51. Will the thought of sustainability finally unite humanity globally?

Sustainability is, ironically, big business, a growth industry manufacturing degrees to meet the demand for the sustainability degreed to serve the growth hegemon (i.e. industrial society), sustainably of course. I looked at the CVs of tenured or tenured tracked professors at Arizona State University and 23% had degrees in neoclassical economics, another pretend science. [ASU Factulty]

In the USA alone, at least 33 schools within the United States that offer a 2 year Associates degree that has a sustainability focus. Approximately 421 colleges offer sustainability focused bachelor's degrees. Over 463 offer Master's degrees with a focus in sustainability, and at least 103 colleges within the United States offer sustainability focused Doctoral degree. A total of 136 schools offer a sustainability focused graduate certificate. [Sustainability Degree]

So people, especially those with money and a vested interest in the status quo, want to believe that the current life-as-we-know-it will keep on keeping on, and unleashing a veritable army of sustainability trained on the economy/society will make it so. This appears to be a belief-based hope. [Schools of Sustainability]

The word sustainability, as Dr. Haydn Washington noted in 2015 in his book Sustainability Demystified: Towards Real Solutions, has over 300 definitions (and counting), can pretty much mean anything a wordsmith wants it to mean, and so it is a smoke-filled concept that potentially a majority of pundits could get behind, uniting them, sort of. Greta Thunberg is for it, the Koch Brothers are for it....

What has the potential to unite humanity is the realization that the current global corporate empire/economy is not remotely sustainable. This will occur when humanity is past peak, looking over the climax of Hubbert’s pimple at the pending rapid descent and a teachable moment arrives, when denial and obfuscation no longer work. It will take a 2x4 upside our blindered head, but Nature can come up with something that will get our attention—always has before.

 

 

52. Do you think a sustainable future will feature more wild areas or more engineered green space?

Yes, by definition, sustainable would involve lowering the human footprint from today’s 1.75 Earths to less than 1 to allow for normal variation in environmental productivity, e.g. 0.8 or less (I’m thinking 0.2 is enough), such that if there is a hundred-year drought, which will happen on average every one hundred years, then the population will be able to live sustainably within the new temporary limits.

Ecomodernists are in universal agreement that humans will only want to live in cities in the future which will occupy only a few percent of Earth’s surface. Just look at the pictures of the envisioned future. [Ecomodernist Manifesto]

Before breakfast I believe in such a sustainable future, but after breakfast I don’t believe anything.

 

 

53. If the purpose of life is procreation, will it eventually lead to extinction from overpopulation?

If the purpose of life is ___, [a given] then will it eventually lead to ____ [outcome]? In the case of procreation, the usual outcome of overpopulation is not extinction, but increased negative feedback loops increasing mortality and/or reducing fertility, which in the case of John B. Calhoun’s 40 years of experiments with mice and rats, overpopulation in a mouse utopia with all material needs supplied resulted in loss of functional behaviors such that, over the course of 8–12 generations, lead to loss of ability to procreate and to extinction of the population. Calhoun was concerned that the same pattern was evident in humans and is one interpretation of the “demographic transition.” So in humans overpopulation is unlikely to result in extinction, but it could. [Critical Mass Transcript]

But premises are questionable and so are implied questions. Is the purpose of life procreation? In the long-run, yes, as perpetuation of patterns that work, but not in the short-term. A metastasizing cancer can procreate with great enthusiasm, but kills the host, and so is selected against as a pathology. Humans who follow this pattern will be selected against despite a period of enthusiastic growth and consumption. Agriculture and food storage enabled empire-building. Fossil fuels have enabled global expansion of industrial society that all Anthopocene enthusiasts benefit from (for a time). But the purpose of life is to give expression to a pattern that persists, is selected for, and adapts to changing conditions.

Ticks suck blood, but do not usually kill their host, so that pattern works. and the tick population is what is supported by their host population. Humans who learn to understand and live properly with the planet could live long (hundreds of millennia as a species) and prosper (within environmental limits) as they evolve. Will humans continue to evolve, to live the purposeful life, despite the last ten thousand years of empire-building?

“Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

― Charles Darwin,

The Origin of Species

 

54. We see a lot of talk in the news media about the evils of overpopulation, and yet countries where the birth rate is low are often portrayed as being in population crisis. What is the true picture?

Human population, over or under, good or bad, is not a subject humans can tell stories about that are both pleasing and true. What, indeed, is the true picture? I've been asking this question for about fifty years, but most likely others have been asking this question from before the beginnings of written language as verbally transmitted memes likely long preceded (70+K years ago) the written word, way back to when our ancestors evolved the ability to tell complex stories, and to make up false stories that are pleasing. A few, who would rather know than believe, question all stories and come to want to know the true picture such as our concept forming minds can rhetorically paint a picture of.

So, big picture?

1. Humans are the storytelling animal: Homo narrator.
2. We differ from other animals in terms of the complexity of our verbal behavior.
3. No one likes point 2, so stories of human exceptionalism, supremacy, and dominionism are selected for.
4. That humans differ in kind from other animals is the received mythology of our empire-building predecessors.

My best evidence-based guess is that maybe 0.001 percent of humans would rather know than believe, would rather know the true picture than believe what is pleasing. I like pleasing words and I don't like true words that are not pleasing, but Nature doesn't care what I like or dislike, so why should I?

So far as I know, I've never had an original thought:

• People would rather believe than know. —E.O. Wilson
• True words are not pleasing. Pleasing words are not true —Laozi
• It is the nature of the human species to reject what is true but unpleasant and to embrace what is obviously false but comforting. —H.L Mencken

But back to population. I have concerns for humanity and the biosphere. In the late 18th century so did Malthus who happened to be the first who lived in the current empire to leave a written expression of his concerns. I also have concerns, but I'm not the only one. Malthus' concerns were reason-based, and there was little evidence-based science in his day to better inform him, so his concerns for those in his near future were displaced in time. He failed to realize that humans could, for a time, turn fossil fuels into food at a faster rate than population could grow and he failed to realize that fracking would extend the fossil-fueled pulse well into the 21st century. He failed to factor in effective birth control technology, or the emerging behavioral sink that would distract humans from wanting to procreate as that puts a crimp on the self-absorbed consumer lives of we Beautiful Ones. So he was wrong, totally wrong about the details.

But to skip ahead three hundred years, what is the sustainable human population on a degraded planet without fossil fuel inputs into the production system (agriculture/industry)? Think that a two or three orders of magnitude decrease is not unthinkable (or more if posterity wants to live like Americans today), assuming you'd rather know than believe as the believing mind has illimitable ability to deny right up to the final curtain. But I self-describe as a cornucopian optimist living on an abundant Earth, because I am and we are (though some corrections are needed).

I can't go on at book length and nothing I could say would be original, so it (the most likely stories, i.e. science) is all 'out there'. But I can offer a starting point, a free book, legacy of Donella Meadows, systems scientist and no ordinary genius. [Thinking in Systems]

To give Donella the final word [with added bits]:

There is one leverage point that is even higher than changing a paradigm. That is to keep oneself unattached in the arena of paradigms, to stay flexible, to realize that no paradigm [belief system, ideology] is 'true,' that everyone, including those that sweetly sing your own worldview, has a tremendously limited understanding of an immense and amazing universe that is far beyond human comprehension. It is to 'get' at a gut-level the paradigm that there are paradigms [that are not 'true'], and to see that that itself is a paradigm, and to regard that whole realization as devastatingly funny. It is to let go into not-knowing, into what the Buddhists call enlightenment.

It is in this space of mastery over paradigms that humans throw off addictions [their purpose-driven Calhoun-rat consumer life], live in constant joy [when not dealing with life debilitating situations], bring down empires [so what are you waiting for?], get locked up, or burned at the stake or crucified or shot, and have impacts that last for millennia.

There is so much that could be said to qualify this list [see chapter six] of places to intervene in a system. It is a tentative list and its order is slithery. There are exceptions to every item that can move it up or down the order of leverage. Having had the list percolating in my subconscious for years has not transformed me into a Superwoman. The higher the leverage point, the more the system will resist changing it—that's why societies often rub out truly enlightened beings.

Magical leverage points are not easily accessible, even if we know where they are and which direction to push on them. There are no cheap tickets to mastery. You have to work hard at it, whether that means rigorously analyzing a system or rigorously casting off your own paradigms and throwing yourself into the humility of Not Knowing. In the end, it seems that mastery has less to do with pushing leverage points than it does with strategically, profoundly, madly, letting go and dancing with the system.

 

55. How can we decrease the population?

So, can we decrease the human, livestock, crop and pet population? Or increase or otherwise manage population? I've been asking this for about 50 years, and I have a special interest in 'real solutions' that might actually work. Decreasing the human population, like that of any species in overshoot, doesn't require us to do anything as negative feedback loops will emerge, though most are likely to find a managed descent (a prosperous way down) preferable to an unmanaged chaotic collapse as usual when descent comes (but not before—except for a very few).

The perhaps greater challenge is to reverse the behavioral sink that complex societies (Dunbar's number - Wikipedia) select for such that a remnant population of marginally functional humans do not go on to repeat the pattern of overshooting limits to both growth and complexity as usual. Per game theory, the 'rules of the game' determine outcomes. It may be that foundationally new rules of the game are needed that some minority of humans self-select into such that new ways of doing things and living with the planet are the outcome.

Calhoun was concerned that humans will fail to avoid ‘death squared’ [Critical Mass Transcript], which refers to the qualitative outcome of overpopulation on human behavior, the loss of functional behaviors and quality of memetic content (i.e. culture, e.g. citizens who end up valuing only bread and circuses - Wikipedia).

Assume the human population reaches 8 billion in the near future and 0.1 percent of humans vote with their feet to form pockets of sustainability in 8,000 watershed management units (WMUs) within six continental areas (other than Antarctica) clustered into on average 28 WMUs/region. By clustering WMUs, they can organize a cooperative mutual defense force to prevent being taken/destroyed by the perhaps 99 percent seeking short-term survival via conquest or who take no coherent action (i.e. they panic as humans, per James Schlesinger, 'have only two modes of operation: complacency and panic' and virtually all are now firmly in complacency mode, for an unsustainable time).

Assume each WMU has amassed food and materials needed to provide shelter for ten times more voluntary emigrants than the WMU can support long-term. As the global economy begins to obviously fail, voluntary refugees [Voluntary Refugee Movement] are taken in on mutually agreed upon terms, i.e. potential refugees apply to become part of a watershed socio-political biophysical economic system and accept rules that apply equitably to all. Those refusing to accept the new 'rules of the game' self-select out, i.e. do not apply or cannot agree to the rules and so remain within BAU (business-as-usual) society.

The rules vary from one WMU to anther [Watershed Design Principles]. One rule could be that all refugees and intentional emigrants forgo reproducing for five years (i.e. practice birth control and agree to abortion as backup), and if they decide to stay after their first five years, and more citizens/refugees want to have children than the carrying capacity of the watershed supports, then the required replacement number of births/year to maintain a sustainable population will be rationed such as by lottery. Mutually agreed upon by all, the rule selects for a different outcome than BAU society, i.e. the dynamic is different.

Initially few women will have children, but within one human lifespan, women on average will have perhaps 2.1 children each. If on average they want to have less, then incentives, such as increased social approbation that all primates crave, will adjust desired birth rate to needed birth rate to match the carrying capacity of the watershed area adjusted for desired level of per capita consumption that citizens can vote on. For a given level of consumption, however, the population of humans, livestock, and pets will have to be adjusted, which can be done humanely, but once the preference for a per capita level of consumption is specified, perhaps as voted on, environmental resources determine population size, and NO ONE GETS A VOTE [per naturocracy other than in matters of preference or taste].

Envision 8,000,000 people, perhaps 2,000,000 heads of households (0.025% of global population), initially vote with their feet in the near future to become pioneers along with, on average, three family members. They form 8,000 WMUs having a core pioneer group of 1,000 on average, and are soon followed by 72,000,000 others (0.9% of humanity) who have the foresight intelligence to be early adapters (who ‘seek out the condition now that will come anyway’) to become part of the 8,000 WMUs averaging 10,000 citizens in each WMU (having on average a 10,000 human carrying capacity).

Assume each had managed to store enough dry food, along with such food as could be grown, to support a population of 100,000 for a time (years to a few decades) and as more humans foresee collapse, 720,000,000 become immigrants. So during climax and early descent 800,000,000 humans maintain cooperative, complex societies with mutual trust intact [Copykitten's and Trust] until nearby failed areas can be repopulated by intentional emigration of those living within the pockets of sustainable culture. The emigrants would have already agreed to new rules of the game that systems ecologists and others who listen to Nature had agreed, per best guess, might work—that actually select for long-term survival and sustainability. Thereby the number of WMUs would increase to spread a pattern of living that works long-term provided the WMUs are not destroyed by the remnant of BAU short-term survivors during the downward spiral of scarcity induced conflict that creates more scarcity....

I can make no claim that anything of the sort as envisioned will happen, that perhaps 800 million will have a reasonable change of contributing memetically if not genetically to posterity, but I am making a claim, based on systems science/ecology, that it could work. There may be other foundationally different solutions, or variations on the above theme, but the set of all 'real solutions' is finite and politics-as-usual precludes all, as none appeal to the short-term self interests of individuals/special interest groups that the current system selects for.

