I’m pretty sure that most people agree it started in the 60s. Borlaug was doing his wheat experiments in Mexico in the 40s, but there wasn’t really widespread cultivation of high yield hybrids until the 60s.
Global demilitarization with those resources moved towards education and science, earlier, more-peaceful decolonization, sustainable restitution to the Third World to offset colonialism, a strengthening of the UN with a move towards ending nation-states. Post-WWII global demilitarization would have been the biggie.
I think there are many things that preclude those policies, ranging from individual selfishness & capitalism to nationalism and racism. But yes, it certainly made it easier for the richer nations to continue to deal from a position of strength.
On a side note, I don’t think people really truly grasp how dependent the GR is on fossil fuels and other petrochemicals. You might replace the diesel in tractors with biofuels (which you grow how, BTW?), but how are you replacing the fertilizers?
Strawman - I never claimed perfection, but you are ignoring the entirety of Sustainable Agriculture completely, which is what I meant by excluding the middle.
Is this “we” the same “we” who promote abstinence over condoms in Africa (That would be the US, BTW)?
One can be for free trade and against the GR at the same time.
I do - but it’s on strictly anti-corporate grounds, I have no fear of Frankenfood. Glow-in-the-dark cheese would make for handy midnight snacking…
Look, we’re not asking whether, if you were appointed dictator of the world in 1948, whether you would have advocated policies that lead to lower population growth. But the UN wasn’t the vehicle to do so, because the UN is simply an organization where countries can argue about their differences rather than drop nuclear bombs on each other. The UN was limited to what the Soviet Union would agree to, because otherwise the Soviet Union would have dropped out of the UN, and then what good would it be?
The question is, was the Green Revolution a bad thing? Those of you who say it was a bad thing seem to have the idea that third world farmers saw they were getting bigger crops, then went home to fuck their wives more often and crank out more kids.
Wrong. The green revolution didn’t encourage more births, it simply meant that more kids that were born didn’t starve to death. Add in simple treatments for some childhood diseases, and that’s what made the population explosion. Not more children being born, more children surviving.
Take away the green revolution and exactly as many kids get born, only they end up dead. That is why opposing the green revolution is supporting death by starvation.
Yeah, I understand you wish the world population was lower. Sorry those kids didn’t die back in the 50s and 60s and 70s. They lived. Too bad. Now what are you gonna do? You can wish them dead, but they aren’t dead. Now what are you gonna do?
And birth control wasn’t even really available in the United States until the 1960s, unless you’re talking about condoms. And look at social attitudes towards condoms here in the US until the AIDS epidemic. Condoms were what sailoers used to avoid getting gonnorhea, not what married couples used to avoid pregnancy.
Just putting bowls of free condoms in every third world village isn’t the answer. It couldn’t hurt, sure, but it’s not going to help unless people actually use them. What will really help is political and social freedom and gender equality. Totalitarian measures aren’t the answer, because that only works when the dictator is interested in reducing population growth. If the next dictator decides to encourage population growth, then where are you?
Ok, I don’t have a good argument to this.
It is actually depressing, it makes it hard to be an optomist, we will just continue to breed, consume and breed some more until we run out of clever ways to feed this endless growth. I guess it is hard to argue against GR, but that does not change the equation, that the world might have been better off not having a Green Revolution until human societies had matured enough to handle it.
So how does the world work towards political & social freedom. We are now 60 years into the UN and we don’t seem to be much closer in large parts of the world. It could be argued the US and Russia are backsliding to the cold war days.
Jim
You can also be for both. Personally, I find it flatly insane that people are saying technological breakthroughs that allow the human race to have a more reliable food supply are bad.
What was O’Rourke’s line? “Just enough of me, but way too much of you.” It’s easy to slag the GR when it’s not your kid going hungry.
But at what cost to humanity as a whole and its future. Currently we keep clearing more land; using up more top soil and combined with other factors, we are experiencing a greater number of droughts. How many people do we need to keep feeding, this cycle cannot go on forever can it? Instead of them starving to death in the last 4 decades, their grandkids in far greater numbers can starve together in the future?
There is a logical fallacy here unless you assume we can handle an ever-increasing population level.
Maybe without GR, we could have made more social progress throughout the world and help most people out of poverty and cycles of famine. Of course maybe, without GR, more of the world would have gone to populist socialism or communist and the Capitalist Free-Trade Democracies would be small enclaves of freedom that are hopelessly outnumbered by a hostile system. I have heard that theory espoused to defend GR.
Personally I must be evil, I spend effort and money to save the environment. I send money to help endangered Wildlife, Animal Shelters and preserve small parts of the rain forest. I contribute money to fight Heart Disease and Cancer. I even contribute money to US Food Banks. I have never spent a dime to help the starving masses outside the US. I guess by withholding my money & effort I am making them starve. Is it ever their fault and their governments?
Jim
Still no counterargument to my points from pro-GR proponents, I see, though - just appeals to emotion.
