6 billion?

Great Debates
61

In the words of P.J. O’Roarke, many people seem to have the attitude of “just enough of me; way too much of you,” referring to all the efforts of trying to stop “those people” from reproducing so much. “Those people” referring, of course, to all those disgusting poor peasants in other countries.

P.J. goes on to compare population densities of certain white-bread American cities, or urban centers such as NYC, to population densities in other countries.

Example:
Freemont, Calif.: 2250 people/sq. mile
Bangladesh: 2130 people/sq. mile

Manhattan comes in at over 52,000 people/sq. mile.

How many Bangladeshis petition the UN to do something about the crisis in Freemont? Do they come over here to preach about how many children Californians should have?

A world population of 8.2 million comes to 156 people/sq. mile. By comparison, Indiana has 154 and Pennsylvania has 265/people sq. mile. (And these figures do not include Antarctica). Of course the world has a ton of uninhabited space; so does Pennsylvania.

So we might be on our way to a world “as packed as that seething mass of pitiful humanity, the state of Pennsylvania (nearly 2 billion acres of state forest, and 9 million acres of farms, producing thirty-eight billion dollars per year in food and agricultural products).”

The horror.

Of course, O’Roarke is a satirist, and illuminates points through exaggeration. But the general idea is valid, I think.

62

Akatsukami wrote:

Vile?! Hey, I’ll have you know I love eating dead animals! They taste great! “Cow” is one of my favorite flavors. If the scorched carcasses of dead animals were good enough for our ancient ancestors, they’re good enough for me!

And besides, I’m vegephobic.

63

divemaster wrote, re P.J. O’Roarke:

Even though this is from a work of satire, I must take exception to P.J.'s use of these statistics.

Fremont, CA is a city. Bangladesh is a country. It is not fair to compare the population density of a city to that of a whole country – even a small country – as most countries consist of little pockets of dense population (cities) surrounded by large areas of sparse population.

Now, if P.J. had compared the population density of Fremont, CA with the population density of Dhaka, Bangladesh, then it would be a fair comparison.

Quick-N-Dirty Aviation: Trading altitude for airspeed since 1992.

64

Pennsylvania’s area is 45,333 square miles, or just over 29 millions acres. P.J. is telling me that 2 billion of those 29 million acres are state forest? I understand that this man is a satirist, but that’s a pretty abstract joke. Is he making fun of Carl Sagan or something?
Maybe this was the “illuminating through exaggeration” part of the idea. I don’t know, he still never makes me laugh.

Nothing I write about any person or group should be applied to a larger group.

  • Boris Badenov
65

Yes, ‘2 billion’ acres of state/federal forested land in Pennsylvania has to be wrong. Change it to ‘2 million’ and that comes out to be about 7% of the area, which sounds like a reasonable figure to me.

The city vs. entire country point is certainly a worthwhile distinction; however, I do not think it negates the point that space is available for 9 billion people on this planet (and that is assuming we ever get to 9 billion, not a given based on reproduction figures posted elsewhere on these pages). Maybe people will have to move away from the more urban centers and start filling in some of that empty space.

66

I did make some mistakes, but at least I kept the thread going. :slight_smile: I’m sure of my facts, I just didn’t express them clearly enough.

Here’s what I believe: “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish and he feeds himself for a lifetime.” (Unless he hates fish. :o )

What does that mean? dhanson said, “…the undeveloped nations depend on us for a lot of things.” Wouldn’t it be better if they had their own industries, grew their own food, stayed with their loved ones instead of leaving them for months or years? Wouldn’t it be better if people everywhere earned a living wage?

(Not everyone here does, and most of the ones who make below-minimum are recent immigrants, legal and illegal both. OTOH, it’s better than earning twenty cents an hour making shoes or clothes. Here, they work by the piece, some making as much as TWO WHOLE dollars an hour. [Wow!] You wouldn’t believe the number of sweatshops there are here in L.A. It’s a quiet scandal. Every now and then, one is busted, the authorities make it appear they’re doing something about the problem, then things continue as they have been. Remember that the next time you buy a shirt that says “Made in the USA.”)

Here’s what I also believe: Immigration and emigration should be unrestricted. Is that contradictory? No. If I may make an imperfect comparison, abortion should be unrestricted but unnecessary. (Did I just open a can of worms?) Immigration should be unrestricted but totally voluntary. In other words, no one should leave their families behind because they can’t survive at home. These are ideal positions, but in the real world, of course, it won’t happen. The best we can do is get as close to the ideal as we can.