Only outliers of the global growth hegemon (Euro-Sino Empire) who cannot serve the system with enthusiasm secondary to having foresight intelligence, could be among those to self-select into a new paradigm. They alone have the potential, as non-Anthropocene enthusiasts, to vote with their feet to form an alternative way of living based on an alternative to belief-based ways of knowing and living, i.e. those who listen to Nature as system over self interest. Such a paradigm shift selects for foresight intelligence and species survival in that the new paradigm or rules of the game molds individual behavior into a plan of actions or avoidances that are oriented toward the maintenance of a viable equilibrium between Man’s demands and Nature’s resources. [We can learn about real solutions from these people]

If the current system cannot select for 'real solutions', then the alternative is to form alternative rules of the game that a few self-select into by voting with their feet to form subsystems (pockets of sustainability) that select for a different outcome than the BAU system.

Note that I am an ignorant know-nothing from the hood who just doesn't get 'it' as viewed by all Anthropocene enthusiasts. All of those offering answers to this question, with one possible exception, will helpfully explain why I an utterly and foundationally wrong in everything I say. But as I've never had an original thought, the corollary is that my sources are wrong or I have utterly misunderstood them. I can and therefore should provide a list of sources, including, but not limited to, the following in chronological order:

1954: Harrison Brown, The Challenge of Man's Future.

1955: Fred Cottrell, Energy and Society, energy and cultural evolution.

1956: M. King Hubbert, models peak production and descent of non-renewables.

1961: Jay Forrester, system dynamics, Industrial Dynamics.

1962: Rachael Carson, complex interconnections, Silent Spring. 
John B. Calhoun, of mice and men, Population density and psychosocial pathology.

1966: Kenneth Ewart Boulding, The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth.

1967: E. J. Mishan, The Costs of Economic Growth

1968: Garrett Hardin, Tragedy of the [unmanaged] Commons.
Edward Abbey. Growth is the ideology of the cancer cell, Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness.
Ludwig von Bertalanffy, General System Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications, & 1976
Paul & Anne Ehrlich, Population, Resources, and Environment (The Population Bomb)

1969: Al Bartlett, Arithmetic, Population, and Energy: Sustainability 101, 1969 to 2013

1971: H. T. Odum, Environment, Power, and Society.
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, economics as subset of ecological economics, The Entropy Law and the Economic Process.

1972: Donella Meadows et al., Limits to Growth.

1973: E. F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful: a study of economics as if people mattered.

1974: Howard T. Odum, "What is the general answer?" Energy, Ecology & Economics.

1977: Herman Daly, Steady-State Economics, & 1991.

1979: Marvin Harris, probabilistic infrastructural determinism, Cultural Materialism: The Struggle for a Science of Culture.

1980: R. C. Christian, Georgia Guidestones–leave room for Nature.

1985: David Suzuki, A Planet for the Taking.

1988: Joseph A. Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies.

1990: The Elder Brothers' Warning.
Carl Sagan, An Appeal for Joint Commitment in Science and Religion: Preserving & Cherishing the Earth.

1992: World Scientists Warning to Humanity

1993: Donella Meadows et al., Beyond the Limits: Confronting Global Collapse, Envisioning a Sustainable Future.

1997: Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel.

2001: H.T. Odum & Elisabeth C. Odum, A Prosperous Way Down.
Charles Hall, et al., ‘The Need to Reintegrate the Natural Sciences with Economics’

2003: Serge Latouche, global degrowth, Pour une societé de decroissance.

2004: Donella Meadows et al., Limits to Growth-The 30 year Update.

2007: H. T. Odum, Environment, Power, and Society for the Twenty-First Century: The Hierarchy of Energy.

2008: Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer.

2009: Serge Latouche, Farewell to Growth.

2011: Kogi second warning, all is interconnected, Aluna: There is no life without thought.
The Anthropocene: conceptual and historical perspectives

2012: Charles A.S. Hall & Kent A. Klitgaard, Energy and the Wealth of Nations: Understanding the Biophysical Economy

2013: Consensus Statement from Global Scientists.

2015: Haydn Washington, Demystifying Sustainability: Towards real solutions.

2016: E.O. Wilson, Half Earth: Our Planet's Fight for Life.

2017: World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice

2018: Charles A.S. Hall & Kent A. Klitgaard, Energy and the Wealth of Nations: An Introduction to Biophysical Economics.
Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker & Anders Wijkman, Come On!: Capitalism, Short-termism, Population and the Destruction of the Planet.
Worsening Worldwide Land Degradation Now ‘Critical’
Living Planet Report of 59 global scientists & overview.

2019: Nature’s Dangerous Decline ‘Unprecedented (IPBES)
Charles Hall, et al., The Need for, and the Growing Importance of, BioPhysical Economics

For a more complete list. The Ecolate Message: A timeline

—————————————————————————————

The above, and others to varying degrees, were successful in listening to Nature, who 'has all the answers' [H.T. Odum] and they endeavored to explain the nature of things to ignorant know-nothings like me. Any 'real solutions' to the human predicament must be in accord with the rules of the game as Nature defines the game, e.g. the first seven laws of energetics [Past Lives of Humans] insofar as humans have the slightest grasp of them.

So are all of the above wrong? I don't know. Have I utterly misunderstood them, or more importantly, Nature as in the nature of things? I don't know, and can never claim to. But so far as I can see, others can't claim to ‘know’ either as at best we can merely iterate towards understanding the what-is.

Perhaps Nature determines what works as a pattern selected to persist for a time, and the pattern doesn't get a vote, whether a cabbage or a human.

 

56. Is overpopulation the biggest problem of the 21st century?

Yes, as in I = f(P,A,T) [What Is IPAT?], where the Anthropocene mass extinction (sixth or ninth depending on who’s counting) is Impact, i.e. the “biggest problem” for life on earth (and humankind’s posterity), is due mainly to growth of Population times per capita consumption (judged to be a measure of Affluence) with energy consuming Technology factored in which enables fossil-fueled growth, e.g. transporting food 1,500 miles on average to get to an American’s fork, turning fossil fuel into food via unsustainable industrial agriculture to increase food supply ten fold—at a rate faster than population growth—for a time, flying four million people siting in airplanes somewhere faster at any one time 24/7, driving hundreds of millions somewhere faster, and on and on to grow the economy as enabled by energy/technology and multitudes of consumers pursuing short-term self interest as usual, FOR A TIME. We are the anthro in Anthropocene and climate change is a distraction by comparison. [Over-pulsing]

But what enables growth apart from fossil fuels and the technology to enable growth? The belief in it. The belief that growth is good, that the pursuit of short-term self interest is good, i.e. will not have human extinction as an unintended result. If it does, then the believing mind (one that would rather believe than know) and its ability to short-circuit foresight intelligence is the biggest problem.

If humans go extinct in the near future (next 500 years), then the educational system would be judged a failure if there was anyone left to so judge it. All are being schooled to serve the socio-economic system, not educated to iterate towards understanding the truth about ourselves and what a “real solution” would look like if we were hit upside our blindered heads with one. All who consider themselves educated may not be as they have allowed their schooling to interfere with their education. Most are so inecolate that they don’t even know they are marginally literate, often innumerate, and wholly inecolate, which may well have human extinction as an unintended outcome. [Protest Inecolacy: As unsustainable denial]

“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” — Mark Twain

“Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.” — Isaac Asimov

“The more he became truly wise, the more he distrusted everything he knew.” — Voltaire

Numeracy includes being able to read graphs and interpret them. If "the greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function," as Al Bartlett concluded after given the same public lecture 1,742 times to help humans understand the implications of the exponential function, then that suggests widespread innumeracy, but also systems science illiteracy (inecolacy). [Sustainability 101]

If you are ecolate, the above graph is clearly showing the first half of a pulse of a complex system, of a pulsing paradigm that is common in Nature. [Pulsing Paradigm]

 

57. What is the main objective of the sustainable development goals of the United Nations?

Basically the goals are the work of generations of wordsmiths and the product of committees such that all could agree to the concepts the goals refer to, e.g. no poverty. Concept mongering, however, does not involve real solutions that involve referencing real issues via data rather than concepts about them. At best we can iterate towards real solutions via guess then test methods (science) that might actually work based on systems science, which involves more that just agreeing upon goals that reference other concepts in a conceptual Hall of Mirrors. UN bureaucrats can no more address real solutions than, say, a few hundred top theologians meeting for decades at Oxford in the 12th century could have done more than generate fine sounding words about the salvation of humanity.

In 1972, UN wordsmiths met in Stockholm to consider human rights to a healthy and productive environment. In 1983, they started to do the fine work of the Brundtland Commission, which spent four years defining 'sustainable development' as 'meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs'. In 1992, they held an Earth Summit where more fine words lead to Agenda 21. In 2000 they came up with the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). In 2011, UN wordsmiths proposed the idea of the SDGs resulting in a document proposing 17 sustainable development goals and associated targets. At the Rio+20 in 2012, a resolution known as "The Future We Want" was reached by member states. In January 2013, the 30-member UN General Assembly Open Working Group on Sustainable Development Goals was established to identify specific goals for the SDGs. The Open Working Group (OWG) was tasked with preparing a proposal on the SDGs for consideration during the 68th session of the General Assembly, September 2013 – September 2014. On 19 July 2014, the OWG forwarded a proposal for the SDGs to the Assembly. After 13 sessions, the OWG submitted their proposal of 17 SDGs and 169 targets to the 68th session of the General Assembly in September 2014. On 5 December 2014, the UN General Assembly accepted the Secretary General's Synthesis Report, which stated that the agenda for the post-2015 SDG process would be based on the OWG proposals. [Sustainable Development Goals - Wikipedia]

All documents, all fine words, are non-binding. A final document was adopted at the UN Sustainable Development Summit in September 2015 when the 193 countries of the UN General Assembly agreed to the 2030 Development Agenda titled 'Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development'. This agenda has 92 paragraphs. Paragraph 51 outlines the 17 Sustainable Development Goals and the associated 169 targets and 232 indicators. But at Rio+40 in 2032, expect more fine words. Meanwhile the pace of planetary destruction will not have slowed. [Notes of a planet watcher]

So the main objective of the SDGs is to distract humanity from real solutions, e.g. proposed alternative goals that might actually change BAU. [Feng Shui Science]

 

 

58. What qualifies a product as ‘sustainable’? Deleted by Quora for unspecified 'violation'.

Good question, and I think this is the first question I’ve seen where all the answers are good too, so let me fix that by offering some lame, incoherent, rambling, self-aggrandizing-just-because-I-like-to-type verbiage.

I read big books that just about no one else does, like Demystifying Sustainability: Towards Real Solutions 2015 by Haydn Washington: Amazon who mentioned over 300 definitions of the word ‘sustainable’, a word that everybody on Earth likes the sound of and that every wordsmith can interpret to mean what they want it to.

The question makes me wonder what an example of a sustainable product might look like if I tripped over it, and so, of course, I thought of lichen even though they are hard to trip over (but I’m sure I could). Unlike humans, who are ever so special, lichen just needs a bit of water, air, and some weathering rock for nutrients and support to grow on. Oh, and energy from the sun which is more or less sustainable in the long run (say a billion years). If palm trees soon line the shores of St. Matthew Island (for a time) before global cooling sets in, then in time lichen will again cover the island, but not so sure about voles and Arctic fox. But maybe their will be mice and Arctic cats.

So lichen are a sustainable product. On St. Matthew Island they are about the only product apart from voles and a few Arctic fox. Keeping it simple helps humans to think better. [St. Matthew Island - Wikipedia]

But in 1944, 29 reindeer were introduced by humans who were staying there a few years to fight a war. In the winter of 1963–1964 almost all of the 6,000 or so reindeer died because it was a more severe winter than usual (and it was—What wiped out St. Matthew Island's reindeer?). By the 1980s all the reindeer were gone. But the ecologist Garrett Hardin claimed the ‘natural experiment’ of St. Matthew Island of reindeer population explosion and collapse was a paradigmatic example of the consequences of overpopulation [An Ecolate View of the Human Predicament], and not, as many now think, another example of climate change. When you politicize an issue, like alleged ‘overpopulation’, humans loose their ability to think about it. [[PDF] The introduction, increase, and crash of reindeer on St. Matthew Island.]

‘Increases are of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid.’ Letters to Lucilius #91, Lucius Annaeus Seneca, 64 CE

When did the reindeer ‘overpopulate’ the island? If you’re a natural science thinking type then it was obviously when they exceeded the long-term sustainable carrying capacity of the island’s lichen resource, and you might wonder if it was at 1,500 or 1,700, but the important point is that the carrying capacity is not determined by the reindeer—they don’t get a vote. Nature determines what actually works within limits. If you were a normal person visiting the island in 1965 you’d look at 6,000 prospering reindeer and say, ‘overpopulated? What are you smoking dude? Just look at them all, there’s no overpopulation problem that anyone needs to solve, and 99.98% of the reindeer would enthusiastically agree and remember all the prosperous growth of happily munching fat reindeer in the past, and the one reindeer who didn’t, who had existential concerns for his population, would have been ignored, ridiculed, or vilified (like them Limits to Growthers, them ‘Chicken Littles with computers’ were — see how ‘The Limits to Growth’ was demonized).

Note the estimated carrying capacity (1,600) is shown as a straight line, while actual carrying capacity varies from decade to decade or even year to year, and so oscillates. If the reindeer were smarter than yeast they would have made sure their population never went over maybe 1,100 so when the 100=year bad winter came only a few would starve or die from the stress. Also note that during the collapse, when thousands of reindeer tried to survive a little while longer by gnawing the lichen off the rocks, that the carrying capacity may have been 60 reindeer until the island ecosystem recovered (95% in maybe 500 years, such that after a hundred years perhaps the carrying capacity would have been 600 reindeer), but only if their population was managed (wolf:prey ratio about 1:1,000 so the island could not support a wolf pack).