So yeah, fuck it, let’s do it your way…
Even if people had to starve in the 60s, in the long run, the GR is a bad thing, because when it collapses, even more people are going to die. Billions more. That’s why it’s bad.
That’s exactly what I’m saying. More yields, more drought-resistant crops, that’s exactly what people do.
I’d argue that that’s not the case. And even if it was, you’re arguing that the GR was great for that generation. That has no bearing on whether it’s a good idea overall.
More reliable, maybe. Less sustainable, definitely, and that’s what will count in the long run.
I don’t know about “we”, but that’s exactly what Richard Parker (you know, the OP?) asked.
People are talking about population control and the Green Revolution like they’re mutually exclusive things, but countries like India engaged in major family planning programs at the same time they were introducing hybrid wheat and rice, and in some ways, the Green Revolution actually made population control easier, but increasing the economic status of the farmers who were affected.
Like the World Bank’s Consultative Group on International Agricultural Resource said (and you can find the article here 404 Error - Page Not Found 
Well, you tell me. I’m not the one opposed to growing more food. Human beings are, after all, the single most important resource we have.
If the problem is a loss of fossil fuels, well, I can tell you right now there’s gonna be a solution to that. Fossil fuels can be replaced for 99.9% of their current uses; the reason they aren’t is simply that they’re the most economical choice at present.
Sure. Of course the cycle can go on. Economic factors will over time change the approach we take to producing food - meat will become more expensive, for instance, and will eventually be replaced by other protein sources. The capacity of the planet to generate useful biomass is incomprehensibly huge.
The problem isn’t that there’s too much food - that isn’t a problem in any sane version of reality - it’s the way the world is set up in sovereign, endlessly suspicious states that leads to warfare, international economic disparities, and an inability to solve externalities (such as global warming.) THAT problem is a serious one and leads invariably to all other major problems facing humanity, but it’s simply not going to be solved by having fewer people or less food. For instance, it’s something that’s kind of fallen off the radar in the last couple of decades, but we’re still at the mercy of the nuclear arsenals of a number of large nation-states who, if they were to get into a fight and panic, could blow up and irradiate most of the world. Next to that, “Too much food” is a pretty comical problem to deal with.
Keep the human race at 1 billion, or 3 billion people, and you will have fundamentally the same problems as you have now. We damn near blew ourselves to kingdom come at 3.1 billion. The world was not a better place with fewer people in it.
MrDibble claims that the GR “isn’t sustainable,” but why isn’t it? Plants grow again. Today’s agriculture is vastly more sustainable than ever before; our understanding of ecology and biology confers upon us tremendous potential to continue growing food. That’s not to say we don’t mismanage our resources, because we do - shit, look at the overfishing of Atlantic cod stocks if you want to see what stupidities we’re capable of. But those things happen at any population level. Overfishing of Atlantic cod was a problem a long time ago. A few hundred thousand North American natives managed to wipe out almost every large mammal species on the continent. The Easter Islanders destroyed their entire ecosystem. Trust me, I see the problems, but why doom people to starve to solve them when there’s no reason to believe that would solve them?
But we didn’t. I mean, I realize it’s nice to imagine we COULD solve problems without more people, but you’ve provided not one shred of evidence, or even a logical argument, that you could solve those problems if only we let more people die of starvation and produced less food. The fact is that we had about ten thousand years of what we now call “Civilization” BEFORE the Green Revolution to make social progress and help people out of poverty, and progress was not fantastic for most of that period of time. When progress did come it was entirely on the back of technology and industralization, and at least to my eyes had nothing to do with birth control.
If we have big time problems - and I don’t for a minute dispute that we do - by what calculus are you concluding that 3 billion people is a number that can solve those problems but 6 billion isn’t?
And as long as we’re dealing with hypotheticals, how much more warfare do you think we might’ve had these last few decades if there was less food to go around?
It’s indisputably their fault. Thanks to Norman Borlaug, they have the tools to prevent starvation. In a few cases - Ethiopia in 1984, or the Sudan today - evil bastards have chosen to use famine as a weapon of war. But, fortunately, there’s a lot less of it now, and it occurs when it’s deliberately caused.
I disagree. Humans aren’t worth anything without a working planet to live on. That’s your most important resource. Humans - they’re not a scarce commodity. Fresh water, good soil - these we don’t have enough of.
I do not share your optimism.
Replaced by what? The perpetual motion machine that is biofuel?
Nuclear/wind/solar/hydro/whatever power isn’t going to fertilize the crops and it isn’t going to destroy the pests that GR monocultures are so vulnerable to. Fertilizer and pesticides use petrochemicals as feedstock, not just for power. What are you going to replace them with?
I comprehend it just fine - it’s limited, and we’ve come up against those limits more and more.
The problem isn’t just too much food. The problem is what that costs in the long run.
No, you don’t - not if the sustainable carrying capacity is at that level.
Did you read my first post? I’ll spell it out again - reliance on fossil fuels, environmental degradation,negative water impacts, economic slavery.
