[andyt]

Lemmy Lemmy:

Nope. How do you know that some bright young kid at Cal Tech isn't going to discover a process that will feed 10x the world's population on 100 acres of farmland? You're taking human ingenuity out of the equation and that's the most important variable.

I guess you're a gambling man. Everything is OK 'cause some bright idea will come along, so let's not deal with the problem. And surely even an economist can see that there is some point in human population where the earth just isn't big enough to support us all. It sounds like we'll never get there, that we'll slow down population growth before then. Unless of course we've already exceeded the carrying capacity of the earth and are living on borrowed time, like using up carbon fuels that took eons to lay down. And even if we do slow down and in fact stop increasing in numbers at some point, all you economists will be pulling your hair out because of declining markets and how does a capitalist system deal with that. We're already doing it in Canada and Europe.

[Lemmy]

It's not a case of being a gambler, it's a case of being an optimist. The same doomsdayer warnings have been cast upon every crisis over every generation in history. The world was going to end when the Romans were running out of timber and when the British were running out of whale oil and coal. But somehow something comes along that takes its place. If you'd like to enter into some variation of the Simon-Ehrlich wager, I'd be happy to play along with you. You get to be Ehrlich. Apologies to romanP for name dropping again.

[BartSimpson]

I'm thinking that it's coming on time to start settling some of those other planets the astronomers have been finding lately.

[saturn_656]

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

I'm thinking that it's coming on time to start settling some of those other planets the astronomers have been finding lately.

We can't even get to Mars... hell Obama not to long ago ended plans to return Americans to the Moon.

[Proculation]

Lemmy Lemmy:

romanP romanP:

Are you blind?

It doesn't take a brilliant statistician to figure out that more people require more resources. Our resources are finite and as population grows, there is less to go around, driving up the cost of everything. With our current global population, the more children everyone has, the more we all suffer, including every new child that is born.

Thomas Malthus has been dead nearly 200 years and he was wrong even when he was alive.

I was going to say that

[andyt]

Now that's optimism.

I think being a realist is the way to go. That means preparing for the worst, while expecting the best. Not hiding your head in the sands of either "we're all fucked so what's the use" nor "don't worry, be happy."

And civilizations have collapsed because of environmental degradation, including loss of arable land. It's seen as a part cause in the Roman collapse. But in those days there was always somewhere else to go. North and South American, but especially US food production came on stream and was able to support much larger numbers of people. But we're a global world now, there is no empty space that can be converted to agriculture. But we can always hope some smarty pants finds a way to created food using much less land and carbon inputs. I wouldn't take that bet tho. Or Bart's.

[Proculation]

Malthus theory was not only proven wrong by observations. It was proven wrong is the theory itself.

He considers the growth of humanity as exponential while the ressources 'are' only growing at a linear rate.

It looks good and a lot of people agreed to that assertion. Look, even today after 200 years there are still people thinking like Malthus.

The problem is that Malthus used a static model and didn't consider the development and the ingenuity of the people.

When you say a theory is "Malthusian", it implies it is proven false.

[andyt]

$1:

What's missing from the debate is an understanding of the changing relationship between humanity and nature. For it is how humans fit into the natural world that will settle whether Malthus was right or wrong. He was wrong in 1798. But if he had been writing 10,000 years earlier, before agriculture, he would have been right. And were his book being published today, on the brink of the third millennium, he would be more right than wrong. Let me explain.

But something else is going on, and I think Malthus may have sensed it coming. As long ago as 1679, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (the Dutch inventor of the microscope) speculated that the limit to the human population would be on the order of 13 billion - remarkably close to many current estimates. For our position in the natural world is once again undergoing a sea change. We are not the first nor are we the only species to spread around the globe, but we are the first to do so as an integrated economic entity. Other species maintain tenuous genetic connections, but no direct ecological connections, among their far-flung members. We, in contrast, are exchanging more than $1 trillion of goods and services among ourselves globally every day.