Can industrial humans make sustainable products? No, not apart from modifying natural products anymore than non-existent sustainable civilizations (complex societies) have so far (average lifespan 520 years and decreasing: Past Lives of Humans), if our pattern of overshoot and collapse (or ‘fading away’) has human extinction as its outcome.

P.S. Climate change is a distraction.

 

59. Why is nobody talking about overpopulation?

For those few with population concerns, consider Discussing why population growth is still ignored or denied by Helen Kopnina & Haydn Washington, 2016. Population is no longer the elephant in the living room. The floor is collapsing and its legs extend into the basement. It still grows. The roof is detaching from the walls and is supported only by the elephant's back, yet academics can still sit on the porch and talk about the failure of Malthus, The Limits to Growth 'prediction' failures, and the underlying racism, anti-developing countries elitism, overt misanthropy, and naked anti-human values of those who deign to point to the elephant.

There really are limits, even to denialism. The merely eloquent, at some point, will not be able to believe even their own prattle. Natural science types, however, listen to Nature, the nature of things, and not to fellow travelers—Right, Left, or Middle.

I was at a degrowth conference last year, attended mainly by left-leaning academics who are more comfortable talking about climate justice than scientistic ‘facts’ and data and sciency concepts and stuff. During lunch break I suggested that the topic of degrowth could include population. I didn’t use the word ‘over’, but merely using the word ‘population’, as if that was something to think about, was literally a conversation stopper. I might as well have said, ‘I’m a racist and I want to kill black babies.’ [Universes of Discourse]

Population was topical in the late 1960s and 1970s, but thinking about it had no feel-good outcome, so the global intelligentsia as come to not think about it, as any real solutions are judged unthinkable. That the consequence of not thinking about it may be human extinction (perhaps preceded by some sort of unthinkable degrowth of the economy (per capita consumption) and our livestock, pet, and human population is unthinkable. It is vastly easier to ignore, ridicule, marginalize, obfuscate, deny, and if necessary to vilify, demonize, imprison, then kill the messenger in roughly that order.

In a Rationalwiki article I found out that Dr. Albert Bartlett is a peaknik doomer. Apparently because while giving his public lecture on Arithmetic, Population, and Energy: Sustainability 101, over a forty-year period 1,742 times, he concluded that the ‘greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function’. [Sustainability 101]

Another bunch of possibly senile professor types from MIT, Chicken Littles with computers like Donella Meadows, thought there were limits to growth, including of population, and as Ugo Bardi (another know-nothing doomer dude to ignore) explains, they were demonized. Welcome to the 21st century. [How "The Limits to Growth" was demonized]

And as everyone knows, the doomer Paul Ehrlich who started it all with his ‘Population Bomb’ in 1968, failed to realize the Green Revolution was almost underway and that it (industrial agriculture) would come to turn fossil fuels into food at a faster rate than the population was growing (for a time). That industrial agriculture is not remotely sustainable is clear enough to anyone who would rather know than believe. But the 99+% would rather believe than know, so that’s pretty much why nobody (except for a few, perhaps a bit more in number than those with six fingers on each hand) talks about (thinks about beyond denial) ‘over’population.

Anyone who still ‘believes’ in overpopulation (and since you can believe anything you want, then why would you?) is among a fraction of one percent who do. It’s just a question of what fraction of a percent to the nearest order of magnitude. Everyone you may know may share your concerns, but no reason to be mislead. Let’s say 3 million adults have concerns that maybe there are too many humans on the planet and that something must be done. That’s vastly more than those who express such concerns on Quora. Still that’s 0.1 percent of all humans. A better guess might be that you who have overpopulation concerns are among the 0.01 percent. Think about the implications.

 

 

60. What would happen if the world's population started to decrease by 5% every year?

 

 

61. Is Noam Chomsky a credible source of information?

I recall one video where Chomsky begins by mentioning evironmental issues as among the most pressing, but then he goes on for an hur without mentioning any. Chomsky views the world through a humancentric lens such that the environment, the planetary life-support system, is something of an externality to the centrality of our human concerns that political thinkers focus on. In this he is like the 99+% of the intelligentsia who 'inform' the rest of us. But I like Chomsky, though I like B.F. Skinner more. Chomsky is not just another storyteller as usual who cites only what supports his conclusions. As a scholar I vet him to be among the few who would rather know than believe ('People would rather believe than know.' —E.O. Wilson), which is a high compliment. Still, Chomski is not a natural scientist who focuses on listening to Nature. His ear attends to humancentric concerns, i.e. political concerns which focus on fairness and justice, freedom and dignity. His humancentric focus is a limitation within which he endeavors to think well, and does compared most of the Left leaning pundits who adore him.

I don't recall the source of the video mentioned above and wouldn't recomend it as an example of Chomski at his best. The following video, where he was invited to view humanity as a passing alien might see us is, however, Chomski at his most informative as the minutia of current political concerns/events is avoided by the nature of the topic. I rarely beg to differ with any claim Chomski makes, and so he is a high quality source of information. However, his interpretation or spin is often questionable, however.

Notes of a Chomski Watcher

4:22 When did the Anthropocene start? Or should the Holocene be renamed the Anthropocene epoch? Answers to such questions are not agreed to by geologists yet., though 1945 is favored. A case could be made (and so has) that fire was the first geologically detectable, biosphere changing technology as used by Homo erectus to burn areas perhaps intentionally to improve hunting as seen in African soil profiles. Certainly the atlatl/Clovis point technology as force-multiplier was a game changer enabling megafauna mass extinctions. Most science types would agree that agriculture empowered empire-building was clearly a beginning of a new dynamic that we are part of. But rapid change kicked in about 1945/1950 with the Great Acceleration, so 1945 is about right for when the Anthropocene 'kicked in' if not began, and Chomsky was clearly referencing the Great Acceleration as a significant turning point. I'm not disagreeing with any points he's made so far, just adding a bit. The concept of Anthropocene has been politicized and so not using it when talking about epochs may be wise at least until humans stop politicizing issues.

7:00 I knew Isaac Asimov argued for a world government, and others, but not that Einstein had too so early on. But it should be obvious, so no surprise that some were quicker on the uptake to realize what the 99+% still don't get.

10:43 So far, nothing to even quibble with, including "But every other great power has also thought of itself as the good guys" including Russia, China, UK, EU.

17:00 He sees with 20/20 vision that the Right leaning Republican Party is double-plus ungood. It denies that global warming is an issue. He does not see that while the Left loudly yells about global warming, exaggerates the threat to the point of declaring it the greatest issue humanity has ever faced, and that unlike the evil Right, the Left leaning have all the answers and so alone have solutions (are "the good guys" as someone has to be?). They are certain that they are verily the "good guys" (as the Right leaning also see themselves). The truth, my dear Chomsky, is that neither side is sane nor has any answers that might actually work. The Right is more inclined to deny reality, and the Left to obfuscate it because they are better wordsmiths. When enough people 'believe' in global warming and that something has to be done about it, the Left will come to power (as Gore could foresee and so started beating the drum) and will fail as usual to address real problems they can't even talk about (e.g. population, consumption, technology) and when they are in power they will address the one problem of global warming in ways that will probably do more harm than good as usual. The Left, Right, and Middle are all part of the same dynamic that none of them can question.

24:14 So far, Chomsky at his best and brightest. 'but Germany was participating as much as it could [selling arms to Turkey]. And it's not the only case.' The USA may be at the top of the list but that's only because the British Empire isn't anymore and because the American Empire hasn't faded enough so China can take its place. There is nothing special about the Americans, they are not more evil than most. Gandhi was enabled to do what he did because the British has some 'sense of decency' that prevented them from just swatting him like a fly. Putin has no such qualms, so anyone going all Assauge or Snowden on Russia would know what to expect. Historians will likely view Americans, like the British, as among the lesser evils of the complex societies that infest modernity or have infested the past. The US is still the major power and is doing what major powers have been doing for ten thousand years, and Chomsky understandably has plenty of work to do pointing out its evil ways that power, BAU, selects for, but it is delusional to see Americans as by nature evil anymore than the German people mid-20th century were evil. In the 19th century humans colonial areas were kept as curiosities to amuse throughout Europe in what amounted to zoos. Hitler was the first to outlaw this abomination that everyone else in Europe overlooked (the last one closed in Belgium in 1958), progressive that he was. All were serving their SYSTEM as almost all are today. Russians are among the most delusional and, thanks to Putin nationalizing the internet, among the least misinformed people by the internet because they get less 'information'.

24:22 Obama's drone-assassination program. Does that make his 'the by far greatest terrorist campaign in the world.' Okay, at present, but that the greatest military power the world has ever seen (thanks to the US military being the greatest user of fossil fuel) that uses a tiny fraction of its power to deal with hostile other powers who have or have every intent to build nuclear weapons and install them on commercial ships to launch when near the US to explode high over the US to create an EMF pulse that would take out the electrical/communications system, isn't evil, it's business-as-usual expected and even understandable behavior. Study up on Iranian ideological proclivities/actions and imagine what they would be doing if they consumed a quarter of the planet's resources and had most of the bombs. Whoever is at the top, which would include the United Federation of Watersheds if that ever came to be in any form (good or bad), would have enemies trying to figure out how to destroy them (and take power). Islamists are doing so now. I'm doing so now but not because I believe the USA is the Great Satan. I just read the tealeaves of evidence and think it likely that the current Euro-Sino Empire, which includes Iran, North Korea, USA and Russia, is NOT REMOTELY SUSTAINABLE and that therefore we should consider the possibility of seeking 'out the condition now that will come anyway.'

28:40 So Latin America is 'virtually alone, didn't participate in the most depraved, cowardly, disgusting form of torture, rendition [extrodinary]' but not so long ago they were the center of the same level of torture. Again, business-as-usual has its ups and downs reginally but the dynamic we are all part of goes on and for a time will. At the height of the British Empire, those wanting their power demonized them as the most depraved, cowardly, disgusting empire-builder the world had ever seen (with the exception of all the others). When China dominates as last superpower, it will be the center of doing shit in its short-term self interest. Of all people, the Chinese may actually be the most civilized in that they are not Indo-European culturally and have a past they could learn from.

30:00 'so we have a lot of information about what the government [USA] is doing, not like other societies [e.g. Russia], we are much more free...' I like Chomsky because, unlike the Left leaning ideologues who hang on his every word, with the exception of those they don't like, he does have a good grasp of reality. Could be better, but he is generally a good source of information, claims, as he doesn't make up stuff. At some point he interprets the stuff through a politicized lens (darkly), as he is not a natural science type, but from adolescence, has viewed the world through a politicized humancentric lens which may not be as clarifying a view as is possible. Chomsky isn't thinking in systems, but he does think well, as well as someone lacking the system's view can.

39:17 'But what's really needed is collective action to deal with the roots of the problem.' Any problem, all problems being interconnected. Individual actions may be 'okay' but will be ineffective as usual. Calling upon individuals to buy Green products and services to 'fix' cllimate or environmental issues is a distraction. The proposed Federation of Watersheds, as a foundationally different institution, would be a 'collective action' that changed the 'rules of the game' to select for a different that BAU outcome. So far Chomsky has said nothing that I would quibble with.

Beause of the alien perspective, this is Chomsky thinking big picture, long-term historical perspective, which is close to the ecolate view. Most of the content that Chomsky is known and loved for by the Left leaning is current event interpretation stuff with bits of big picture thinking thrown in, but the minutia is for most a distraction. Every event is seen in terms of for and against, like and dislike, good and bad, right doing and (mostly) evil doing that hu-man primates love to prattle about incessantly, especially as they feel ever so superior to the evil doers, while ignoring the fact that they are the SYSTEM and probably as much a part of whatever problems they deign to admit exists as anyone. As Chomsky would know and did point out, if you want to do something about the impact on the environment of what you eat, okay, don't eat meat or anything else that has been transported 1,500 miles on average to get to your American mouth. Oh, but if everyone stopped eating meat, yes, that's what we have to do, so join PETA, vilify meat producers/consumers and protest... is delusional, is to be part of the problem.

Ending industrial agriculture, organic or not (all commercial organic agriculture uses vast amounts of fossil fuels, just not in the form of pesticides or fertilizer other than the fossil-fuel embodied in the organic fertilizer which could be more than is in the inorganic stuff), whether plant-based or animal-based, would be to seek out the condition now that will come anyway. Industrial agriculture, that feeds over 90 percent of humans, 99+% of those living in industrial society (not just Americans), is not evil or even 'bad'. It is what works temporarily and so has been selected for.

If anyone wanted to know about 'real solutions' I would point out that 30% of grain production goes to feed animals other than humans, including pets. I'd suggest humans stop feeding grain to animals or turning it into ethanol or high fructose corn syrup. Breeding populations of livestock and pets could be maintained on by-products of industrial agriculture. It is possible t continue industrial agriculture for a time with the understanding that in 50 years humans would have to transition to 'natural' swidden, crop rotation, and fallow agriculture (4 to 50 years between plantings) that will sustainably produce maybe 5% of current fossil-fueled production assuming 80 percent of humans work in agriculture. So rapid human population reduction will occur either by rapid reduction in birth rate and/or increase in death rate. That all humans will not embrace rapid degrowth is a given, so for most it will be the rapid increase in death rate as usual option that they will seek to resist (and fail). If enough humans had enough foresight intelligence, however, it would be possible to divert grain production, store it, and create pockets of sustainability in regions where the rapid birth rate reduction option was universally agreed to by all voluntary eMigrates.

