I disagree with this. Outside of CO2 production the environment in North America is getting better despite population growth and we could lower CO2 if people weren’t stupidly afraid of nuclear power. Water is an issue but it’s not directly related to population either; e.g. if California farmers stopped growing water-intensive crops their problem would largely go away.
Humans have been causing extinctions ever since we learned to hunt. For example it is thought that mastodons went extinct due largely to human actions. The Carrier pigeon went extinct when North America had a much smaller population than it does now. There is evidence that over-farming helped lead to the collapse of the Mayan empire.
A growing population puts a strain on many resources (and I’m not against efforts to reduce it) but it also increases our most important resource: the human mind. We can solve most (maybe all) of our problems with solutions inconceivable to prior generations. I just don’t believe we are near any kind of catastrophic tipping point.
It seems to be your contention that the very poorest people can afford food that has been transported hundreds of miles. Do you have any evidence for that remarkable claim?
I agree that much more nuclear power would provide lots of benefits but good luck getting those plants built. Time from conception to operation is measured in multiple decades even if there was the political will to do it and there isn’t. Even if we could switch the U.S. over to mostly nuclear power overnight, it would still be an insignificant stop-gap.
The really egalitarian thing about CO2 and other greenhouse gasses is that they don’t care what country or region they come from. That are just as effective globally in the long-term if they come from China or India as they would be coming from LA and their effects are long-term.
California has cleaned up its act greatly and literally in the past few decades but that still represents a net loss when you have over 2 billion Chinese and Indians fighting to get even a piece of Western quality of life. Even if they could do that cleanly (they can’t and they won’t), Sub-Saharan Africa is the next major region that is going to explode in population and try to grow their economies exponentially throughout much of this century. Good luck talking them into doing that in an environmentally or socially responsible way at least anytime this century when all they are trying to do is gain some level of parity that some of the rest of the world has enjoyed for a long time.
Water is directly related to population at least in any common practical terms. It is one of the vital resources that people need to live, grow food and use for recreational activities. However, it is true that many of the most water intensive uses are optional like growing and shipping desirable foods from California or other agriculturally diverse regions to the rest of the country or the world. Over 80% of California’s water is reported to be used by agriculture for growing things like avocados, almonds and even rice in places where they never grow naturally without intense irrigation. You can say that is a theoretically solvable problem but how? Ban all water intensive agriculture in California?
That has some serious economic and social problems of its own. The Foodee market that has built up over the past couple of decades depends on the fact that almost any reasonable ingredient be available not only at specialty restaurants but also places like Whole Foods. That takes a huge amount of both water and fossil fuels to make it happen for anyone that wants it and it isn’t sustainable. Sure, there is sustainable and local foods movement but it is so small and inconsequential that it is more of a badge of hippieness than a real driver of sustainability and it doesn’t scale up in any real way especially for poor people.
All of these ecological, economic and social factors are tied together into a Perfect Mess that is extremely difficult to untie even a portion of let alone straighten out completely. Every piece of string has two others that are intertwined with it and pulling others in as you try to unravel it.
That is a very good documentary and I watched it but still does not address core concerns. He is a statistician rather than ecologist and certainly not an economist. I believe it is great that birthrates are dropping rapidly in many impoverished countries but the number of people in the world is still increasing drastically, consuming unsustainable resources, and the the overall effect of that will be negative for the foreseeable future already on top of our proven unsustainable population.
He presents it as positive message but the net real-world results demand a different interpretation. This isn’t about lines on a certain graph that suggest they aren’t as bad as they once were. It is all about measuring if you have enough resources on a finite planet to see if you can meet the needs of 9 billion or more people for the next several hundred years. Barring some near miraculous series of technological breakthroughs that are now unknown to science, the answer to that is still no. Even then, the further collateral destruction of the Earth’s ecosystems is inevitable and could only be partially replaced by intense research to get things back that we once had for (nearly) free like massive desalinisation plants run by nuclear energy to turn seawater back into fresh water for a high price.
Think about that for a minute. Not 50 years ago, we thought that we could colonize the Moon or even other planets. We don’t even think about that anymore. A much more pressing concern is keeping Earth itself habitable and it is a very real one.
Thus VERY CLEARLY implying that he thinks that the raw population number is the only reason for the overfishing issue.