Only if watered, de-pested and fertilized.
The Sahel, meanwhile, grows apace.
That’s just not true…
No-one has to starve.
What do those six give you that 3 doesn’t? That extra 3 is not working in labs or universities solving problems, it’s scratching a living in India or Nigeria, living hand-to-mouth.
If my proposed pre-GR agenda was followed, not a hell of a lot.
I have yet to see the evidence that no GR = mass starvation. As far as I can tell, modern famines are all about distribution and politics, not crop failure. And the ones that were about crop failure, like Ireland? That’s what a GR-style monoculture gets you.
I’m going to back out of this for a bit. **RickJay ** has given me some things to think over and as I already think we can sustain the GR if we can ever get our damn population growth under control, I also still agree with much of what MrDibble is saying.
I am going to observe and hopefully learn a bit.
Jim
Actually, I think Lemur’s argument (birth rates didn’t increase; the death rate fell) is correct. If you look at historical birth rates in India, the numbers bear him out: Birth rates drop steadily from the turn of the century through the 90s (UNICEF bears this out, albeit with fewer data points: 40 in '70, 31 in '90 and 23 now). Note that the birth rate continued to drop even as the GR started. In fact, the birth rate fell by more (27%) in the three decades from 1960-1990 than it did in the three decades prior to the GR (11%).
The population increase in India is purely because the death rate fell much faster than the birth rate did. It fell by 57% between 1960 and 1990, while falling only 37% between 1930 and 1960.
I’m not arguing that birth rates didn’t fall, I’m arguing that this is not due to the GR - your own cite bears this out, with the rates continually falling from the turn of the century, 60 years before the GR. I’d lay that at the feet of modernisation and education, myself. I’m just saying that I don;t see the GR as having a noticeable impact by itself in stopping people from having kids. If India had gone for sustainable agrarian reform rather than the GR, who know what thoise rates might have been? I don’t, and neither do you.
The correction will mostly take part in tropical hellholes and the developing world because that’s where the new people are being birthed. They are also poor, so they will act as the canary in the mine. Nations like the U.S. will have enough food to feed themselves after they stop exporting grain. Also, first world nations are technologically advanced as a rule, which means we will be able to bootstrap ourselves out of the crisis with less pain. We will watch the blizzard from our comfortably heated cabin while sipping our hot chocolate. Well, not really, since it takes an enormous amount of fossil fuels to grow and process cocoa and ship it to the U.S. over tens of thousands of miles of ocean. And the heat may only be available a couple hours a day. But good enough.
This replaces one problem with another. It does no good if you cut the population dramatically if those who remain have consumption levels similar to those of Western Europe or the United States. Either these new people will not have this lifestyle in the future or – more likely IMO – ultimately, the lifestyle of the U.S. and Europe and the developing world will have to ratchet backwards.
Of course, we could be much more efficient. But then Devon’s paradox comes and bites us in the ass.
Maybe if we invented advanced fusion in a secret lab twenty years ago or we find some dilithium crystals lying around somewhere. We’ve really gotten ourselves in a pickle. To maintain an ever increasing population or just maintain our current first world ways we need an ever increasing energy supply. Even our debt based economies are built on the idea that they must grow forever. If a nation experiences only 1-2% growth people start talking doom and gloom and saying it’s a recession. Imagine what the talking heads would say if we had 0%.
The scale of the problem is hard to imagine. The only way we’re getting out of a major population contraction that I can see it is if we’re lucky enough to have a gentle downward slope of the energy curve which will cause us to stop wasting fossil fuels on personal transportation. Then we can devote the rest (and tens of trillions of dollars which will come from…somewhere) creating a sustainable worldwide infrastructure based on solar, wind, and other renewables. Then we can save the rest of the fossil fuels for farming as a stopgap until we someday figure out a way to feed 9 billion people without fossil fuels (or maybe just create a huge amount of artificial FF, like algae or something). Then we save the rest for critical needs (like servicing, maintaining, or making new “renewables” – it takes a shitload of oil to make solar panels and construct wind turbines).
That still doesn’t answer the sustainability problem (e.g. massive loss of topsoil, water salinity, fresh water scarcity, massive pollution, desertification, etc.). That just might make things even worse several decades down the line. But it could work for awhile. Of course, I seriously doubt even that will happen. I’m guessing here in the U.S. we’re gonna do crazy things like turn coal into synthetic fuels so we can continue driving to the mall so we can buy plastic goods shipped from China and a bag of cheese doodles which came from a thousand acre farm devoted to making the corn to make the doodles and the corn syrup in the Coke with which they guzzle it down. And when the natgas peaks in a couple years and then coal itself peaks in 30 years from the synth fuel use…well…um…yeah. So it goes.
I agree we are in for trouble with just that attitude. We will destroy are world rape are land. Wreak from the stench of our own death. Then with no respect for our mistakes ask THE LORD for help as we set our lovely Earth Home a blaze.