 

 

62. Given the opportunity to wipe out half the population, would you?

The ‘wipe out’ part of the question makes the question unthinkable to all but those who enjoy wiping out people for no reason. To propose a thinkable scenario, ask, ‘If pressing a button would cause half of humans, wholly at random (no age, sex, race, education, wealth...matters) to die, then would you push it knowing that you have a 50/50 chance of dropping dead in a nanosecond and that half of those you know would “turn off” like a light without the slightest time to suffer?’.

 

As it happens, I can think unthinkable thoughts, sometimes as many as six before breakfast [ref]. So I offer this note:

[But to cut to the answer, yes, I’d push a button to make half ‘depart’ with the understanding that doing so again and again to reduce the current human population to 962,500,000 might not be enough and that I probably wouldn’t be around after three cuts to push it, so I’d see if I could find maybe 30 others to stand around the button to push it two more times after I had. Oh, and I would release a notice explaining to those left, apart from the 30, why I pushed it. Of the maybe seven left, they would wait to see if humanity could question assumptions, before considering whether to press it again]

Abstract: There are unthinkable thoughts that no mere abstract can dare to mention.

TUCSON (A-P) AUGUST 16, 2015— What follows is a thought experiment as the means to implement it are not available. The hypothetical is: a means exists such that, if deployed, 9 out of 10 humans at random, of any age, gender, group membership, or genetic endowment would go utterly brain dead and drop in less than a heartbeat, burdening the random survivors with disposing of their bodies.

If the means could be initiated by pressing a button, should it be pressed? Would you press it? If the button should be pressed, but you couldn't press it, someone could, so your inability to press it is irrelevant. The only relevant question is should it be pressed?

An initial objection would be that pressing the button would be the greatest act of genocide in history past or likely yet to come. It would be, but if philosophical suicide is thinkable, so too is genocide as the scale is secondary. To think about pushing the button requires freethought. That freethinkers are able to think the unthinkable may be an argument against freethought (as made by those who can't), but noises made by those who refuse to think do not make for a convincing argument.

The issue comes down to assessing the consequences of pushing the button verses not pushing it. If pushing the button is horrific, not pushing it could be more horrific. That not pushing the button will likely have horrific consequences is not an extraordinary claim and should be thinkable. If all humans, but one, agreed the button be pressed, should it therefore not be?

If pushing the button now means that 90% of humans are euthanized humanely, which could include the one pushing the button and 90% of those who think it should be pressed, then of 7,400,000,000 humans, 6,560,000,000 die leaving 740,000,000 random survivors to ponder why the button was pressed and endeavor to live so as to minimize the perceived need to press it again to reduce human multitudes to a more manageable and sustainable 74,000,000.

If not pressed, then 7.4 billion humans continue doing what they are doing. No need to belabor details to make the point that not pushing the button could have unimaginably more horrific consequences to far more humans and other living things (all life on Earth including all of human posterity far beyond the seventh generation) than pressing the button.

There is no button to press, so you can't press any, but you can think about it. It is both possible and thinkable, however, to transition now one human life, one household, one community, one watershed at a time. If pushing the button is thinkable though not doable, consider transitioning now to a more prosperous descent, to a sustainable prosperity of enough that allows posterity to live the eudaimonic life. If pushing the button is unthinkable, then carry on per business as usual, full speed ahead, and enjoy the cruise.

You could join the VHEMT (Voluntary Human Extinction Movement) or Church of Euthanasia as doing so is entirely thinkable and those who join can feel ever so good (superior) about their life choice. You can't join the IVHEMT (the Involuntary Human Extinction Movement) because it doesn't exist (other than as title of a music album) for some reason. Oh, clever name maybe, but the real deal wouldn't feel good. The IVHEMT is several orders of magnitude more cogent than the VHEMT. If taking yourself out of the gene pool is good, taking more humans out with you, more being better, would get us to were we (of the IVHEMT) want us all to be. The VHEMT could get us there if every human joined. But if just one couple (Adam & Eve?) didn't, it would all start over. Only the IVHEMT would have any reasonable chance of getting us to the blessed land of enough of us. Or maybe we need to consider something other than another feel-good movement (aka another social, political, environmental, religious, sustainability or any other mass movement).

If joining the IVHEMT proves difficult secondary to it not existing and no one you know or who reads your sign while protesting responds by asking if they can join, then perhaps other unthinkable thoughts need to be considered.

Oh, and the not so naked ape above, on behalf of the other life on the planet (except humans and some of their pets and livestock), says, "Push the (expletive deleted) button!"

————————————————————————————————————-

There is no substitute for energy. The whole edifice of modern society is built upon it. It is not "just another commodity" but the precondition of all commodities, a basic factor equal with air, water and earth. —E. F. Schumacher

It will be a race toward either paradise or oblivion, right to the last moment. —R. Buckminster Fuller

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe. —H.G. Wells, The Outline of History

Education: that which reveals to the wise, and conceals from the stupid, the vast limits of their knowledge. —Mark Twain

 

 

63. When will the world population become too large to sustain?

The concept of ‘overshoot’ implies ‘too large’ and it implies descent. Biologists understand overshoot, as distinct from believing or disbelieving in it. You can believe that the concept of overshoot doesn’t apply to humans. Or you can rather know than believe. Choose wisely.

 

 

64. Why will civilization collapse?

Why will this civilization collapse, as have all prior complex societies? This is a good question that has been of interest to others going back at least to the Ancient Greeks. To understand why the now global complex society we all depend on and are part of will collapse, descend, fade away, or whatever term you prefer to use to suggest the unthinkable, it is helpful to first note that all prior complex societies, much over Dunbar’s number, failed to ‘keep on keeping on’ for very long (typically <1,000 years), which includes over a hundred ‘civilizations’ (state-level societies), but thousands of chiefdom level and city-state-level ones since agriculture enabled large ‘permanent’ settlements about ten thousand years ago, though in some resource rich areas (e.g. where wild grain or fish was abundant), some technology enabled hunter-gatherers formed complex societies. [Past Lives of Humans]

To understand the dynamics of overpulsing unto overshoot and collapse, consider standing on the shoulders of giants such as Joseph Tainter whose book ‘The Collapse of Complex Societies’ is a must read. Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Wikipedia considers some examples, none of which ‘chose’ to fail (and we won’t either). And do consider Guy McPherson, another professor emeritus type, but there are many so you still have to vet your sources. I’ve been planning to write an article call ‘When Good Professors Go Bad’ and McPherson would be featured. [Guy McPherson - RationalWiki]

Will the current ‘civilization’ (scientist types prefer ‘complex society’) end? Well, yes, and understanding why is of interest as is how to avoid a 90 to 100 percent loss of information as usual by working enable remnant but functional complex societies to persist (which excludes those who plan to retreat to their bunker with their finger curled around a trigger), but unlike McPherson and ilk I’m not a doomer. If some ‘pockets of sustainability’ form and persist to thrive on an Abundant Earth, then that would not violate any biophysical laws of the universe. The systems ecologist H.T. Odum knew that ‘the way down’ was a common happening in Nature and together with his wife wrote ‘A Prosperous Way Down’ to help those humans who would listen (to Nature) instead of the voices in their head (or on social or mainstream media or in taverns, etc.), to have a prosperous way down. [A Prosperous Way Down, his daughter’s website]

I would add to the usual Malthusian concerns those of John B. Calhoun who observed the effects on rats and mice of ‘urbanizing’ them. The outcome was a ‘behavioral sink’ and collapse unto extinction of the experimental populations. Calhoun failed to see why humans are different ‘in kind’ from other animals, and so are exempt from developing a loss of functional complex behaviors needed to persist as the generations passed. Oh, but maybe we are not different in kind such that the details of our behavioral sink will differ, but not ‘in kind’ (it took mice a matter of years to collapse, and humans have been doing the Industrial Society thing for 300 years, so we are different (we can do drugs his mice couldn’t), but we still share half our genes with a cabbage). [Critical Mass Transcript]

James Lovelock is someone to consider (not infallible, but he knows that, and so is far more credible than Guy McPherson). He thinks we may be in for an 80 to 90 percent descent this century. ‘You iterate towards the truth. You don’t know it....eventually we'll have a human on the planet that really does understand it and can live with it properly. That's the source of my optimism.'—James Lovelock. That is the source of my extreme cornucopian optimism too. ['Enjoy life while you can' and read more books]

 

65. 1.9 billion is the ideal global population for everyone to live like the average American. If today, the population suddenly dropped to this number, how would society be effected?

The ‘1.9 billion’ suggests a source (who is innumerate enough to over specify what could at best be a guess so ‘less than two billion’ is better). The question isn’t ‘so if only a couple billion is the ideal (or best, a superlative whose usage is a red flag) global population...’ First, vet your source (which includes their usage of words and numbers), their sources, and then listen to Nature who offers to inform those who listen (i.e ‘Nature has all the answers, so what is your question’—H.T. Odum). So to repeat, first question we often-wrong humans, starting with yourself, or in short: question everything. I looked for and may have found your source: What's the Ideal Number of Humans on Earth?, a collection of ‘expert’ opinion by a writer for Gizmodo on assorted views on population matters.

So start by asking ‘who is Gizmodo?’ Or start by asking how to assess media (the oversellers of sellable narratives) and their bias. Google ‘media bias’ and consider Media Bias/Fact Check and others (e.g. Politifact). This leads to Gizmodo - Media Bias/Fact Check Gizmodo where allegations of Left political bias are made but that factual reporting is ‘High’ meaning they tend not to just make up claims, like say RT or Fox, but reference them. This is not a high bar to meet as it is extremely easy to correctly but selectively cite only those who say what your Left leaning readers want to read to make them happy (confirm their bias) and keep coming back for more. Does Gizmodo (and site visitors) traffic in hardcore facts that only inquiring minds want to know? Note that ‘Founded in 2002, Gizmodo is primarily a design, technology and science fiction website. The current editor is Kelly Bourdet.... Editorially, Gizmodo does not separate news from opinion, which can be misleading, with most editorial positions favoring the left.’

And, yes, if the claim made actually mattered I’d vet Kelly Bourdet, the author, and the alleged experts, e.g. Carissa Véliz & Bent Flyvbjerg (who argue that 3 billion is ‘ideal’), but the opinions a professor at a business school (Oxford) on population is equivalent to that of a Lyft driver (or an Oxford Professor of Theology), and the 1.9 claim is just another facepalming offering to discount along with those involved in making it. None (writer, editor of Gizmodo nor their sources) listen to Nature. That’s about all I need to know.

So, if humans want to live like Americans, what population could Earth support? Well, let’s see, consider your sources and I start with E.O. Wilson (you vet him). David Suzuki (vet him—highlight name, right-click) knows E.O. Wilson and ‘I once asked the great ecologist E.O. Wilson how many people the planet could sustain indefinitely. He responded, "If you want to live like North Americans, 200 million.”’ [Achievable via a 97% depopulation.] But ‘the great’ systems ecologist H.T. Odum guessed 500 million if humans lived at the level of consumption of those in the 18th century (per daughter Mary Odum at a workshop on ‘A Prosperous Way Down’ at the University of Florida, 2018), which is the same answer. But at a conference a couple of years ago Jack Alpert, Stanford engineer [Jack M Alpert BIO], was coming to question his estimate that for humans to live the high power/consumption life of an American, that Earth could support 50 million (living clustered around hydroelectric dams for a time as average life expectancy of the dams are about 400 years). He was questioning his optimism and admitted that maybe only 30 million could be supported in a fossil-fuelless world where fossil fuels couldn’t make solar PV panels or wind generators as they do now (for a time).

I could cite someone who answers questions on Quora who thinks the ideal population is 5 million because he (and he assumes everyone else) really wants to consume ten times more than average Americans today and as equality is ideal, everyone should live in a palace (and become trans-humans served by robots?). But vet sources, and note that I’m not making any claims, merely citing others who are, e.g. E.O. Wilson, so vet him as I’m an ignorant know-nothing who doesn’t know enough to have an opinion, so anything I say should just be water off your doubting duck’s back. But you are swimming in a sea of misinformation and disinformation (prattle), so don’t ignore the reality thing in front of your face that you and life as you know it (and posterity) depend on.

As a know-nothing from the hood who questions the premise, I can’t answer the question of how society would be affected, but I could guess that almost nobody wants to think about it (the perfect storm of multiple system failures). I don’t want to think about it, and yet I do, even though (almost) nobody, including me, wants to think the unthinkable. But Nature doesn’t care what I want or don’t want, what I Like or don’t Like or Share, so why should I?

 

66. It seems obvious that many of earth's biggest problems are caused by human overpopulation. Yet we don't hear much about it. Could that be because the people in power need population growth to fuel economic growth?

It is and you don’t hear much about it due to denial, which, as Mark Twain noted, is not a river in Egypt.

Discussing why population growth is still ignored or denied, Helen Kopnina & Haydn Washington pdf

 

67. There is a lot of concern about population growth but there is data pointing to decreased fertility in key developed nations. Will the expected population decline in the next few decades be advantageous or detrimental?

Some areas, like Greenland and Puerto Rico, have negative population growth due to emigration, but their birth rate still exceeds death rate, so the rate of natural increase is positive. More leave the area (out-migrate or emigrate) than are born or immigrate into the area. Without factoring in the death rate, the crude birth rate tells you nothing about growth or degrowth of population.

 

A better way to grasp reality is to look at the rate of natural increase before factoring in out-migration and in-migration.

 

The most likely story (science-based, not belief-based) is that humanity (technoindustrial society) exceeded global carrying capacity (sustainable environmental productivity of planetary life-support system) in about 1970 as enabled by one-time fossil fuel consumption, i.e. we went into overshoot which implies grow will climax followed by descent.