Which, of course, is total nonsense. If the entire world had the standard of living that the very poorest people have, only the people living right by the ocean would be able to afford fish–and probably only because beaches are not good farmland. Furthermore, they would not be able to afford the fancy boats, huge nets, etc., that are necessary for the large-scale catches that are so prevalent today.
It takes a higher standard of living to be able to afford fish that has been transported for hundreds or even thousands of miles. For that matter, it takes a higher standard of living to afford to develop the technology that makes such transportation possible. THAT issue is the reason for overfishing.
I think the Earth is way overpopulated as it is. Besides exacerbating every modern problem you can think of, I think the current overpopulation of the planet has caused people to become meaner than they used to be. I’ve tried to trawl the net for studies about this, but have so far come up empty, so all I have is my own personal conviction and a few anecdotes.
I once saw an episode of Globe Trekker where the host asked an old man (I think it was Justine Shapiro asking an old Englishman) what he thought the difference was between “his day” and today, for some reason, and “his day” was clearly meant to be somewhere in the Interwar period, between WW1 and 2. And he said that people “want a bigger piece of the pie” than they used to.
While watching “Welcome to the Dollhouse”, an over-the-top story about schoolyard bullying, my elderly friend told me schoolkids never used to be this mean, they didn’t waste their resources on such nonsense. We also watched a 90’s adaptation of “Little Women”, with Kirsten Dunst and (I wanna say) Winona Ryder. I said the movie was a little ridiculous because people aren’t that nice, and he basically disagreed, and said maybe not now they aren’t, or something to that effect.
We know from both scientific studies and plain farmers’ wisdom, that many domestic animals get more aggressive, even psychologically unhinged and murderous, when they are overcrowded: chickens, rabbits, goats. It would be arrogant and irrational to think our own species is immune to this natural phenomenon.
We know from both scientific studies and plain farmers’ wisdom, that many domestic animals get more aggressive, even psychologically unhinged and murderous, when they are overcrowded: chickens, rabbits, goats. It would be arrogant and irrational to think our own species is immune to this natural phenomenon.
It’s not that simplistic. Tokyo is one of the world’s most crowded cities and also one of the safest.
You think people are meaner now? In ancient Rome, watching people get torn apart by wild animals used to be considered good fun.
I think the world is more “civilized” now than it ever has been.
I recall reading some article about global warming and pollution and how it would lead to a lack of potable water and desertification in large regions of Asia and Africa. Maybe it was even that peak oil documentary I don’t remember but basically saying how wars in the future would be fought over having water to drink and not oil. You can’t go very long at all without water to drink especially in places that are so densely populated. I’m not sure how realistic such a scenario would be or how soon, but it also kind of makes you think Mother Nature has her own cruel way of dealing with overpopulation. :eek:
I don’t mean to suggest that people were perfect back then, either. But people are hardly nice now. The institutions for meanness have changed, definitely. I think maybe hatred is not aimed at as many groups and certainly not at the same ones, but has sort of diffused into everything, especially things or aspects of people that don’t fall neatly into groups. I know people think we were intolerant then, and I agree, but I think we are even more intolerant now, in a different way. For example, people have such high expectations of life nowadays, it seems, and when they are (unsurprisingly) disappointed it seems like they take it out on other people, not people who have what they (think they) want but have even less of the quality they (think they) want, ie, someone lower on the totem pole.
Also, this is talk of quality only, ie, people back in the day hated gays and lesbians, hated black people. But quantity matters a lot too, as well as aspects of feeling which I don’t even have the vocabulary to really talk about. It’s a big topic. How much did they hate gays and lesbians and blacks? How much do people hate the people they do, now?
I totally agree, it’s not at all a simple comparison, our incredible intelligence compared to other animals first and foremost makes the thing a totally different ballgame. I would argue that it’s still comparable though. We are still animals.
As for violence, don’t people still love to watch violent movies? Don’t people still love violence enough to break the law by having dog fights, cock fights, whatever-animal fights-to-the-death? I bet if it were legal to let convicted criminals be torn apart by wild animals in your local stadium (just as in Rome the people sentenced to the arenas were criminals or war prisoners or other undesirable elements), there’d be a huge audience for it.