No, I don’t believe that we should totally cut off L.A.'s water. That would cause incredible chaos, to put it mildly. We’ll just let an earthquake do it for us. :slight_smile: If L.A.'s water WAS cut off, well, we’d just have to leave and possibly move to YOUR home towns.

Seriously, though, people moving to urban areas DESTROYS wilderness and farmland both. How? Read this partial quote from a recent story in the L.A. Daily News, dated October 15:

“Opponents of the 22,000-home Newhall Ranch development have found an ally in state Attorney General William Lockyer, who on Thursday filed a friend of the court brief in a Kern County Superior Court stating his opposition to the mini-city.” (“Mini”-city? That’s enough homes for 100,000 people!)

“Lockyer further asked the court for permission to testify for Ventura County, which is suing to halt the project.” (Ventura County borders Kern and Los Angeles Counties on the west.)

"‘This is tremendously exciting,’ said Mary Ann Krause, field deputy for Supervisor Kathy Long. ‘The interest of the state demonstrates how important the Newhall case is. It’s potentially a landmark case.’

"Long spearheaded the suit against Los Angeles County, which approved a project she said will drain her county’s groundwater supply and destroy its $1 billion agriculture industry.

“A ruling by the court is expected on November 4.”

In other words, Los Angeles County approved the construction of a HUGE housing development that will cause neighboring counties - Kern and Ventura - to suffer, and for the reasons I’ve stated earlier: Loss of groundwater and agricultural land. Similar developments mean the loss of “wilderness.” And I stated in an earler post that there is no real wilderness left; it’s mostly federal parkland, and some of that is leased to ranchers at below-market rates.

I think my position is clear. Disagree if you like, but I stand by it.

Those who do not learn from the past are condemned to relive it. Georges Santayana

67

I meant to write "Unless he hates fish. :smiley:

I’ll get it right one of these days…

Those who do not learn from the past are condemned to relive it. Georges Santayana

68

Anyone have the square mileage of Freemont vs. Bangladesh?

If we are looking at people per square mile does it really matter whether we are comparing a county to a country?

What I mean is that if the problem is not the number of people but the fact that they are all living on top of each other, is that really a problem. IF they have the same population density, why do they not just spread out?

Clearly there is some compelling reason beyond the mere number of people that compels the people of Bangladesh to live in a certain city, just there is a reason people live in Manhattan. The problem would seem not to be the number of people, but economic factors.

(I am of course assumiong that we are comparing habitable land and excluding mountaintops and lakes and such in the calculation of people per square mile.)

69

Just because we have open spaces does not mean that it should be filled with swarms of people. What kind of dumb logic says we must populate all free space and give no thought to attaining a managable world population? What kind of thinking is that ?

Think about the Great Plains and Grand Canyon, for example, should be put condo’s there, or house the homeless?

Brille
“Wet Floor” sign does not mean do it.

70

John John asks:

John John, I hate to ruin your day like this, but the Great Plains already have condos on them. The colloquial term for this noble ecological formation is “Kansas”/

“Kings die, and leave their crowns to their sons. Shmuel HaKatan took all the treasures in the world, and went away.”

71

[[[[[[[[John John, I hate to ruin your day like this, but the Great Plains already have condos on them. The colloquial term for this noble ecological formation is “Kansas”/]]]]
Akatsumkami

Damn, that was funny. Thanks for the chuckle. I get your point. Yes, that did ruin my day, but Kansas can do that. LOL.

Seriously, shouldn’t we try to LIMITED the kind of expansion an over population that impacts the envirnoment negatively?

Brille
“Wet Floor” sign does not mean do it.