The rate of population growth will continue to decline over the next few decades, but global population may not peak until after 2100. [Projections of population growth - Wikipedia]

If your only income is the interest on the ten million dollars you inherited from your rich uncle, then there is a huge short-term advantage to not only spending the interest, but the principle as well. You can have a new car, fly around the world just because, become obese, have sex pretty much whenever you want, get high.... live like an elite (for a time). Oh, but let's say you have foresight intelligence and always ask, 'And then what?'

So it turns out you can't continue to live like an American. The can't enthusiastically spend all the money that is burning a hole in your pocket without limit forever. You are burdened with foresight and some intelligence, and so your potential enthusiasm is diminished. But it took a while to sort of realize this, and you started spending the principle about 1970. The amount needed to support your current sort-of-modest life-style will peak (climax) about 2032 followed by rapid financial descent (collapse), as your nephew who knows a bit of math explains, and so you decide to live only on the interest of such principle as is left. But that means you need to live in a mobile home and maybe grow food using runoff from nearby roofs. So you did the 'advantageous' thing, which was all good and everything, but then there is the 'detrimental' thing.

You end up by adapting, acquiring a life-driven purpose. You spend some more of the principle and leave the short-termers in their unsustainable urban areas. You move to a smaller city powered by the hydroelectric dam it is next to. Life there will be prosperous for some time after the fossil fuels are no longer cheap. But you have concerns for posterity and aren't so sure about the long-term sustainability of industrial society needed to maintain hydroelectric generators (or PV, wind generators...), and so since Sol is pretty steady, has supported life on Earth for nearly 4 billion years, you decide that the sun is a better bet for posterity. You decide to 'seek out the condition now that will come anyway'.

But before coming to such a realization, you decided your nephew was just wrong, so you had kept spending, you kept on keeping on like everyone else. And it worked for a time, but the descent thing was lamentable as was what you had to do to keep on keeping on. But you were lucky and weren't eaten. You finally realized you were wrong to spend your uncle's principle. You were wrong to keep on spending unsustainably. You had bought books about how to keep on spending sustainably, but that didn;t work. Your denialism, short-termism, and relentless focus on self interest was wrong. But in the end, you got right with biophysical reality and learned to live properly with the planet.

Of course the huge loss of environmental productivity and biodiversity was lamentable too. But in the end you do what works and pass it on to posterity who, after about five hundred years of environmental restoration (as usual), will come to live an even more prosperous life than you end up living.

Someday we will come to understand the planet and learn to 'live with it properly. That's the source of my optimism.'

 

68. Does the rule of 70 apply to negative population growth rates?

Yes. I’ve long assumed so, but I could be wrong even if I’m absolutely sure I’m not. That others who seem to ‘know’ stuff agree suggests I’m right. If ‘experts’ disagreed, I’d have to figure out who’s wrong (probably me) and why (experts can be wrong, so just believing I’m wrong or right is meaningless). See point 4: Economic Growth and the Rule of 70. If the rule doesn’t apply to population degrowth, let me know and explain why, but I’m absolutely sure it does which, as usual, means nothing.

 

69. What are the different human phases for growth and development?

When growth is possible the rate may vary, but any steady rate of growth, however small, plots out as exponential growth having a typical upturn prior to climax and descent. For three hundred years we have been living, for a time, in the upturn. This is what the Odums (systems ecologists) call the pulsing paradigm. http://kfrserver.natur.cuni.cz/g...

When pulsing exceeds boundaries, limits, the pattern may shift from oscillation to collapse followed by restoration which may transition to a sustainable pulsing pattern or repeat the overpulsing pattern with collapse of the system. [Past Lives of Humans]

We are currently in overshoot secondary to overpulsing the system as empowered by, for a time, fossil fuels.

Some regions are in descent. Globally we may be in Stage 2, but that will not be clear until we are in Stage 3. When US oil production peaked in 1970, it took ten years to admit it.

The future is of interest to those who can think more than a decade ahead. Many who dream of sustainability and transitioning to a steady-state economy see a future where growth is limited, but the 11 billion or so humans on earth will transition resiliently to continue qualitative growth, to benefit from the limitless progress and prosperity without growth that they can believe in. Alternative is to not believe in belief.

The above is what happens when an old-growth forest burns down, as they periodically do. The end point, in perhaps five hundred years, is another climax forest. The fossil-fueled pulse we are living in will not have this outcome.

One possible future is that we manage the descent to a more or less steady-state of pulsing with oscillation.

Another is that we keep on keeping on per BAU (business-as-usual) and collapse complex society as usual. We don’t do the prosperous way down option, but we do learn the hard way to not do the overshoot thing again and again.

There has never been a global empire before and what happens post collapse to a global complex society that has reached such heights (the bigger you are....) is unknown.

And Nature is giving parent, but her ‘love’ is conditional, so listen. To think is to listen.

Will we ever learn?

Maybe.

'Eventually we'll have a human on the planet that really does understand it and can live with it properly. That's the source of my optimism.' —James Lovelock

‘Love that well which thou must leave ere long’.

Sonnet 73: That time of year thou mayst in me behold by William Shakespeare

 

 

70. What is the strongest neoclassical argument for the possibility of sustained exponential growth on a finite planet? If we keep growing GDP at 3% for the next 200 years, the economy will grow by two orders of magnitude.

Oh, an easy one. There are no arguments that are not ‘barking mad’.

‘Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.’ —Kenneth Boulding 1973, an economist...

Kenneth Boulding, Wikiquote

Beliefs, no matter how firmly stated, are not arguments. Books by people with PhD after their name may be written in the form of arguments with mountains of evidence cited, they may even get a Nobel Prize or answer questions on Quora, but all are barking mad singing servants of those whose bread they eat, like me.

'Whose bread I eat, his song I sing', German proverb.

 

 

71. Due to population growth and environmental problems, should families have fewer kids?

No. Ideally everyone would read Exploring New Ethics for Survival: The Voyage of the Spaceship Beagle, 1972 by human ecologist Garrett Hardin whom most intelligentsia types came to view as a racist who wanted to kill black babies, which is why no one needs to consider what he had to say about alleged 'overpopulation'. The only review of Exploring New Ethics for Survival I found was from Nov. 1972 in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists which includes a review of Limits to Growth by Garrett Hardin (p. 23) that merits reading. The reviewer of Exploring New Ethics notes: 'Now that he [mankind] is aware of the [ecological] dilemma, conscious of its implications for his survival, he must figure out what to do about it.' Or not. We now know what 'he' as consensus of the 'learned' did: deny, deny, deny, and if necessary obfuscate or vilify the messengers, e.g. the 'Chicken-Littles with computers'.

Ideally one hundred percent of humans would ask what the sustainable long-term population of Earth is for humans. If the answer is ‘50 million’ (or 500 million), then they would ask how many babies, assuming an average lifespan of 76 years, can be born each year? Well, 657,895 births (50,000,000/76) per year, or 1,802 per day. Everyone would be able to do the simple math or realize that they didn’t know enough to have an opinion. So say 40% of women are potentially fertile, that’s about 1,540,000,000 of current population. Assume half want to give birth, or 770,000,000. Simple math. The first year one in 1,170 women who wanted a child could have one. But in less than one lifetime, all women could have 2.1 children on average, and that is well within the childbearing limits of humans (about 7 children average).

Ideally everyone (fertile human females), without exception, would understand and ‘take a number’ or petition the Mothers (or otherwise await to see if they were ‘blessed’) to be among the 657,895 if they wanted to have a child. If only 99 percent agreed to reproduce if ‘blessed’, then the 1 percent would in time displace the 99 percent assuming they wanted to reproduce at will (the current ‘rules of the game’), and would want to have their ‘quiver full’ and teach their children to be like them. Soon they would be 2 percent of the population. Then 4 percent..., then 8 percent.... and the system would select for its own destruction, i.e. overshoot and descent (collapse). And it won’t matter if you, as minority or majority, have no children or ten. The time frame may be altered slightly, but not the outcome. But this can’t be ‘true’ as everyone you know firmly believes that 2+2=5.

By choosing to limit your reproduction you merely self-select out of the population in terms of the frequency of your genes or memes in future generations. So have ten children and tell them that you hope one survives and that if any do, that they should agree that the population of humans, livestock, and pets be limited to carrying capacity and treat any humans who do not as a cancer. Or with cream and sugar on top, ‘seek out the condition now that will come anyway.’ —Howard T. Odum, systems ecologist.

 

 

72. Have we already gone too far in destroying our planet to save it? What changes are being made to prevent complete destruction?

I could quibble and note that from hundreds of light-years away, Earth will appear to spin on, but should you have existential concerns for humanity and the biosphere? Will there be ‘complete’ destruction of the biosphere (including humans)? Not likely, but whether we outdo the methanogens of 252 million years ago, who evolved an ability to turn complex carbohydrates in ocean sediments into more methanogens, and methane causing a rapid increase of about 10°C and extinction of 96% of oceanic life, is not clear yet. Our technology has enabled us to exploit a planetary vat of fossil fuels (for a time), like Methnosarcina did [Methanosarcina - Wikipedia], which may not exceed the Permian extinction event, but it is too soon to say as we are just getting started. So despite our hubris, which is the size of a planet, we are not going to destroy it and probably won’t manage to cause the extinction of 100% of life on it. But we are clever apes, so maybe we can.

It will take about 10 million years for Nature to replace the biodiversity loss that we have already caused without any significant help (>5%) from anthropogenic climate change and if someone finds a magic bullet (technological fix) that totally eliminates any climate change and reverses such as there has been, we can easily cause a ten-fold increase in species extinction, added to the one hundred to a thousand-fold increase we have managed so far, by the end of this century.

Greta Thunberg has existential concerns for humanity and the biosphere. So far as I know, all ‘ecolate’ (systems science literate) people I know or know of also have grave concerns. Open Letter to Greta Thunberg.

 

 

73. What is the future of sustainable agriculture?
[answer removed by Quora moderator without a clue as to why.]

To seek out the condition now that will come anyway, eliminate all fossil fuel inputs, direct (e.g. tractors, combines) and indirect (e.g. nitrogen fertilizers produced by Haber process or used to transport anything). As mining is unsustainable, no use of inputs of anything mined (e.g. most fertilizers especially phosphorus). Irrigation, other than by rain or melted snow, not used, so no diversion of river water or pumping of ground water even without using fossil fuel sources of energy, to avoid salt build-up over decades, centuries, or millennia unless flood irrigation flushes salts below root zone into water table, which the Nile did before it was dammed. If soil loss exceeds soil formation, stop farming the land. To not mine the soil, allow to lay fallow for years to decades so soil decomposition releases nutrients, and nitrogen fixed by bacteria bills up. Swidden agriculture is sustainable if enough time passes between burning of vegetation to clear and fertilize.

On grazed land, monitor forage and reduce stocking rate if there is any measurable decrease over time (decades) or if soil erosion exceeds soil formation rate. Industrial agriculture is a set of ways and means of turning fossil fuel into food, for a time. About 90% of the food we eat that on average traveled 1,500 miles (and not by donkey) to get to our mouths, is 'made' of fossil fuel, meaning it wouldn't exist without such direct and indirect inputs. Figure that most of the lands currently farmed cannot be farmed sustainably as the millennia pass, and that planting the same land year after year will not be the norm as it is now. Agroecology methods will maximize food production, but total global production will be a fraction of what industrial fossil-fuel-into-food agriculture output has been that has allowed the human population to grow in the last 300 years.

When a field is planted in corn/maize (every 50 years in some parts of the Southwest USA by traditional Hopi farmers with 4 bushels/acre yield) in the Corn Belt, expect 25 bushels/acre again on average, but not on every acre.

 

74. What do experts of climate change and scientists think of Greta Thunberg?

As Richard Feynman noted, "science is the belief in the ignorance of experts," and I'm an ignorant know-nothing from the hood who doesn't know enough to have an opinion. But since that means I'm like everyone else, I wrote an open letter to Greta Thunberg. To boil it down, I said boycotting school was her better idea, adding that as an autodidact (like me) that she would have a fool for a teacher. She is close to realizing that there are no political solutions, which is the best hope we have for saving humanity and the biosphere. My wife suggested this morning (which suggests but does not prove that I am not Ted Kaczynski) that I should make a cap that says "Make America Greta Again." I'm thinking I will, fanboy that I am.  Open Letter to Greta Thunberg.

And, no, she didn't actually say that, I'm just putting words in her mouth like everyone else. I'm guessing she would disagree with everything I say, but I could be wrong.

 

 

 

75. What are some low-tech options for greener living?

Look into solar cooking and cookers. ‘Green’ implies don’t use fossil fuels, directly or indirectly. Solar cooking can be relatively low-tech using glass, reflective material, and perhaps insulation if making a solar oven. An old tire stuffed with straw and covered with a piece of glass works. Somewhat more difficult to be made DIY, evacuated tubes make for practical solar cooking even laying on snow on a clear day. In many areas cooking with solar 200+ days a year is possible to minimize using a wood-gas stove and to maximize carbon sequestration.

 

 

Climate change is happening, so at best can we mitigate the effect by stopping our use of fossil fuels, sooner being better, but to allow humans time to transition, let’s think: Can human efforts end fossil fuel use in five years to mitigate species extinction (and climate change)?