It’s ironic that you mention Tokyo. I was just listening to an episode of Coast to Coast that talked about these funny apartments that guys rented there. These super-cramped things that don’t even qualify as proper rooms, with hardly a space for a bed and a desk with a laptop jammed against each other. The tenants would, when they weren’t at work, come “home” and spend all their free time on their computer. Not talking to other people. Ever. That sounds like aggression turned inward.
But apart from that (I’m sure not all Tokyo apartments are that bad), I agree with you on the Tokyo thing. It’s a counterexample to the theory that people are meaner. However, many sociologists have said just what you said about all of Japan: it’s awfully peaceful for such a crowded place, probably because Japan is, like, 99% native Japanese. Most other megalopolises have less homogeneous populations and are almost definitely more violent.
Yes, now that I think about it, I’ll have to go with the conclusion that aggression would be directed along ethnic/racial lines, maybe economic too. However, that’s just all speculation from my rational mind. My main reason for saying people are meaner than they used to be comes from somewhere else, much more personal and emotional. It has nothing to do with group issues at all. I just have the strong feeling that people have lost their niceness somewhere along the way, and I saw it happen. And the only remotely logical explanation is the overpopulation of the world.
I think you’re using selective memories. People used to hate blacks so much that they strung the up from trees or wouldn’t let them use the same water fountain. Businesses would hang “Irish Need Not Apply” signs and wouldn’t hire them. During WW II we threw over 100k Japanese-American citizens into internment camps just because they were Japanese. Women weren’t considered equal to men.
Sure we have problems today. They used to be worse.
A good call-out and I agree on this. A lot of more urgent issues are upon us today: people are already fighting each other for resources, a major extinction event is well under-way, industrialized food production is leaving the supply vulnerable to pathogens, areas where people live are becoming a deserts, pollution now invades even points furthest from human civilization. All these things can be tied back to the planet’s human infestation.
If the human mind can solve the problem of travel to the moon and back, it would seem we’d have someone in the teeming millions who’d be able to solve real issues facing us today. But, for some reason, these types of tough problems are not sexy enough to invest money, resources, and time into at this point. Perhaps we, as a species, are not really equipped to solve big problems that can destroy us. Maybe we’re just too damn lazy, or stupid.
This completely misunderstands the “water war” threats. People will have plenty of water for drinking, and bathing, and washing the dishes, and so on.
The competition over water will be over water for irrigation of cropland. People upriver divert the scarce river water onto their farms, leaving less for the people downstream. Maybe they used to have agreements over how much water everyone was supposed to use, but now that there’s less water the previous agreements don’t leave enough for everyone. Now what happens? The people downstream complain. They threaten. If they can’t agree on a distribution of water that makes everyone happy, then there is a source of conflict.
Does that mean California is going to go to war with Washington over the water in the Columbia river? No, because even if Californians could defeat the Washingtonians in battle and do whatever they like with the water in the Columbia river, you still have to transport the water thousands of miles through mountain ranges. It could be done, but it would cost billions and billions and billions of dollars. And then what do you do with the water? Dump it on the ground in a rice paddy in the middle of the desert? That water cost billions of dollars, and you’re going to use it to grow a few pennies worth of rice?
At some point, rather than fighting ruinous wars and spending hundreds of billions of dollars on extreme engineering projects to move water around the globe, people will figure out that they could just use the water they have more effectively. Again, this is agricultural water we’re talking about, not water for drinking. If people are dying of thirst they’ll do whatever it takes to not die. But instead we’re talking about farmers arguing over who gets how much water and when and where.
This is not because the tough problems are tough technological challenges, they are tough political, legal, and economic challenges. If we have to figure out a way to transport X million gallons of water to California every year or the human race goes extinct, we could do so easily. But the real problem is that farmers in California don’t need water, they need water at cheap enough rates that they can pour it on their fields and sell the resulting agricultural products at a profit. If water becomes too expensive, you can’t afford to dump a million dollars worth of water on a rice field that will only sell for a hundred thousand dollars. And so the field goes fallow, or the farmer has to switch to a crop that doesn’t require as much water.
California is a desert. It is great for growing crops, but only if you irrigate the crops. If water becomes more expensive in California, that means crops grown in California become more expensive, and we’ll all have to pay more for vegetables grown in Iowa instead.