Or, perhaps, the key to feeding the world in the short term is petro-chemical based agriculture, leading to massive overpopulation and total collapse.
while another key to feeding the world over a longer time span would involve permaculture-style methods and slower population growth,
TIED TO
ending corruption in distribution networks and much of the world's governments.
Let's not tie everything too much together. Tying everything together is how people become unhinged conspiracy theorists. Let's take one subject at a time.
1:
>>the key to feeding the world in the short term is petro-chemical based agriculture, leading to massive overpopulation and total collapse.
Let's assume this is because the profit is there to make more grain, not because anyone wants overpopulation or collapse. What you're saying is that it works, it does create more food. More food for more people. People are less likely to starve. Okay, good. Until the overpopulation and collapse part.
What evidence do you have that that will happen?
You're suggesting limiting food to decrease population. I just want to be clear about that. You're saying that people should starve. Even though we could farm enough food to feed them. Because you disagree with the farming methods. Right?
I don't think they are suggesting that people should starve. They are suggesting that we need to stop making so many damn people, so that we can transition to better farming methods (among other things).
From my uneducated perspective, the pain of "not having enough young people" due to declining population growth is a temporary problem, whereas reducing the long-term population growth trajectory is still a good thing. Is that wrong?
The world doesn't have an overpopulation problem. It is clear that when economies develop and infant mortality goes down, people start having many fewer children after a few generations. Most of the world's advanced economies are in population decline already when you discount immigration. '
> the pain of "not having enough young people" due to declining population growth is a temporary problem
The world economy was set up to grow which requires a constant growing population. What we're in for is a long term global population decline, maybe starting as soon as 2040. With lengthening life spans (covid aside) you have a younger generation perpetually having to do the work for more and more people as the elder generation ages out of the workforce but still needs to be fed, entertained, and cared for. It isn't "temporary" but could last centuries.
> The world economy was set up to grow which requires a constant growing population. What we're in for is a long term global population decline, maybe starting as soon as 2040. With lengthening life spans (covid aside) you have a younger generation perpetually having to do the work for more and more people as the elder generation ages out of the workforce but still needs to be fed, entertained, and cared for. It isn't "temporary" but could last centuries.
I think the parent is thinking longer term where "centuries" is temporary. Over a longer time horizon like this it's pretty clear that "an economy set up to grow" isn't sustainable in that we have finite resources and thus cannot grow infinitely. Which leads to the opposite conclusion to yours: that we need not to have a constant growing population (ideally over the long term it should be a roughly stable population).
>> Over a longer time horizon like this it's pretty clear that "an economy set up to grow" isn't sustainable
Really? The resources as we open up the moon, Mars, and the rest of the solar system are almost infinite. So is the space. Perhaps humans are programmed to reproduce too much, to grow constantly. But we have only begun to touch the edge of the womb, with one little toe. It's quite possible we are the only species within 100 light years capable of spaceflight of any sort. Think about this: There are 7.5 billion humans. In one place. That's it. It's really not much. That's the number of bacteria living on your shower curtain.
One comet hit, one nuclear war, one bad flu, it's finished.
1 million years from now, if we're gone, there will be a thin layer of strange plastics and metals, maybe 10cm thick at the bottom of the ocean. Maybe 5 million years from now, the octopus will become civilized, and they'll discover this weird layer. They'll burn it for fuel and end up dying from the radiation. A few million years after that, the rat will become civilized.
50 million years from now it won't matter at all.
But right now we're part of a very interesting project, as far as we know maybe the most interesting project that has ever been generated by this galaxy of 100 billion stars in 5 billion years. This generation right now that we're living in.
Uh, in an abstract way it's not wrong; I don't have kids and probably won't have 'em, and I'm not real happy about paying for other people's kids. But let me just give you a nauseating example of how your kind of thinking is real close to the edge of the rails...
I was in Spain and through some friends I was hosting an American couple, showing them around town. The wife was a bicycle racer and the guy was in the Air Force, logistics guy recently back from sitting somewhere air conditioned. So we had a few drinks and he told me about his views. He had a very negative opinion about Medecins Sans Frontieres, I'm not sure if they had done him wrong somehow (they saved my life, once, so I had a positive opinion of them, and we argued). He said this:
"Why should we give aid to Africa? They just make more babies. The population is already too high."
I asked him, "Do you mean we shouldn't make drugs available?" He responded in the affirmative. He said,
"Until they can make those drugs for themselves, why should we white europeans give them drugs to make more children?"