No, but to understand why requires considerable self-education as understanding the dynamics of complex systems is perhaps the greatest challenge humans have failed to meet. Complex systems, e.g. socio-economic-political complex societies and geo-biophysical ecosystems, are not only more complex than we understand but more complex than we can understand, though hubris prevents many from recognizing our considerable limitations. Still, we can iterate towards understanding systems by learning to think better in them. A starting point is Donella Meadows’ book, free as a pdf, Thinking in Systems: A Primer. https://wtf.tw/ref/meadows.pdf

To understand that all money is counterfeit (among other things), that energy is the real wealth of nations, the precondition for everything else, there is a recent textbook that isn’t free, but is of high value: Energy and the Wealth of Nations: An Introduction to Biophysical Economics: Charles A.S. Hall, Kent Klitgaard

Basically the current system selects for short-term payoffs and no matter how many alternative sources of energy are developed, no matter how much energy they provide, there will never be enough to continue growing the economy even if we end up building a Dyson sphere and converting the entire output of Sol, using all materials of the Solar System including the Oort Cloud, into humans, pets, crops, livestock, and stuff. But when the sphere was finished, then what? The only way for growth to continue would be for some living within the Dyson sphere to take the resources of those weaker than they are in other parts of the sphere [A Dyson Sphere is Built]. Consider the last 12,000 years of the human past and note the pattern [Past Lives of Humans].

My hope is that the current empire, the first global empire, will fail sooner than later [e.g. 2000 years from now], creating a ‘teachable moment’ when foundational change is possible. It almost happened with the Technocracy movement in the early 1930s which began in 1919. It is not too late to start thinking alternative thoughts outside the Overton window, which, updated for the 21st century, might be called the Naturocracy Alliance that could start in 2019: [Down with Democracy, Up with Naturocracy]

Unfortunately, many are being distracted by pretend revolutionaries like XR. [Open Letter to Greta Thunberg]

 

77. Why don't people see population growth as an issue? Isn't it the elephant in the room?

In 1968, the Ehrlichs' Population, Resources, and Environment book, which the publisher renamed The Population Bomb and wanted Anne's name to not be included as co-author to sell more copies, sold 2 million copies. The publisher encouraged provocative predictions of near-future doom that did not come to pass, as the Green Revolution was not foreseen (nor fracking) in 1968.

In 1969, professor Al Bartlett started giving his public lecture on Arithmetic, Population, and Energy: Sustainability 101 which he gave 1,742 times, He asked, “Can you think of any problem, in any area of human endeavour, on any scale, from microscopic to global, whose long-term solution is in any demonstrable way aided, assisted, or advanced by further increases in population, locally, nationally, or globally?” [Sustainability 101]

In 1972, 30 top scientists (e.g. Julian Huxley), signed A Blueprint for Survival [A Blueprint for Survival - Wikipedia] which mentions the word “population” 114 times, e.g. “for various reasons, industrial growth, particularly in its earlier phases, promotes population growth.... demand is a function of population numbers X per capita consumption, both must be stabilised...however slight the growth rate, a population cannot grow indefinitely. It follows, therefore, that at some point it must stabilise of its own volition, or else be cut down by some "natural" mechanism —famine, epidemic, war, or whatever. Since no sane society would choose the latter course, it must choose to stabilise...taking world population as a whole, and using per capita per diem protein intake as the key variable in assessing carrying capacity, we believe the optimum population for the world is unlikely to be above 3,500 million and is probably a good deal less...we are faced either with the task of reducing world population still further until it is well below the optimum, or with condoning inequalities grosser and more unjust than those which we in the developed countries foster at present....an optimum population, therefore, may be defined as one that can be sustained indefinitely and at a level at which the other values of its members are optimised...” [A Blueprint for Survival-Ecologist-1972.pdf]

In 1992, World Scientists' Warning to Humanity notes “Pressures resulting from unrestrained population growth put demands on the natural world that can overwhelm any efforts to achieve a sustainable future. If we are to halt the destruction of our environment, we must accept limits to that growth.” Signed by over half of Nobel Prize winners and about 1575 top scientists from around the world. [Warning of concerned scientists]

In 2017, World Scientists' Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice notes “The authors of the 1992 declaration feared that humanity was pushing Earth's ecosystems beyond their capacities to support the web of life. They described how we are fast approaching many of the limits of what the biosphere can tolerate without substantial and irreversible harm. The scientists pleaded that we stabilize the human population...we are jeopardizing our future by not reining in our intense but geographically and demographically uneven material consumption and by not perceiving continued rapid population growth as a primary driver behind many ecological and even societal threats. By failing to adequately limit population growth, reassess the role of an economy rooted in growth, reduce greenhouse gases, incentivize renewable energy, protect habitat, restore ecosystems, curb pollution, halt defaunation, and constrain invasive alien species, humanity is not taking the urgent steps needed to safeguard our imperilled biosphere.” Signed by over 20,000 scientists in 184 nations. [Warning of concerned scientists, second notice]

So some people do see population as the elephant in the room (e.g. some “know-nothing” scientist types). Why do most humans not see it? In a word, “denial.” It is easier to not think about the implications of ‘over’population than to think about them. As the great ecologist E.O. Wilson notes, “People would rather believe than know.” Some (e.g. above) would rather know than believe, but they are an insignificant percentage of the population (perhaps 0.01%).

A more thinkable thought is that human activity (burning fossil fuel) is warming the globe. The issue has been politicized and is within our Overton window. But politicizing an issue, including population (which was within our Overton window in the 1970s until the intelligentsia agreed to stop thinking about it), merely forces people to take sides and be “for” or “against”, which is a social/cognitive pathology. What is the biggest elephant in the room? Population or per capita consumption? Is climate change a distraction? [Open Letter to Greta Thunberg]

Population follows energy.

And then what?

 

78. Why does it say 'maintain humanity under 500,000,000' on the Georgia Guidestones?

The Guidestones are written in eight languages, seven of which are not commonly spoken in Georgia, and the message is chiseled in granite for the ages. Today some have climate concerns, but in 1980 ecological concerns centered on population, consumption, and the effects of technology on the biosphere, were common and had been since the mid 1960s. Existential concerns for humanity and the biosphere were thinkable to those who knew enough of systems ecology to have an opinion. That the population in 1980 of 4.4 billion was unsustainable was commonly understood among ‘top scientists’, e.g. 30 top scientists signed A Blueprint for Survival 1972

David Suzuki asked E.O. Wilson what he guessed was a sustainable population and he replied, ‘If you want to live like North Americans, 200 million’ and another top scientist, H.T. Odum, among others, guessed 500 million and R.C. Christian, nominal author of the Guidestones, likely knew what the best guess of systems ecologists was at the time and, well, 500 million is still about mid ballpark. Jack Alpert, however, thinks E.O. Wilson, a mere biologist, was optimistic, as a better current guess is that 50 million is the most that sustainable high energy sources (hydro) can support. I’m guessing he is a bit optimistic, but I don’t know enough to have an opinion.

Still, in the 23rd century, people may visit the Guidestones and wonder why we ignored the suggestions and the mountain of supportive data. I might change a word or two, but why ignore the Georgia Guidestones - Wikipedia?

‘Be not a cancer on the earth — Leave room for nature — Leave room for nature.’

But we are, and we are not. I would capitalize ‘Nature’, but I quibble. Sustainability Issues: There is no Planet B so we need a Plan A & B

 

79. What percentage of the global population lives in a dystopia? Where and what makes these places a dystopia?

One answer so far as I type. I don’t know enough to have an opinion, let alone an answer, but I’m also an R.N. retired, and for no particularly good reason I do have opinions, or perhaps I am had by opinions that I should endeavor to free myself from. But to answer the question: 99%. Or somewhat better: 99+%. Would 99.99% be a better guess? I don’t know.

Everyone reading this, or who could read this note, is the product of industrial society, now global. You, dear reader, know what money is and likely have some. You have therefore served the technoindustrial growth hegemon, in some way or ways. In my youth I worked summers only as a migrant farmworker, taking the rest of the year off to hangout in libraries and partake of the free information offered. The last thing I did before becoming an elder was provide nursing care. I never served the SYSTEM (also known in the late 1960s as ‘the Establishment’) with enthusiasm, i.e. I never worked for money, but I spent my life serving, living in, and being a product of a dystopian SYSTEM.

To be literate is to ask ‘what does the word mean?’ The word is ‘dys·to·pi·a, /disˈtōpēə/, noun, an imagined state or society in which there is great suffering or injustice, typically one that is totalitarian or post-apocalyptic’.

So far as I know I’m not living in a holographic universe created as an Oomicron higher school science project by a hyper-intelligent, pan-dimensional kid. So I'm guessing this world is not imaginary, so not, strictly typing, a dystopia, but the definition is in error as living in one is entirely possible. An alternative word, for purists, would be dysfunctional. So, what percentage of the global population is living in a foundationaly dysfunctional social SYSTEM? 99+%.

This answer implies some do not. For about 300,000 years our H. sapiens ancestors lived functional lives in matriarchal bands (with exceptions) of 5 to 85 others, bands of sisters, that were matrilocal with some exceptions.

Then agriculture was invented, allowing for fixed settlements over vast areas to arise within which stories of the goddess and goddesses were told. But village size could and did exceed Dunbar’s number [Dunbar's number - Wikipedia]. Hierarchy was selected for. Energy (as food) and material wealth built up to become exploitable resources for the taking. Some came to take them and build empires. [Past Lives of Humans]

Male atavisms were selected for, e.g. the patriarchal, patrilocal, and patrilineal Indo-Europeans who from their steppes with cattle and horses (and later chariots) did come and flourish as did their stories of a big God as supreme alpha male. [Complex societies evolved without belief in all-powerful deity]

Are all complex societies at or above the chiefdom level unable to persist more than a thousand years or so? The Puebloans of the southwest USA (Ancestral Puebloans - Wikipedia, pulsing at Chaco Canyon, then Mesa Verde) failed, but the traditional Hopi still live in six villages and were a remnant population on the outskirts of the Puebloan empire (and now our empire) that persist to today. [Southwest Timeline of Pueblo Culture]

Globally, all complex societies that persisted into the 15th to 21st centuries have been subsumed into the now global industrial society [Euro-Sino Empire] with one possible exception, the remnant population of the Tairona [Remnant survivors of the Spanish conquest] in Colombia.

Some remnant functional complex societies may still exist other than the two mentioned, but the 99+% are products of empire-building societies whose remnant populations now serve technoindustrial empire in its various forms with varying degrees of enthusiasm. One result of living in such a ‘human zoo’ is a loss, as the generations go by, of functional behaviors that go down the drain of the ‘behavioral sink’ that John B. Calhoun studied in his rats and mice. His research was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) as there is no reason nor evidence that humans are different in kind from other social animals, i.e. that what the mice and rats of NIMH were telling Calhoun (and anyone who can follow his studies) should be of concern to we humans of NIMH [Critical Mass Transcript].

No one likes a humans of NIHM narrative. Few would rather know than believe, and 99+% will deny that we are humans of NIHM, but Nature doesn’t care what we like or want to believe.

 

80. Why is population increase sought when it is a proven fact that over population creates havoc in every species. As competition grows the animals characteristics turn rather psychotic. could this be happening to us already?

To not offer an opinion-based answer, I will reference those who endeavor to listen to Nature. John B. Calhoun listened to what his rats and mice ‘told’ him. Science is the narrative that humans are not different in kind from any other species. We differ in terms of the complexity of our verbal behavior, but not in kind from other complex systems. Consider: Critical Mass Transcript

 

 

81. Scientists and the news media are presenting ever more evidence of climate change. Governments cannot be expected to solve this problem. It is the responsibility of individuals to change their lifestyle to prevent further damage. What are your views?

Scientists are documenting climate change, noting trends, and offering best-guess projections and scenarios for likely future change based on solar-geo-biophysical principles as understood by best-guess science. All scientists are subject to bias, which can be unconscious and unintended. Climate change has been politicized and some political animals have PhD after their name and do climate research. A few see climate change having an overall beneficial outcome, while others foresee only catastrophe and likely human extinction in ten years. In science there should be no Overton window, though political thinking normalizes bias. Public discourse is defined by political storytelling that celebrates science or vilifies it depending on whether claims support or refute one's deeply held conclusions.. In science "for" and "against" thinking is not selected for.

The media, mainstream and social, are telling stories their readers/views want to hear as judged by best-guess journalism and owners of media, and other creators of content (e.g. Quora). 'Peer reviewed' science journals tend to publish the more credible content, though nowadays impressively named journals claiming peer review (how much peers are paid varies) in relentlessly credible looking pay-to-play journals where the only barrier to publishing is how much you want to spend. I'm not a scientist nor academic, but have presented at conferences, so my name got on some lists and offers have been made to publish my 'work'. So vet you sources, which boils down to a short list which may include some not very popular sources serving those who would rather know than believe anything (e.g. scientists and evidence-based scholars who question everything), and who don't want their biases pandered to, which excludes all social media.

That there are no political solutions will be assumed. If I hold an apple out in front of me, quickly withdrawing my hand, I assume it will fall. Political ideologues, right, middle, left, or off the scale don't traffic in real solutions that might actually work.

Is calling upon individuals to change their lifestyles a potential solution for any problem that is the outcome of an unmanaged commons? Is the solution to pollution for me to choose to not consume any product whose manufacture or use involves polluting the geobiosphere? Overpopulation? I won't have any children. Climate change? I won't consume any products or services that directly (e.g. cars, trucks, buses, trains, planes) or indirectly (e.g. industrially produced/transported/processed foods) are made using fossil fuels including solar PV panels, inverters, wires, wind generators, smartphones, etc. made using fossil fuels (e.g. just about everything made using cheap, dirty coal in China/India or the most expensive purified natural gas or oil elsewhere.

