Where’s your King of Infinite Space now.
That’s it in a nutshell. ;-)
I try to make all of this manageable for my students in Environmental Science, but they have always left the class stunned at the end of the semester. Every unit, they come up with solutions that previous units should have told them wouldn’t work. It’s difficult to carry so many interlocking things in our head at a time, and it’s natural for us to try to reduce it down to one more important things that we can deal with. Unfortunately, we never deal with one problem before we move to another.
Save the whales? That used to be a big thing. The whales are not saved, but we’ve moved on. Ozone depletion? I almost never hear about it anymore, except by people who claim it’s over. We did a good job, but there is still a large area of depletion over Antarctica, and it isn’t likely to recover for some time. Litter? Get real. Too much focus on litter during the 70s; much of it was planned as a deliberate distraction that people could wrap their heads around and ignore larger looming problems.
This cannot be solved by focusing on doing just that one thing and then moving on. It’s like a sweater; if you unravel this thread, a lot of threads come out with it, until you are naked and there is a pile of yarn on the floor beside you. Everything (including us) is connected.
Also, something that works in one context won’t work in another. We introduced plants to solve problems a long way from where they grew as natives; gee, that worked out, didn’t it? We cleaned up the air by slurrying it through water; we cleaned the water by evaporating it into the air. When I worked for Air Quality in Oklahoma, the air and water departments were on different floors, but it was a simple one floor flight to visit. No one from air quality ever consulted with water quality; no one from water quality ever consulted with air quality. Everyone is a specialist in one thing, and doesn’t stop to consider how their one thing impacts everything else.
As a result of my rather meandering college and career path, I have education in a lot of diverse areas. It helps me at least a little when I try to pull what appear to be separate ideas but which are connected in strange, overlapping webs of confusion. When I try to explain to my students about the interconnections, I ask them if they think the economy is complicated (a simple flow chart of what companies are owned by one company is enough to elicit a yes). Then I point out that the economy is extremely simple compared to the ecology. It’s sort of like comparing a brick to the Grand Canyon.
[…] a comment by iknklast on Hamlet’s gotta […]
Yes, it turns out that there’s a lot more to saving whales than simply no longer killing them on an industrial level in order to convert them into lamp oil, corset stays, cat food, and fertilizer. Our normal business activities keep right on killing them, or at least make their lives much more difficult. Many sectors of our economy continue to take their toll on Whales decades after industrial hunting was abandoned by my most former whaling nations. (Nations that continue commercial whale hunts are Iceland, Norway, and Japan, which claims its hunts are for “scientific” purposes. https://hakaimagazine.com/news/whats-true-scientific-value-scientific-whaling/ ) Indigenous, susbistence whalers still hunt Bowhead whales in the American and Canadian Artcic. But even without these direct hunts, humans continue to stalk whales.
Shipping traffic makes the oceans louder, interfering with whales ability to communicate with each other. They have to “yell” to be heard. Toothed whales (many of whom use echolocation in order to hunt) have a harder time hearing echoes from prey in noisier waters. Cetologists noted the changes in behaviour that occurred when COVID disrupted ocean-borne trade. Whales could hear each other again with fewer ships inyruding on their ancestral, home waters.
Ship strikes injure or kill much more directly. Increased volume of commerce increases the risk to whales. People might think “How do you run into something as big as a whale?” When you’re in a ship that’s 300 metres long, a 15-25 metre whale doesn’t even register as a speed bump*. More than one vessel has entered a port unknowingly adorned with a dead whale at the waterline, draped over the bulbous bow that improves hydrodynamics and fuel efficiency. Reduced speeds and the movement of shipping lanes away from areas more heavily frequented by whales help, but only a bit. Whales don’t follow schedules or stick to “lanes.” And it’s not just big, transoceanic carriers that are the only threat. Even small pleasure craft moving fast enough can fatally injure whale calves. And their are always vested interests who will resist any regulations that will cost money or time, or rules that might restrict pleasure boaters’ pleasure.
Entanglements in fishing gear hamper a whales movement, sapping their energy, and if not cut away by human recue crews, can end up cutting into their flesh, or prevent them from eating altogether, leading to slow death by infection or starvation. Fishing gear (like lobster or crab traps) designed to reduce the risk snagging on whales is more expensive than tradtional hardware. This deadly combination of ship strikes and entanglements have killed hundreds of whales of all species. The North Atlantic Right Whale is now down to fewer than 400 individuals. Normally long lived, they no longer die of old age, and those born more recently are smaller than they should be, their strict energy budgets having to redirect resources that would normally fuel growth to recover from repeated, chronic injuries from fishing gear and collisions.
Toxic runoff accumulates in whales through bioconcentration up the food chain. This too has chronic effects on whale health, particularly for nursing calves, who (like human babies) are introduced to human contaminants even before they start eating solid food on their own. Once they’re hunting for themselves, the poisoning continues. Contaminated prey makes for contaminated whales. Beluga Whales that die in the St. Lawrence River are technically considered toxic waste because of the high levels of pollutants that collect in their tissues, especially blubber.
This is a quick small sample of what we’re doing just to whales. Multiply this over all biomes and all species, and you begin to get a sense of the bigger picture. It’s not pretty.
There’s little that we do that is benign when there are eight billion of us doing it. Earth can’t afford our necessities, let alone our luxuries. The superyachts and cruise liners are symbols of excess that make big, easy, deserving targets, but they’re low hanging fruit. What of all the rest? Environmentally speaking, just about everything we do is an “excess” because it’s done by and for so many of us. Agriculture. Construction. Transportation. Industry. For our civilization, none of these are luxuries. Without them people die. In their present form and scale though, everything else dies. As far as the planet is concerned, they might as well be the Four Horsemen, and they ride at our bidding. We might have managed to turn our economy into a global death machine mostly by accident, ** but we can’t stop it from being a death machine by accident.
The powers that be in the International Commission of Stratigraphy succeeded in voting down the proposal to rename our current era the Anthropocene, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t living in it. That train has left the station, and we’re all on board. It doesn’t really matter what we call it, it only matters that we slow it down, and find a better destination. At this point, there’s no stopping it.
*To get a sense of the scale of the problem, check out the graphic on page 40 of A Mariner’s Guide to Whales in the Northwest Atlantic and the Eastern Arctic https://navigatingwhales.ca/en/mariners-guide/#:~:text=A%20Mariner's%20Guide%20to%20Whales,where%20extra%20caution%20is%20warranted.
** Though until recently we didn’t seem to concern ourselves that this was whart was happening. All those “externalities” never showed up on the bottom line, whereas dealing with them did.
Ooops. Didn’t need that last blockquote box after all.