Well, for one thing the “combatants” often were people drafted into combat against their will, given a third-hand pike or crossbow, no training whatsoever and told to stop those heavy horsemen, chop chop !
For another, as **Malthus **notes, you have a rosy view of antiquity and medieval warfare. Wide-scale looting, torching villages and food stockpiles, executing random civilians to teach them who they should be rooting for, raping the womenfolk, poisoning wells, besieging entire cities into starvation and plague (which you gave them by catapulting corpses over the walls)… all in a day’s work for King and [del]Country[/del]Duchy :(.
Like what ?
(And, again, warfare in the old days was pretty much a surefire way to induce famine and epidemics in the country where the fighting took place. Deliberately or indeliberately - you can’t march ten thousand blokes through a countryside that provides just enough food for the locals and expect it not to end badly for someone)
What about the environmental damage of large-scale burning of the entire countryside and ruination of the local irrigation system, the old-fashioned way?
When the Mongols - hardly a high-tech class of combatant - swept through what is now Iran, they did so much damage to the population and to the environment that it took hundreds of years for population densities to recover, not only by massacre but by environmental degredation (such as destroying agriculture, ruining irrigation systems, enouraging grazing beasts owned by nomads to ruin agricultural lands, etc.) … that’s worse than what was done to Europe in WW2.
Interesting read, although your cite doesn’t actually say what you said. It says the damage turned back hundreds of years of agricultural development, not that it took hundreds of years for the population to recover.
Do you guys really think that we can’t fuck up the planets’ ability to support us much worse now than 500 years ago? I don’t.
Since that’s the only point I was making, you can stop with the rosy, chivalry bullshit.
How do you support the same population density in a premodern society without the same level of agriculture? What are your people supposed to eat?
Sure, a nuclear exchange would do it.
The reason we are tasking you with “… the rosy, chivalry bullshit” is that you appear unwilling to concede that premodern warfare, sans nuclear weapons, could be just as environmentally-destructive as modern warfare.
Fair enough, but you did say we. BTW, why should’t we count nukes or agent orange? You’re right, I don’t think premodern warfare could be as environmentally destructive as modern warfare.
I don’t think agent orange is really any worse than simply burning people out, which has been happening since forever. Maybe marginally so, with some residual poisioning effects.
Nukes certainly are worse, but they haven’t actually been used in war since WW2.
Similar stories run in every family I know; the consecutive Nazi and Bolshevik occupations have left deep impact in my country.
I’m not going to be fooled by the apparent lull following WWII. Human communities have never stopped waging wars and never will. The peace in the aftermath of WWII teems with local genocides. It is a period during which players at the global table regroup as they can’t wait to re-ignite frozen territorial conflicts. All this while overpopulation, pollution, resource depletion and extreme weather are acknowledged as facts by responsible people. The recourse to religion is not as comforting as it used to. Secular social projects have lost their appeal too. Today’s people (at all levels) can only focus on the short term and it seems they can’t even manage that satisfactorily.
Or will be spared from an existence. It’s all about one’s outlook on the overall worth of a human life, innit ?
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Do you guys really think that we can’t fuck up the planets’ ability to support us much worse now than 500 years ago? I don’t.
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Honestly ? Without factoring nukes as they’re a whole other kettle of fish (that we don’t really use) then no, I don’t think modern war is so much more destructive to the environment, proportionally speaking. From a human-centric P.O.V. at least, if the tools to destroy and their scale of destruction have evolved a lot since Caesar, so too have the tools to cope with the destruction, generate the bare necessities and recover.
Poison a well in 800 CE, burn a full granary just before the winter, kill or disperse the oxen, salt the earth if you really want to be a cock about it : that’s one dead town, period. All of it. Refugees won’t be readily accepted in the next village over (which may or may not have enough resources to care for them anyway) and the city itself can’t be “fixed” in any timescale that could matter to the people who up to this point used to live in it.
By comparison, bust an entire region’s water supply today and their allies will start trucking in food and water from hundreds of miles away 5 minutes later to try and help while the reconstruction goes on. Hell, we manage to muddle throughmega-tsunamis. That’s the sort of stuff that a few centuries ago would have doomed a whole civilization and/or sprouted a religion.
The main difference I would agree upon is the problem of unexploded munitions and mines, which do tend to keep on killing people long after the guns have been silenced. That’s brand new. But while certainly tragic, those hazards are not really dangerous/deadly on a grand scale - in Viet-Nam for example, one of the worst battlefields of the Cold War when it comes to that sort of crap, UXOs & old mines account for ~105.000 deaths since the mid-1970s (cite). That’s a lot of people to be sure, and it sucks. But then again in the same timeframe the total population of Vietnam has nearly doubled, going from ~57 to ~86 million people. Out of a 30 million new people, +/-105.000 is a statistical anecdote.
It’s still no comfort for the ones starring in the anecdote, no quibble there.
As for agent orange, Vietnam 30 years after copious spraying is the second largest rice exporter in the world (fifth largest producer, total), which isn’t bad considering the limited acreage. First black pepper producer, too. OK, I’ll stop cribbing from my cheat sheet :). The point is, all things considered Viet-Nam’s economy is pretty darn robust right now, as are their public health stats, so if they’ve *really *been devastated by the war for generations to come they’re keeping it close to the chest :o. They’re nowhere near the multiple hundreds of years’ worth of lasting damage of Malthus’ Genghis cite. Elsewhere in the article, and I quote :
2.5 million to 250 thou. 9 out of 10 people gone. That’s… kind of a lot, honestly. Silly Mongols, they got “decimated” the wrong way around ! Depending on which estimates you go by, it’s actually *more *dead people than the whole of the Vietnam war, napalm and all.
The adjustment for inflation is left as an exercise to the reader.
I think otherwise; things could not be better for bringing new lives into this world. Overpopulation is one of those self-correcting scare monsters those who would like us to think they are sophisticated come up with every now and then. Lower infant death rates and population growth self-corrects, as it has already done in Vietnam and most of the rest of Asia.
I’m a humanist. I don’t want mankind to be wiped out. Its extinction, however, does not make the object of the present thread.
I don’t wish people stopped breeding either, but I can’t help wondering about the condition of Man given the present state of affairs and the knowledge we’ve accumulated on reality and Man’s place in it.
It is quite disappointing to see reactions to this concern only range from amused denial to blind optimism.
“Don’t worry. No matter how many times you watch “Finding Nemo”, Marlin will always benefit from Dory’s wisdom.”
Wait wait wait… so you believe my parents are responsible for my fulfillment?
Hell no!
They were responsible for doing their best to avoid fucking me up* but they’re no more responsible for my happiness and fulfillment than I am for theirs.
Parents have a great deal of responsibility to do more than just avoid fucking them up. I watch a mother berate her children in public and I see the child’s face and I feel like smacking that mother right there. No such child who grows up with such a parent is going to be happy, and it’s the parents’ fault.
That falls under “avoid fucking the child up”, and most of humanity has managed to be reasonably happy despite ohmygawd, being berated in public (dude, if that’s the worst think you believe a mother can do to her child, congratulations). Do you really believe your parents are responsible for your fulfillment? All of your life? Until you’re 17 and 364 days old? Until when?
What are your people supposed to eat?