As those who know me know, I could live on the streets of some cities and get everything I need by dumpster diving, without stealing a thing or even trespassing (I don't consume psychoactive substances, legal or otherwise, and have no sense of entitlement—being broke doesn't scare me). But would doing so change the trajectory of the world system?

Okay, I choose to not have offspring and to consume just enough. A lifetime of committed activism convinces 837 others to do the same. We thereby self-select out of the system, saving resources to enable others to have a quiver full by delaying Malthusian feedback loops and enabling the consumer society to last a little longer. Or, if I want to go somewhere, I'll walk, and because of my 1,742 hours of protesting, 837 others pledge to do the same. Each convinces 837 others to walk only, and soon half of all humans walk and grow their own food. This allows the other half to keep on driving a little longer. If 90 percent of humans decide to walk and eat only food they grow, then the trajectory of fossil-fueled growth and consumption of planetary resources will be slowed down, but the outcome will be the same.

Let's say that by protesting vigorously all people in all countries agree to end fossil fuel use in five years starting in 2020. All but China, which is not a democracy.

Ending all fossil fuel use except in China would slow but not alter the growth trajectory as all Chinese want to live like Americans used to before they all agreed to transition (because I sternly told as many as would listen why they had to and each then did the same until the last car was driven to a museum). To actually change the outcome of an unmanaged commons in China, boat loads of XR protesters would sail to China and march on Beijing until their demands were met. Those refusing to stay in detention centers (where no food they could not grow or water other than rainfall is provided) non-violently march into the guns and bayonets to become martyrs. The boats keep coming. Eventually the People's resolve to keep on growing the economy within the last outpost of industrial society falters. The moral high-ground wins, and all humans stop living like cancer cells.

I sail and have a sailboat. I will captain the first protest vessel and a bullet or bayonet will stop me, but not my cause. But to get all citizens of the world, with the possible exception of those within the People's Republic of China, to transition by 2025 seems unlikely. Still, I can protest unsustainable denial and distractions in the streets because I do. Walking with signs helps clarify the mind wonderfully. Will it change the trajectory of the world system? I don't know.

 

 

82. Which one is the most interesting religion of all of them, and why is that?

The teachings of Zhen on mindful science. It is based on inquiry instead of belief (including the belief in belief), which involves questioning everything, including whether the believing mind is sane. The religion of no belief is what is left over after all claims are committed to the flames of an all consuming doubt (and inquiry).

Religion: No Belief, The teachings of Zhen on mindful science

 

83. Do you think there were people who warned their fellow islanders about the forthcoming collapse of the Rapa Nui civilization if they continued with their lifestyle?

Yes. No one can know, but it is likely that some watching as the last palm tree was cut down, or even some before then, could foresee that continued ‘progress’ could not last and so asked, ‘And then what?’

As David Suzuki noted, “We're in a giant car heading towards a brick wall and everyone’s arguing over where they're going to sit.” If he, or someone like him, lived on Rapa Nui at the height of the monument building, she might have asked, 'and then what?' Unfortunately, very few humans seem to have ‘foresight intelligence’, so we keep repeating the pattern of overshoot and collapse. Consider Muzuki's Tale.

 

 

84. With birthrates going down across the world, why do we still fear overpopulation?

A best guess is that we transitioned into overshoot about 1970. By definition overshoot means descent will follow. If there is no descent in our future, then we were not in overshoot, and all those pointy-headed scientists who claim we are are like so totally wrong. If 99% of humans believe that because we’ve managed to keep on keeping on growing our population and per capita consumption for fifty years, and that that proves there is no so-called ‘overshoot’ problem and we can keep on keeping on because we’re such clever apes, well, 99% of humans can be wrong. For over 50 years we’ve been turning fossil fuel into food, cars, phones, and tons of other stuff, for a time. The Cosmic Heartbeat

Far less than 1% understand basic systems ecology and ‘everybody’ firmly believes that humans are exceptions, different in kind from all other animals. Per best-guess science, most of our deeply held beliefs are errors born of ignorance awash in a sea of illusion.

Our future could look like:

Or, in perhaps 500 years, we’ll pulse complex society again, but regionally, as a planetary larder of fossil fuel will not allow us to do so globally again.

The bigger we get, the harder we are likely to fall. Managed, rapid depopulation and degrowth of the economy would be adaptive. Unmanaged, it will be chaotic collapse as usual.

Oh, but I’m just a know-nothing from the hood, so you can believe what you want. True, but Nature doesn’t care what we believe or want, so I don’t believe anything or anyone, not even the voices in my head. I just endeavor to listen to the nature of things, because Nature has all the answers. Sustainability Issues: There is no Planet B so we need a Plan A & B

 

85. If the world had a national anthem what would it be?

My answer was collapsed by a Quora moderator as is their wont. But this time a clue was offered, which is optional. 'Answer has very poor formatting that significantly distracts from readability'. So, per google search, the first 14 copies of the lyrics to Imagine were without punctuation. But then I found one with proper formatting, and so didn't have to incorrectly punctuation the lyrics myself, but can blame it on someone else: ST. The corrected versin below was never approved.

I have access, occasionally, to the Wayforward Machine:

On November 17, 2087, the United Federation of Watersheds adopted their anthem:

Imagine

Imagine (John Lennon song) wikipeia

Imagine there's no heaven,
It's easy if you try,
No hell below us,
Above us only sky,
Imagine all the people living for today...

Imagine there's no countries,
It isn't hard to do,
Nothing to kill or die for,
And no religion too,
Imagine all the people living life in peace...

You may say I'm a dreamer,
But I'm not the only one,
I hope some day you'll join us,
And the world will be as one.

Imagine no possessions,
I wonder if you can,
No need for greed or hunger,
A brotherhood of man,
Imagine all the people sharing all the world...

You may say I'm a dreamer,
But I'm not the only one,
I hope some day you'll join us,
And the world will live as one.

— John Lennon

Imagine there's no money, why do we need to try? It's what we value. We need to wonder why. Imagine all us hu-mans living in the now...

Imagine all us hu-mans wanting just enough... Imagine one’s watershed, having enough for you. Yet leaving room for Nature and posterity too.

Imagine all the hu-mans living life in peace... No self-serving Always Cheats, Copykittens everyone. Someday we’ll live properly...we and life will be as one.

Imagine no land owners, no Takers if you can. A gifting economy where there‘s no man eat man. Imagine all the hu-mans
sharing this planet...

While maximizing empower for the betterment of all, some say we are a cancer... Will we kill all or love all?

 

---

Imagine: no other world, only sky above, people living for today, no countries, nothing to kill or die for, no belief-based religion, people living in peace, no vehement claims to possessions, no need for greed or hunger, a brotherhood of man, people sharing all the world....with other organisms. Perhaps this world should end before the world does.

 

86. Are there any modern religions that incorporate all the best parts of all traditional world religions, as well as science into their beliefs?

This answer was also banned, but without explanation or clue as to why other than 'violation of policy'. But then it came back from the grave in some mysterious way. Clearly there is a God and she is Zhen.

The teachings of Zhen on mindful science. It is based on inquiry instead of belief (including the belief in belief), which involves questioning everything, including whether the believing mind is sane. The religion of no belief is what is left over after all claims are committed to the flames of an all consuming doubt (and inquiry).

Religion: No Belief, The teachings of Zhen on mindful science

 

 

87. What is the critical mass point for the world population, and when would that occur?

We are in overshoot. Best guess as to when we went into overshoot globally is 1970. The population of humans was about 3.686 billion when we reached critical mass. Overshoot implies descent, but there are feedback delays, so we have not climaxed yet, but climax and descent likely this century.

Demographers are not population biologists or systems ecologists and have no better understanding of the sustainable carrying capacity of Earth for humans and their pets, livestock and crops that your average Uber driver or Quora pundit. So don’t believe a word I say and listen to those who maybe know enough to have an opinion. Read the transcript of Critical Mass, a 2012 documentary featuring population experts. Critical Mass Transcript.

We have been warned.

A Blueprint for Survival 1972

Limits to Growth 1972

A Planet for the Taking 1985

An Appeal for Joint Commitment in Science and Religion 1990

Elder Brothers' Warning 1990

World Scientists' Warning to Humanity 1992

Joint statement by fifty-eight of the world's scientific academies 1993

The Anthropocene: conceptual and historical perspectives 2011

Aluna: Elder Brothers' Second Warning 2012

Consensus Statement from Global Scientists 2013

World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice 2017

Worsening Worldwide Land Degradation Now ‘Critical’ 2018

Living Planet Report of 59 global scientists 2018 & overview

The State of the World's Biodiversity for Food and Agriculture 2019

Nature’s Dangerous Decline ‘Unprecedented’ (IPBES) 2019

 

88. It’s not always easy to distinguish between needs and wants. What are the effects and causes of confusing the two that could affect the quality of our lives and pose a threat to the survival of humanity and the sustainability of our ecology?

My mother was a child of the Great Depression, but her family was from the hills of West Virginia and my grandmother used odd words that turned out to be Elizabethan English. They got by. Her concluding remark on modern so-called life and human folly was often "people don't know their needs from their wants." This is the foundational critique of our unsustainable consumer society. When the next and perhaps Greater Depression from which there is no recovery comes, people like her, the few that remain, will know their needs from their wants and how to meet their needs. Today, no products of the consumer society know their needs from their wants.

An army of experts, with or without PhD after their name, have worked (and been well paid) for a century to obfuscate human needs from wants to sell products. Per one documentary the 20th century was the Century of the Self. The Century of the Amygdala

The Gods themselves gave the traditional Hopi the three things they needed: seeds, a gourd with water, and a digging stick. They already had sun, rain, and a place to stand. In the winter a robe was needed, but they managed to make those from cotton. Modern Hopi need pickups, chainsaws, propane heating, electric for smartphones, video games to play, and the long list, inclusive of most everything found in a Walmart, goes on and on multiplying our wants for a time. We consumers no longer know our wants from our needs. When the transition comes, there will be too few traditional Hopi left willing and able to teach even the few who may be willing and able to listen.

In an environment averaging 9.9 inches of rainfall a year with sandy soil, here's what you need:

And the knowledge of what to do with them. Hint, don't eat the seed corn.

 

89. Are scientists really saying that humans are bad for C02 levels in the environment and that the world population should be reduced?

Yes.

1992: World Scientists Warning to Humanity

2013 Consensus Statement from Global Scientists

2017 World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice

2018 Worsening Worldwide Land Degradation Now ‘Critical’

2018 Living Planet Report of 59 global scientists & overview

2019 The State of the World's Biodiversity for Food and Agriculture

2019 Nature’s Dangerous Decline ‘Unprecedented’ (IPBES)

And from today’s science news: World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency

 

90. Would the Earth (the planet, not the humans) benefit from a pandemic now?

As the third rock from Sol, Earth could not benefit, but assuming the pandemic kills only humans, the current Anthropocene extinction event would be mitigated. Currently there are more mammals on the planet than ever (by weight), but only 4 percent by biomass are wild mammals. Our livestock make up 60 percent, meaning humans are now 36 percent of Earth’s mammalian biomass, up from 0.00008 percent about 100,000 years ago to about 20 thousand years ago. Earth's Biomass

Did the meteor that hit Earth about 66 million years ago benefit the Earth? Not life on Earth, and if you were a passing alien and noticed the meteor, would you divert it? If you could foresee that if it hit, humans would evolve to become the last hominid standing, to then preside over a mass extinction event that could rival that of the Permian, would you have another reason to divert the meteor?

A plague could be the best thing that ever happened to humanity. If the aliens could foresee the plague and what happened as a result, they would have let the meteor strike Earth. Stand on Unguja

 

 

91. Why can’t the smart and rich people make the world population shrink along with economical shrink, because it is good for the environment?

The short answer is that what is good for the environment is irrelevant to Anthropocene enthusiasts, the 99+% of humans living in industrial society, now global. The short-term contingencies of reinforcement select for outcome. The rich, who may have inherited money or who are clever apes and made money, are empowered only insofar as they seek short-term self interests. They can’t do otherwise. Individuals can. A billionaire could give everything away and become a monk or homeless guy. They would merely be replaced. The system, the ‘rules of the game’, select for outcome.

[There was one comment which offered: 'The best solution would be for all the people who are dumb enough to think that the Earth is overpopulated to look at satellite photos of China and India over the past 30 years. ' I had already looked at it.]

Oh, and I’m an agronomist and the reason for the greening of India and China is the same as it was in North America: they are turning fossil fuel into food. They are pumping aquifers and rivers down, for a time, to irrigate vast areas that can only be farmed using industrial farming inputs to increase food production. About 90 percent of industrially produced food is in effect made of fossil fuel.

For over 200 years we’ve been doing this, and the rate of food production has kept pace with population growth. But as Norman Borlaug knew, his Green Revolution was merely buying humanity a bit of time. Industrial agriculture is unsustainable. You do the math.

As seen by NASA, the world is getting greener due to expansion of silviculture and intensive agriculture. China and India—the world’s most populous countries—are leading the increase in greening on land. The greening is anthropogenic, due to fossil-fueled industrial agriculture. Global green leaf area has increased by 5 percent since the early 2000s [arid land when irrigated turns green until ground water is exhausted or there is no fuel for pumping], an area equivalent to all of the Amazon rainforests. One-third of Earth’s vegetated lands are greening, while only 5 percent are growing browner. Anthropocene enthusiasts and ecomodernists, like me, rejoice.

China’s outsized contribution to the global greening trend comes from its programs to conserve and expand forests [aka tree farms] to produce future wood products (and incidentally reduce the effects of soil erosion, air pollution, and climate change) as well as intensification of irrigated agriculture in order to feed their large populations [for a time] using multiple cropping practices that have increased food production 35 to 40 percent since 2000 by turning fossil fuel into food to grow the economy.