There was nothing humanitarian in his statements, he was purely a racist. It was one of (not the) most outright racist things I've ever listened to. I sat and absorbed it as we drank wiskey on my balcony. Then I told him he was a racist piece of shit, and kicked him and his-- wife who fell asleep on my couch, out of my house.
Now, even though I don't have kids and don't want them, do I think your Malthusian theory about growth trajectory is wrong? Yes.
Simply that that's where this type of thinking leads, once you begin reducing living people into the category of "too many".
I think it's okay if you want to pay people not to have children. I don't have kids and it annoys me to pay for other people's kids. But when you begin speaking of the world in terms of overpopulation -- of too many living people -- the next question is "who should be eliminated?"
So who do you think should be eliminated? I think if you hate your own kind enough to want them dead, then you've gone too far -- this road leads you to become like the sociopathic racist.
//--> Me, Jew whose great-uncle and aunt survived Auschwitz. The world was made better, for other people, because they survived.
I didn't say anything about eliminating anyone. I said there are too many of us.
It's dramatic and disingenuous to suggest that "I think there are too many humans" implies "I think that we must decide which humans to eliminate".
You seem concerned about the legacy of the Nazi agenda. That's understandable. But I do not personally have any "final solution" in mind.
I had in mind things like "shifting our economic system to reduce reliance on growth to maintain prosperity". It also acknowledge that it's very human and natural to want to reproduce, and that you mostly shouldn't force people not to.
It's possible to think that the world is overpopulated in the sense that a world with fewer people would suffer less environmental degradation and have higher levels of happiness on average, while at the same time denying that some living people should be eliminated. I think it's probably a good thing that developed nations tend to reach a point where population levels start declining. Does that mean I want to kill off grandma early? Not at all, that's absurd. I think there are too many pure bred dogs, too, but I'm not going to start murdering golden retrievers.
I mean, it sounds ridiculous when you put it that way, but it also sounded ridiculous in the 1930s. We're still within living memory of a time when such ideas of how to improve the world and give people more living space were discussed in polite society before polite society started politely shooting and gassing Jews and Gypsies. Reducing the human population so us and our kids have more land and resources sounds great but how? To the Germans, they didn't care how. They didn't really want to hear the details. Americans are exactly the same. Oh, look, there's all this open land with no one living here! Just some buffalos and savages right?
Oh no, that was terrible? You think that was all criminal? How could those people have been so cruel - wiping out whole races to take their land! You would never do that! So now, in the name of ECOLOGY you just want EXCESS PEOPLE TO MAGICALLY DISAPPEAR, no specific plan, just would be nice if they vanished, because there's too many for your taste or what in your opinion the world should be like? And this is supposed to be a liberal or humanistic notion? No, it's exactly the notion of the white American settler or the quiet German. "Too many of this or that - we need more space and more nature - of course I wouldn't kill those dirty people, but it would be great if they disappeared. Better for the planet and the environment, you see."
> So now, in the name of ECOLOGY you just want EXCESS PEOPLE TO MAGICALLY DISAPPEAR
Is this a statement about me specifically? I don't want excess people to disappear, and I didn't claim that. I think I made it clear (but I'll make it clearer now) that I wouldn't condone any plan that reduced the population via the premature ending of life, up to and including a magical Thanos finger snap. My point was that this does not conflict with the notion that, had fewer people been born with all else being equal, the resulting world would have certain positive ecological qualities in comparison to the world we have now.
Would it be better for me to deny this? It seems self-evidently true, and I feel it every time I look at a radar map and think about how much green space my home region has lost over the past few hundred years. I'd keep it to myself if I really thought it was a slippery slope to a world of eugenics, but I don't think that's necessarily the case. I don't want to make anyone disappear -- but I do think a world of declining birth rates would probably be a net positive.
We are making more calories, the jury is still out on whether we’re making more food.
Something has gone very wrong with nutrition and that needs to be solved too. Some people think you can solve all of these things at once. Maybe so, maybe not, but calories is a pretty sketchy metric to use as a yard stick.
Distribution networks is key. We are plenty of food to feed everyone in the world, right now. Petro-chemical based agriculture was one of the greatest innovation of humanity. But it's been misapplied and abused, mostly in the name of profits and slow/bad policy makers. Does not mean those tools and techniques can't be more properly applied.
Can we feed them American style diets? No, but I would argue that diet is not worth scaling as we see several negative health outcomes as the result of our quantity and quality of calories.
Link to my blog in my profile where I write about some of these things.
while another key to feeding the world over a longer time span would involve permaculture-style methods and slower population growth, TIED TO ending corruption in distribution networks and much of the world's governments.