Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site dciem.UUCP Path: utzoo!dciem!mmt From: mmt@dciem.UUCP (Martin Taylor) Newsgroups: net.politics Subject: Re: I'm OK, you're excess population Message-ID: <1457@dciem.UUCP> Date: Sat, 16-Mar-85 16:22:22 EST Article-I.D.: dciem.1457 Posted: Sat Mar 16 16:22:22 1985 Date-Received: Sat, 16-Mar-85 19:01:42 EST References: Reply-To: mmt@dciem.UUCP (Martin Taylor) Distribution: net Organization: D.C.I.E.M., Toronto, Canada Lines: 80 Summary: Will Martin wrote that the world perhaps cannot continue to carry the present population, and if it can, a time will come when increasing population exceeds the stable carrying capacity of the world. Paul Torek disagreed, quite strongly, claiming that greater population gave more people the opportunity to enjoy life, and that people arguing for lower population levels always included themselves and their friends among those who would be included: >Look, someone who wants a "long range goal" of lower population probably >thinks it would be better *now* if out ancestors had followed low- >population policies. Suppose they think an ideal population would be >one-fourth of the present one. Then I would ask who they are imagining >as inhabiting such a world -- if they are imagining that everyone >presently alive would live in such a world, but that everyone has one- >fourth the lifespan (that would get you the desired population), then >they are drawing the right comparison. If they are imagining that they >and their favorite one-fourth of the present population would get to >live in such a world, then their comparison is flawed. See the point? For once, I think Paul Torek has the wrong end of the stick (a rare event). It is possible to argue that the famines in the Sahel and elsewhere, territorial wars, resource fights, and so forth are unrelated to population pressures. We don't KNOW that they would be greatly reduced in impact with a less dense world, but I believe that they would. I don't think there is any question of a "long range goal" of lower population; I think it is just a fact of future life. Whether it comes about through war, disease and famine, or through intelligent planning, is up to those now living. We KNOW that the kinds of energy source we now rely on will be running out soon, and that we are not doing much about building the infrastructure for substitutes. We KNOW that the kind of agriculture that is needed to feed the world is highly energy-intensive. Yet we think that all is fine, and that if we just teach those Africans our ways, they will no longer be hungry. That could be true, for a few years, but we would all be hungrier quicker if they started using energy with as much abandon as we do. We are living on borrowed energy capital, built over hundreds of millions of years, and we are using it up in a matter of centuries. Is that wise? How many people would the Earth have, in a natural balance with the rest of life? If we avoid the Judeo-Christian notion that we have to dominate all other creatures, and learn to live beside them instead, we might get some idea by considering biomass. How much do all the members of given species weigh? There should be some kind of distribution that would determine a reasonable range of numbers for humans (the figures should be for a time before humans became so dominant, rather than now, when we have driven so many species to extinction and cultivated others to unnatural numbers). If you want another approach, consider what kind of lifestyle seems to result in the greatest average happiness. Again, I don't know the answer, but I am pretty sure it is not in crowded cities, nor yet in hermitages. It may be in small towns close to a rural countryside. If so, then judge how many people could live in such places in the fertile parts of the world. I haven't calculated, but I would bet the number is far, far less than one billion. As for who I would expect to live in such a world -- in the real future, I expect the majority to be the descendants of non-urbanized people from reasonably fertile (but not prime) land. I expect the cities to be decimated by disease, famine, and riot when the energy supplies break down (all bets are off if this leads to nuclear war, as it well might). People who can feed themselves and a few neighbours are the ones who will have both the organization and the spare resources to survive this period, if anyone does. I hope that enough history survives that humanity (and the rest of us) will not have to go through a similar period again in another two or three thousand years. At least it seems unlikely that those people will be able to build their population on the basis of using up resources hundreds of thousands of times faster than the resources accumulate. We, in this century, will have used them up. -- Martin Taylor {allegra,linus,ihnp4,floyd,ubc-vision}!utzoo!dciem!mmt {uw-beaver,qucis,watmath}!utcsri!dciem!mmt