One interpretation of the data: “Once people realize there is a problem, they tend to fix it... Humans are incredibly resilient.That’s what we see in the satellite data.” Humans are fixing the world! Data needs to be interpreted, however. The interpretation is provided by the journal Nature Sustainability (pay-walled article, Feb. 2019, in pay-to-play journal launched Jan. 2018), and is one interpretation (reviewed on NASA Earth Observatory). Caveat emptor.

Bottom line reality check: The global economy is not (nor the population it supports) remotely sustainable. Believe what you want, or study science and listen to Nature. Question everything.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." —Richard Feynman

 

92. Is the sheer size of the world population now becoming unsustainable?

The current growth dynamic is not ‘sustainable’ and hasn’t been for longer than any Anthropocene enthusiast can imagine, no matter which of over 300 definitions of ‘sustainable’ you prefer, as humans don’t get to determine what is sustainable. Demystifying Sustainability, A review

1. Pre-agriculture human population: 5 million.
2. Maximum human population of hunter-gatherer-gardeners that would not have decreased biodiversity: 7-10 million (but anthropogenic species extinction well under way now—only 4% of mammalian biomass is wild).
3. Maximum human population, with low-intensity crop/animal agriculture, that would not degrade the planetary biosphere/life-support system: 35 million.
4. Maximum sustainable human population, with humans serving as agents of the Earth by working to mitigate their effect on life on Earth: 42 million.
5. Maximum human population supported by hydroelectric power living in technoindustrial society: 0-50 million.
6. Maximum human population able to live as Earth Agents and in hydroelectric powered cities: 42-92 million.
7. Maximum human population obtainable, for a time, by turning fossil fuels into food: 8,000-10,000 million.

See: Carrying Capacity and Overshoot for references.

 

 

93. What is the typical shape of a population growth curve? How can the biotic potential be represented in the same way graphically?

This image was used by William Rees, human ecologist famous for the human footprint metric. Yes, the Climate Crisis May Wipe out Six Billion People | The Tyee

So normal is the pulsing paradigm, that varies below the limits of carrying capacity which changes. But sometimes conditions exist for growth: a yeast cell falls into a vat of grape juice… or humans tap into a planetary larder of fossil fuels. This allows for exponential growth, for a time, as Al Bartlett masterfully explores in his lecture Arithmetic, Population, and Energy: Sustainability 101 he gave 1,742 times, for free, before he died in 2013. Sustainability 101

 

94. What is Esther Boserup’s theory of population growth?

I’m an agronomist by training but had never heard of Boserup’s theory, but then it is not science-based. I looked into it and used a quote of her’s that I agree with, if nothing else. So thanks for the question, I’ll share what I wrote:

'Somebody should have the courage not to specialise and to look at how one can bring things together. That is what I have tried to do.' —Ester Børgesen, conventional economist and anti-neo-Malthusian who argued that population growth is independent of food supply and received three honorary doctorates for telling the intelligentsia what they wanted to hear. She grouped land use into five types in order of increasing intensity: (1) forest-fallow or swidden (15-25 years of fallow), low intensity agriculture or gardening, (2) bush-fallow (6-10 years, (3) short-fallow (1-2 years), (4) annual cropping (for a few months), and (5) multi-cropping (no fallow) meaning (climate permitting) continuous mono-cropping, i.e. industrial agriculture.

The assumption is that all of the above are sustainable. For whatever population humans 'choose', agricultural production will adjust to supply needed or wanted food. This is still the view of ecomodernists/Anthropocene enthusiasts, the 99+%, with biophysical eyes wide shut. There is evidence (1+ million years) that human hunter-gatherers can live sustainably without degrading the environmental productivity they depend on provided their technology limits their ability to prosper.

About 30,000 years ago spear and atlatl (force multiplier) technology, climaxing with the Clovis point spear and North and South American Paleoindian prosperity (for a time during mega-fauna extinction), enabled overshoot and descent. The smaller Folsom points worked for remnant buffalo/deer sized fauna that neither it nor bow and arrow tech was able to exterminate, so a predator-prey balance could develop.

Agriculture is also an energy maximizer and so is selected for. Empire-building leads to great prosperity, if not for all of the peasants, serfs, slaves, or wage earners that maximize agricultural production (unsustainably, i.e. 2-5 above as 1 does not support empire-building). Fossil fuels merely provide today's average human (500 billion slave-equivalents/4 billion wage earners=) 125 energy slaves serving them, meaning today's elites (e.g. Walmart shoppers) have vastly more than 125 energy slaves serving them. For a time, so maybe we should free the slaves: empire serving wage-slaves and energy slaves. Maybe we should 'seek out the condition now that will come anyway'. [Howard T. Odum]. And I have a plan for rapid depopulation and to end wage slavery.... Never mind, just kidding, let's protest in the streets of the city and tell government what they and other elites must do to save the world.

If the 'rules of the game' prevent empire-building (as in a functioning complex organism the body prevents cells from pursuing short-term self-serving metastatic grow to maximize empower which is selected against long-term as it destroys/degrades the host/environment), then the Earth may come to 'have a human on the planet that really does understand it and can live with it properly. That's the source of my optimism.' [James Lovelock].

The endeavor to 'bring things together' can have multiple outcomes, and courage alone is not enough. Having the courage of one's convictions (beliefs) may be the enabler of the human predicament and the preventer of any real solutions.

 

95. Why do declining fertility rates concern people so much?

Just so you know that concerns vary.

Some are concerned that the fertility rate is not continuing to increase and hasn’t been much since the post. WWII baby boom. Growth is good and more is better (subjectively viewed), so in the best of all possible worlds ‘progress’ implies the rate should have kept growing, if only slowing, forever.

At worst it would level off and perhaps fluctuate slightly between 4.5 and 5.0. That it hasn’t seems (subjectively) ‘unnatural’ to the ‘old school’ humans who view families of five or more as benefactors of mankind. When childhood mortality (and death of women in child birth) was high, having ‘many’ children was adaptive, normal, and praise worthy.

Large populations serve their chiefdom, city-state, nation-state, or empire-builder by providing grist for the factories to produce and warriors to go forth to conquer, so for the last 11,000 years priests, chiefs, kings, aristocrats, dictators, bureaucrats, tyrants, presidents, and captains of industry have viewed more citizens as a needed resource to build empire and grow the economy.

So declining birth rates are of concern to all traditionalists, and to most modernists especially when it falls below a ‘replacement rate’ of about 2.1 assuming current death rates. BBC: ‘Remarkable' decline in fertility rates

The intelligentsia of industrial society are partially science literate, commonly innumerate, and cluelessly unaware of being inecolate [systems science illiterate]. [e.g. on May 16/17 2018, the media was abuzz with 'news' that federal officials at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reported the extension of a 'deep' decline in US birth rate that 'began' in 2008 with the 'Great Recession'. The only population related problem that can be envisioned is the failure of millennials to have enough babies to ensure economic growth without increasing immigration. The word 'plummeting' is favored, and hundreds in the media, mainstream and social, reported on this dire issue of concern (google it). Zero note that the drop is part of an ongoing US trend since 1971, is insignificant, and not nearly plummeting enough to matter as the total US population growth rate is +0.7 percent despite the below replacement birth rate, which would double US population in 100 years IF GROWTH COULD BE MAINTAINED. So zero grasp of the human predicament, hence the ‘news’ is, as usual, literate by wordsmithery standards in terms of telling people what they want to hear using words they like to hear, but largely innumerate, and utterly inecolate. Virtually all who 'inform' are university educated and are as inecolate as are they who read their prattle.]

So those who can think about fertility rate decline ‘objectively’ [Carrying Capacity and Overshoot] realize that the fertility rates have not been nearly ‘plummeting’ enough. To avoid hitting the wall of biophysical limits. The birth rate would have had to actually been plummeting into the negative range since 1971 to achieve rapid depopulation of humans, their animal mutualists, and thereby stop and then reduce the spread of cropping and industrial sprawl.

Another ‘objective’ concern is that humans cannot live sustainably in complex society for more than a dozen or so generations without such loss of functional behaviors that they can no longer reproduce successfully. Successfully raising offspring that are as functional or more so that their parents is a type of progress known as evolution. When removed from any semblance of a normal environment, rats and mice (and other eusocial species like humans as ‘superorganism’) put into an environment that provides everything they need except infinite space, become increasingly dysfunctional and undergo a demographic transition that leads to their extinction. This should be of concern to we humans of NIMH.

The drop in fertility rate below replacement level occurred between the 8th and 9th generation of the mice of NIMH. We humans of NIMH are not mice. But we are about 8 to 9 generations into the Industrial Revolution that conquered the world, that started in the Euro region and is climaxing in the Sino region. Critical Mass Transcript

Well over 99% of people living in industrial society, now global, view the decline in birth rates subjectively as a ‘bad’ thing, or at least maybe a bad thing, which in terms of short-term self interest it is. Calhoun’s behavioral sink is also cause for concern. Over 99% of us are ‘Anthropocene enthusiasts’ [E.O. Wilson], who view the world with biophysical eyes wide shut. Those who would rather know than believe view futurity differently.

M. King Hubbert predicted the first US oil peak but not the fracking boom currently empowering the US economy, which will peak ‘soon’ or maybe ‘years from now’ which doesn’t seem ‘soon’ to many (so why worry?), as few humans can think beyond the next pay check or quarter’s profits.

We are living in the fossil-fueled pulse unto overshoot. It won’t happen again.

The essence of thinking in systems, of ‘ecolacy’, is to always ask, ‘And then what?’

Open Letter to Greta Thunberg & XR

But what, me worry?

I want what them flies are eating:
7.7 billion people can’t be wrong.

 

 

96. Is the world’s current population sustainable?

I’m an agronomist, but only by training as I’ve never used my degrees. I had sought to become an agricultural expert so I could go overseas or lands from the USA to bring the blessings of the Green Revolution to humanity. Six years later, with BS degrees in crop and soil science, with ‘highest honors’, I was more or less the expert I intended to be, but I realized, based largely on self-directed study in systems ecology, that the rapid agricultural development of the world was not remotely sustainable. I used my senior seminar in crop science to share information offered by systems and human ecologists that, as I interpreted and still do, explains why industrial agriculture, a production system for turning fossil fuels into food, is not merely unsustainable, but the conversion of vast areas of land and sea into food production for livestock, pets, and humans was the main driver of species extinction and degradation of the biosphere (aka life-support system of spaceship Earth). None of my fellow students nor any of the professors (circa 1980) liked hearing what I had to offer, so my concerns were ignored, but that doesn’t mean they were wrong then or now.

To teach traditional farmers how to double or triple or even increase their productivity ten fold, FOR A TIME, would greatly benefit them and I would likely come to retire to live in luxury amid abundant social approbation, my life’s work celebrated for serving as a benefactor to mankind. But then what?

Obviously I can’t answer at book length here. Let’s say that 99+% of us humans are ‘Anthropocene enthusiasts’ as E.O. Wilson refers to those who ‘would rather believe than know’.

In 1949 Aldo Leopold noted that the penalty ‘of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen.’ And the damage inflicted on the sea, ditto. To be a systems ecologist in 2019 is to live alone in a biophysical world that is in the ICU with multiple system failures.

For students or ‘laymen’ what can I offer? Nothing anyone, including myself, wants to hear. But I have dabbled in what could be read as entertaining fiction. The most entertaining and least challenging would be: The Time Traveler's Tale , so enjoy.

Some may know of or have read ‘Stand on Zanzibar’, and I can offer: Stand on Unguja , but expect to be challenged.

A more recent note, no fiction, just some science straight up and black: Carrying Capacity and Overshoot

But if you’d rather believe than know, don’t waste your time reading stupid stuff from ignorant know-nothings, like me, who just don’t get it. Just believe what you want.

 

 

97. What happened to the scientific debate from the 1960s that claimed over-population would end humanity in the 21st century?

I didn't answer this question ther than to link to Catton's Overshoot book, but the answers offered are of more interest. So try click here and read the answers.

 

 

98. Will we as a species ever live peacefully without destroying one another and the world we live in?

We mostly have been living in conflict with Nature and one another for the last 11 thousand years. Complex societies select for hierarchy and empire-building. Consider thinking about the Past Lives of Humans .

Is it possible for humans to learn from past failures (collapses of complex society)? The Muisca of South America may have lived the peaceful life by supporting only a defensive military and living in harmony with the natural world. But they were exterminated by Spanish genocide (1537–1540). Muisca - Wikipedia

But they likely learned how to live properly with the planet from the older Tairona civilization. Tairona - Wikipedia  Some Taironans survived the Tairona genocide of 1600–1650, with culture intact, as the Kogi in an isolated area in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta as: Remnant survivors of the Spanish conquest

They are the only complex society, well above tribal or chiefdom level, to have not been ‘assimilated’ into the globalized growth culture we are all products of. Could we learn from these people? No team of our best systems and human ecologists have gone to them to find out. This is a potentially incalculable loss.

We can learn about real solutions from these people . Or we can continue to fail to consider The Elder Brothers' Warning  they offered in 1990. We didn’t listen. They tried again in 2011: There is no life without thought . Perhaps we should listen to these people who listen to Nature, aka Aluna.

 

99. Will the world population be stabilized at 10 billion as the United Nations predicts?

That the population will climax is a given. That it will naturally transition to 9–13 billion and maybe stabilize and maybe go down a bit, then up a bit as the millennia pass and thereby iterate towards some population that humans still living on Earth decide is enough is as imagined by Anthropocene enthusiasts.