Not really a cite, but check out Wikipedia, which flags fuel/cooking wood and illegal logging. The land, in my experience, tends to become scrubland. African cities and villages tend to be surrounded by a broad swath of scrub caused by scavenging cooking fuel.
This is south american, not african. The commercial cattle ranching is not viable in the dense forested zones of the Africa. The trypanosomiasis.
It is usual for small farmers to move in.
Which is actually worth mentioning. Even if the birthrates are falling more people are living longer and babies are surviving into adulthood. People are living for decades with underlying health problems which woud have killed them in weeks just a few scant decades ago.
It turns out that even basic health actions can greatly increase survivability and lifespan.The young are surviving much more; child death has gone from being “common” to “unlikely”, middle age illness are now “pop these pills and cut back on xyz”, rather then die in a few days.
If only the young and the elderly would do the decent thing and drop dead like naturei intended…:p:D
No population problem.
:rolleyes:
Most European countries are overpopulated to the damn hilt. Bypopulation density.
India has a lower population density than Israel. Pakistan lower than the UK, and Germany and just a tad above Italy’s. Nigeria is well below all of them.
The Poms, Israelites and Krauts need to learn how to keep it in their pants,
So how are activists going to solve this problem? It seems the country has no land left for farming and so are cutting down the trees for land for farming.
We aren’t talking about Jack and Susan Farmer trying to find a place for their cabbage patch here.
These are large-scale export-orientated players in the multi-trillion dollar global beef market. They are looking for the absolute cheapest ranch land they can find on the planet, and the vast rainforest fits the bill-- at least for a few seasons until the soil is ruined.
This isn’t a desperate search to find the last patch of land to feed a family with. It’s a chance for to make a quick buck by essentially strip mining cheap land to sell on the global market.
Activists are trying to promote sustainable ranching, property rights for rainforest dwellers (their lack of rights is why the land is cheap), and conservative efforts. Basically, trying to make the land more expensive and thus less disposable.
I do think we’ll be able to support that many people. And individuals will reduce resource consumption, but it won’t be voluntary. Everything will cost more on a relative scale. Average wage owners in most countries won’t be able to afford a car, which won’t matter because self driving shared car services will be ubiquitous. Most people won’t be able to afford to eat real meat with every meal, but lab grown meat will be cheap. The average family won’t be able to afford a free standing house, only an apartment (this is already true in many places). And unless we get some major breakthrough, electricity will be much more expensive relatively, so running aircons all day long through the whole summer will also be something most people can’t afford.
Oh and by 2050 I think most developed countries will have universal basic income. As more and more jobs get eliminated by automation its pretty much the only way to prevent society completely falling apart. Not everyone is smart or skilled enough to get one of the few jobs that is unlikely to ever be automated.
Thanks.
Most of the time, when a forest is clearcut and then abandoned, it reverts to forest (which is not to say that that justifies clearcutting - there are a lot of problems with replacing old-growth with new-growth.) But in marginal cases, the clearcutting of the forest can cause soil loss or even changes in the patterns of rainfall which make forest regrowth very slow or even impossible. I’m more familiar with East Africa, where regrowth hasn’t been a problem in areas that are protected from agriculture and firewood gathering. West Africa could easily have different attributes.
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It is usual for small farmers to move in.
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This, though, would raise the question that if there’s demand for the land from small farmers, would they have cleared the land anyway, even in the absence of demand for the timber (as is the pattern we see in South America and Indonesia.)
The planet can easily support 9 billion humans. To put it into perspective, if you could somehow get all the people currently living on earth to stand shoulder to shoulder all of us could fit in the city of Los Angeles!
The damage that is being done to our ecosystems is being done by a microscopic portion of the human population. It is the greed of those few that are damaging the earth.
My understanding is the planet could support many more than 9 billion. Current problems are due to poor distribution of food and other items.
On the other hand, the planet seemed not to have so much pollution and no climate change when the population was only 2 or 3 billion. So some sort of balance is needed.