72

But, John John, we do have such limits. E.g., it is actually illegal for a developer to even try and build cliff-side apartments.
Now, I will concede that there is no overarching Ecology Board with the power to change the rules whenever it sees fit, conduct warrantless searches, seize any property it pleases, etc. But, advocates of any plan (by no means limited to environmentalism) like to say, “Hey, wouldn’t it be so much easier if I had all of that power; of course I would never use it in the service of evil.” One would think that the conflict between Stalin and Trotsky would give them at least a moment’s pause.
Now, all the evidence is that the world is not being overrun by people like the Scandanavian peninsula by lemmings. The birth rate of the industrialized world has already crashed, and the problem (more social and political than environmental) is that an aging population will not have young’uns it needs to support the current old-age pension system (the name of which varies from country to country). The U.S. is in a slightly different position; continued immigration keeps the population growing and relatively young, but the ethnic makeup of the U.S. in 2050 will likely be considerably different from what it is today (whether that is to be considered a problem is, again, more social and political than anything else).
Again, Third World birth rates have crashed, and now stand at about replacement level (I say “about”, because it’s difficult to get good statistics out of countries like El Salvador and Myanmar). Only in sub-Saharan Africa does the population seem to be increasing – and there, the rate of increase has still fallen by 75% in the last 35 years.
All of the data show that the doubling of population so widely feared just isn’t going to happen. World population may stabilize at about 11 billion in about two centuries – or may fall to a third of that. Older data, of course, is impressively scary – but it’s as relevant to the current situation as is Ken Olsen’s prediction that time-sharing would be the wave of the future. After all, the population has several hit the limits of sustinence before – around the 3rd and 14th centuries CE. We’re not taking those data as relevant, are we?

“Kings die, and leave their crowns to their sons. Shmuel HaKatan took all the treasures in the world, and went away.”

73

]]]]After all, the population has several hit the limits of sustinence before – around the 3rd and 14th centuries CE. We’re not taking those data as relevant, are we?]]Akats

Are you saying in the 3rd and 14th centuries AD we have hit limits of popualtion, or food to sustain the then population?

Brille
“Wet Floor” sign does not mean do it.

74

It doesn’t make much sense to talk about food supply as a limiting factor for world population, because there’s more than one population group in the world. If you look at each country or region independently, you’ll see that not everywhere will reach its limit at the same time.

For a hypothetical example, let’s assume that everyplace on the planet has equal population growth, and that we can barely growing enough food to feed everyone. Does this mean that the whole planet will be eating only enough to survive? Not hardly!
Countries that produce a lot of food (like the USA) will feed their own populations first, and only export what they don’t need. Countries which have more population than they can feed on their own (like, IIRC, Japan) will be in trouble, because no one will sell them all the food they need. Either they will institute strict population controls, or starvation will start doing it for them.

As I see it, if population growth continues we will begin to see major localized famines, some with great loss of life; but each time this happens, the overall world population will be reduced. IMO there will never be a time at which the entire planet is simultaneously in danger of starvation. (Aside from such catastrophes as an ice age, or global nuclear winter.)

Laugh hard; it’s a long way to the bank.

75

The problems of food production and distribution are political, and not due to population per se. The U.S. spends only a tiny fraction of its GDP on food production, and even at that we wildly overproduce to the point where the government sometimes pays farmers to not grow food.

In many of the parts of the world where people are starving the ground is fertile and ripe, a veritable bread-basket. They are starving because their government chooses to take their property and misuse it, or because they don’t have the infrastructure (roads, refrigeration, etc) to make use of their resources, etc.

Agriculture is a self-sustaining exercise. Issues of soil erosion aside, it’s a totally renewable resource. And we clearly have the knowledge to produce as much food as we ever need or will need. We still have left the oceans pretty much untapped, we don’t use hydroponics because it’s not economically efficient, etc. Our capacity to increase food production is almost unlimited.

So it’s not a population problem. It’s a problem of government and economics.

76

I’ll provide examples to further dhanson’s point of 20th century famines being a consequence of politics and food distribution rather than agriculture per se. I’m not saying these are irrefutable examples, but they are food for thought.

  1. China 1958-61; Ukraine 1932-34; Cambodia 1975-79: due to the imposition of Marxist theory on traditional agriculture.

  2. Nigerian, Ethiopian, and Sudanese governments using famine as a weapon against non-favored subgroups.

  3. Bengal 1943: British wanted to keep rice supplies out of the hands of the Japanese, and send it to India (under British rule at the time). Result: mass starvation in Bengal.

  4. Bangladesh 1974: famine came in one of their most productive rice years; largely attributed to the socialist Mujibur Rahman’s martial policies

  5. During the sub-Saharan drought in 1983-84, Sudan and Ethiopia suffered ~12% declines in food production—> severe famine; however, Botswana (17% reduction) and Zimbabwe (38% reduction) had no famine. Reason? Probably political factors within the respective countries

  6. In a investigative report for the Village Voice in 1993, the take-home message was that the dumping of free food into Somalia destroyed the agricultural economy. No one could sell their crops with piles of free food sitting at the docks of Mogadishu. Of course, only certain people were allowed to receive the food; others starved. Again, distribution policy and politics. Somalia, about the size of Texas, has a lot of fertile land and a population of only around 6 million (1993).