This means that in an economic - if not a political - sense, we have become a single, enormous population. The system in which we are living, extracting our energy and other supplies, is global: the totality of Earth's atmosphere, its waters, its soils and crust, and all its living things. This is the sum total of all the world's local ecosystems - ecosystems we have allowed to decay as we have chosen (quite successfully!) to live outside them

We have converted woodlands and prairies to farmland virtually all over the globe. Our cities, suburbs and malls have paved over natural communities, and pollution and overfishing are rapidly destroying our rivers, lakes and oceans. As these ecosystems go down, we are losing perhaps 30,000 species of animals and plants a year, out of perhaps 10 million total species, even though we still deeply rely on at least 40,000 species for food, shelter, clothing and fuel. We rely on natural products to replenish genetic diversity in our crops and to produce new medicines. We rely on pristine ecosystems to replenish oxygen, regulate water cycles, control erosion, cycle essential nutrients and restock critical fisheries. We still need these things to sustain life - our life. The irony is that our rampant success in living outside the world's ecosystems has put them all, and thus ourselves, in jeopardy.
The tide is running back toward Malthus. We are emerging from a 10,000-year vacation from nature still not fully realizing that our own survival hinges on reducing the damage we do to Earth's natural systems. We may not drive ourselves to the complete oblivion of biological extinction, but I fear that the Malthusian specters of famine, warfare and disease will rise in the comparatively short run (the next few centuries), coupled with an accelerating loss of human cultural diversity and, ultimately, quality of life.

Unless. We can, I think, find the inner will to wake up to our current situation, to see the grimmer outlook around the corner and to choose to do something about it. We can stabilize our numbers and temper our patterns of consumption. We can work to stem the tide of ecosystem destruction and species loss. We can, in short, see ourselves for what we have become: the first global economic entity, a fascinating state arrived at through no end of cleverness but a state that is ultimately limited by the health and productivity of the natural system in which we live. We can, if we choose to do so, prove Malthus' direst prognostications wrong.

http://www.time.com/time/reports/v21/health/malthus_mag3.html

[martin14]

andyt andyt:

Oh well, all he younger unemployed can get jobs in the new military that will be needed to fight off the hordes. War solves every problem, including Malthusian ones

20,000 years of human history can't be wrong !


It's the nature of the beast; honestly, people in Canada have no idea
whats going in the rest of the world.

[andyt]

martin14 martin14:

andyt andyt:

Oh well, all he younger unemployed can get jobs in the new military that will be needed to fight off the hordes. War solves every problem, including Malthusian ones

20,000 years of human history can't be wrong !


It's the nature of the beast; honestly, people in Canada have no idea
whats going in the rest of the world.

You forgot a zero there Martin. And likely those who came before us also already knew some form of warfare. Chimps seem to do it.

[Lemmy]

Proculation Proculation:

I was going to say that

Good thing you didn't. You wouldn't want to be accused of name-dropping.

[DrCaleb]

How much would you pay? (redundant question)

$1:

Aglukkaq was responding to photographs released last week of $29 jars of Cheez Whiz, $27 tubs of margarine and $77 bags of breaded chicken that were recently photographed on the shelves of the Northern Store in Arctic Bay, a community of 700 in Nunavut's High Arctic region.

The photographs surfaced amid concerns about the federal Nutrition North program, which is replacing the government's 40-year-old Food Mail transportation subsidy program.

[Proculation]

Lemmy Lemmy:

Proculation Proculation:

I was going to say that

Good thing you didn't. You wouldn't want to be accused of name-dropping.

What would Ricardo say to romanP. (name dropping)

[Lemmy]

Ricardo would say "Always be sure to pat-dry your filets before you dredge them in your beer-batter."

[EyeBrock]

DrCaleb DrCaleb:

How much would you pay? (redundant question)

$1:

Aglukkaq was responding to photographs released last week of $29 jars of Cheez Whiz, $27 tubs of margarine and $77 bags of breaded chicken that were recently photographed on the shelves of the Northern Store in Arctic Bay, a community of 700 in Nunavut's High Arctic region.

The photographs surfaced amid concerns about the federal Nutrition North program, which is replacing the government's 40-year-old Food Mail transportation subsidy program.

Having lived in Labrador for three years, paying outrageous prices for basics is the way of the north. That's why you get a 'northern allowance' tax break, so your local store can bilk you.