77

]]It doesn’t make much sense to talk about food supply as a limiting factor for world population, because there’s more than one population group in the world. If you look at each country or region independently, you’ll see that not everywhere will reach its limit at the same time.]AuraSeer

You make an excellent point and one that has occured in the not so distant past, to prove your point,- 1840’s Ireland. The problem was not that there was not enough food in the country but that it was not shipped to the famine sections that were affected. Add to this mixture the English intolerance and refusal to help distribute food and you have the catastrophe of a million plus people starving to death.

This, too, speaks to that as a political event as much as a natural calamity. I also do not think that could occur today, to that extent, because of communication and food distribution.

Brille
“Wet Floor” sign does not mean do it.

78

John John asks:

I admit to not being perfectly clear on the question, but the question is almost certainly, “yes”, regardless.
The population appears to have levelled, as best we can estimate, around 200 million in a very slow (by modern standards, at least) process during the Hellenistic and Principate periods (the Roman Principate is generally reckoned to have ended in 235 CE, FTR). This seems to be the limit of sustinence allowed by the stick-plow and slave-labor agricultural technology of the time; the limits of growth (haven’t I heard that phrse before?) were likely reflected in the breakup of the Roman and Chinese empires at that time (Diocletian and Constantine I patched together the Roman Empire; the Chinese Empire was nominally unified under the Western Chin, but wasn’t a serious political entity until the rise of Sui Wen Ti).
The 14th century CE population of about 400 million represents the limits of the moldboard plow dragged by animals, together with the cooling climate of the “Little Ice Age” (which lasted until the end of the 18th century). Europe was already politically disunited (but suffered horrors beyond the normal despite that), but hitting the sustinence-limit from both sides, as it were, helped bring the Yuan (Mongol) dynasty in China.
There may have been population booms and levelling-offs during the two Neolithic revolutions, too, but we don’t have any evidence as to whether and when they occurred.

“Kings die, and leave their crowns to their sons. Shmuel HaKatan took all the treasures in the world, and went away.”

79

John John ]]]Are you saying in the 3rd and 14th centuries AD we have hit limits of popualtion, or food to sustain the then population?]]]]

I admit to not being perfectly clear on the question, but the question is almost certainly, “yes”, regardless.]Akats Do you mean “answer is yes”?
Yes, we are both unclear on the question, it seems. Who said that in AD 300 and AD 1400 we were at peak population? Are you saying peak population with regards to food quantity, distribution and growth? Who’s figures say that?

As AuraSeer wisely pointed out, not all regions will suffer the same shortages at the same time. One part of the globe can have a glut, while another is enduring a famine. Furthermore, at no time in our past, in all regions, did we ever have a popualtion that was not capable of feeding istelf. No food, very few births.

Brille
“Wet Floor” sign does not mean do it.

80

John John asks:

Ah, the original question becomes clearer. Thank you.
As you all know, we have a fairly good picture of Bronze and Iron Age technology (agricultural and otherwise), area cropped, etc. We also have the Roman and Chinese censuses (these tie in with some of the information previously mentioned). It’s not too difficult, therefore, to come up with a decent estimate of the population of these areas on a decade-by-decade basis, and of the amount of calories that could have been gotten out of these areas.
Now, of course, the Roman and Han empires covered a rather small amount of the land area of the world. OTOH, other areas (from archaeological and literary evidence) were so technically and economically backwards that their carrying capacities were miniscule by comparison (the Romans never did invent foreign aid per se).
In medieval times, we don’t have the equivalent of the Roman census for Europe, but we do have church registers (births and deaths), religious chronicles and secular histories. etc. In China, by contrast, we still have the Chinese censuses (done for purposes of tax assessments, of course) to go by.
So, yes, humanity has reached the limits of agricultural carrying capacity at least twice in the past (other times seem reasonable, but we lack the information necessary to back up our SWAGs). After all, carrying capacity is heavily dependent upon technology (unless we’re going to discuss the term “carrying capacity” in a highly Platonic form that leads us to such absurd questions as, “How high can we stack people before they suffocate at the bottom of the pile?”). The land on which my house stands would, if a HFG type were to be confined to it, cause him to starve to death within a month or so; it would keep a medieval peasant barely alive, provided nothing ever went wrong. OTOH, although it is almost entirely wasted from an agricultural aspect, I make quite a comfortable living.

And, of course, the same is equally true today.

“Kings die, and leave their crowns to their sons. Shmuel HaKatan took all the treasures in the world, and went away.”