THURSDAY, DEC 28, 2019: NOTE TO FILE

Quora Q&A 3

More info offered

Eric Lee, A-SOCIATED PRESS

TOPICS: QUESTION EVERYTHING, FROM THE WIRES, TENATIVE ANWSERS

Abstract: So another fifty pretend answers offered. Few comments and no corrections offered, so I only learned from such research as I did for each answer. The number of views is of unknown meaning. The number of upvotes may be interpreted to mean at least that many peple read the answer.

COOS BAY (A-P) — So answers starting with 101 follow, and may be of interest to someone someday. Answers are not mine. I reference sources. If the source, the data, is correct and the interpretation is valid, then Nature answers the question. As 'people would rater believe than know', answers that few or none Like or Share will be ignored, obfuscated, denied, and if necessary the messenger will be vilified, demonized, or killed. But 'my' answers are ignored, so I'm in no danger.

 

 

Questions:

101. How can agriculture meet the world's growing need for food while doing less environmental harm?
102. How many people can be on earth before earth is considered to be overpopulated?
103. How can we stop the destruction of the Earth via overpopulation, climate change, and the possibility of nuclear warfare?
104. What's one way we can make this world a safer place for all beings?
105. As a communist, why do you think the USSR fell apart?
106 What does the best possible future for humanity look like and how will we achieve it?
107 Why should humanity avoid living in major cities?
108 Could a worldwide collapse of civilization occur? What could bring about it?
109. If all the commercial food sources in the world vanished, would there be enough animals to hunt to feed the entire human population?
110. How many people can the Earth sustain realistically?
111. What is the most meaningful question to ask that will benefit mankind at present and set the foundation for the future generation?
112. Can you think of some conception that about 3/4 of the people in the world are actually wrong about?
113. Could what happened to the Indus Valley Civilization happen to us?
114. What keeps the majority of people in a society cooperating with the people who hold a majority of the wealth at the top?
115. If humans are just a destructive cancer on the planet, why is human life still considered precious and worth living?
116. How can agricultural systems be adapted to reduce the impact of climate change?
117. Did human civilization get any benefit of being greedy?
118. Learn from the past lives of humans... or not?
119. What are the Mpemba effects and its effects on global warming and climate change?
120. What is the difference between sustainable agriculture & modern agriculture?
121. Human civilization is about to collapse into a thousand years of barbarism, this can't be prevented. You must preserve as much knowledge in a form future civilizations will understand as you can, money and resources are unlimited. How do to do it?
122. Where did the Borg come from?
123. What do we need as humanity to understand that we have to take real care of Earth and save the environment?
124. How would the world change if everyone were only scientists and not religious?
125. Which do you think would be worse, human population increasing up to 17 billion, or dropping down to just 7000?
126. If you are tasked to give one ever lasting gift to humanity, what would that be? What is one best wish you have for the Mother Earth and all its inhabitants before you die?
127. Are science and religion compatible?
128. Is there enough food for the population to live on or is the distribution of food not fair?
129. How many acres is the world?
130: How do we solve the human population problem?
131: Do you think the planet is overpopulated at this time, and what do you consider to be a sustainable population of humans?
132: How does the world fail to hit targets to halt biodiversity collapse?
133: How do farmers help the environment?
134: ‘Environmental concerns and economic growth cannot co-exist.’ Do you agree?
135: Humans’ lives have become more complex as time has passed. And as the world grows in complexity, it becomes harder for humans to understand the world, the world’s problems, and the solutions to those problems. Is this why many people are unhappy?
136: Why is every human action in conflict with nature?
137: Do you think that limiting the human population would be better than destroying nature looking for more resources and technologies in an endless economic growth?
138: How can we make this world a perfect place for both humans and animals? I wish evil never existed in this world. I also wish wars could go away.
139: What percent of the world is not educated?
140: What is the optimal population for our planet and how could we humanely get there (for context, I recently read that there are more people than rats)?
141: Are we today, in a scientific and technological age, on the right path to solve the problems of human injustice and exploitation? Why?
142: How did humankind manage to increase the world’s population by 5 billion people in the last 100 years?
143: Can capitalism actually solve the world’s biggest problems?
144: What is the best way to save peace, humanity, and nature?
145: In your opinion, what is the biggest problem affecting the world currently?
146: Is it true or not that every human uses resources that leave a carbon footprint that contributes to global warming? If yes then isn't the best solution population reduction and why are the most obvious solutions so difficult to achieve?
147: Can a city be sustainable?
148: Are cities good or bad for the environment?
149: The population of our world rose from 1.6 billion to almost 7 billion in 120 years. How can we stop the world from becoming overpopulated ethically, and is this issue being addressed properly?
150: Who are the good people on this Earth?

 

124. How would the world change if everyone were only scientists and not religious?

How would the world change if only science literates ‘were running the show’ and not the religious [e.g. most politicians]?

This sounds like a serious question, i.e. one thought to matter as would the answer to it. I would guess it does matter and may well be viewed as hitting the existential nail on the head. Whether humans come to understand the planet and learn to live with it properly, i.e. whether humans go extinct in the near future (this millennium), could matter. That we technoindustrial urbanized humans are presiding over the greatest mass extinction event since the one that ended the Cretaceous is as evidenced by what is in front of your face. Whether the Anthropocene will result in a larger mass extinction event than the Permian (96% extinction) remains to be seen, possibly by the last woman on Earth (the female of the species, being naturally superior, is more likely to be the last).

Consider a note by James Lovelock whom some suspect may know enough to have an opinion:

'In most of the world's nations, fewer than 1 per cent of the politicians and administrators are scientifically literate. And if this were not enough to hamper understanding, most of the languages of science is fragmented into at least 100 different dialects. Scientists, even good ones, only rarely understand their colleagues of a different department. How can they possibly convey their wisdom to a politician? Far worse than this difficulty in understanding, humans inevitably, as part of their evolutionary destiny, spontaneously act collectively as gangs, lobbies, learned societies, political parties and cronies. These all have a consensus view that, even with respected groups such as the IPCC, can be far from accurate.... My hope is that we survive and evolve further to the point where we are as much a part of our living planet as our brains are of us.' —James Lovelock, A Rough Ride to the Future 2014

The quest to live a religious life (e.g. Laozi) is very different from the endeavor to espouse religious certitudes to form a tribal consensus and, in so far as possible, work tirelessly to impose them on one’s family (especially offspring), or better, universally upon all. It was not that long ago that the most magnificent edifice at Oxford University was for the theologians who served the elites well, and if anyone, student or professor, considered the possibility of begging to differ with the consensus paradigm, they did so only in the privacy of their own minds, fearing what would happen to them if they demurred.

Today it is different. You can say anything you want as long as it is what others want to hear. Otherwise We the People merely ignore claims, no matter how evidence and reason based. If forced to, the intelligentsia servants of the SYSTEM are prepared to obfuscate and deny, deny, deny. There is now an endless supply of alternative facts (for a time).

So what if only those who maybe know enough to have an opinion were attempting to run the show? Well, about 91 years ago there was a Great Depression and it was not clear that things were just going to keep on keeping on. In 1919 an informal think tank arose to consider the possibility of putting the scientists and engineers in charge of running complex societies. But the economies of industrial societies were booming in the 1920s and interest in change faded. But not so by 1931–33 when M. King Hubbert (a scientist) learned about the ideas of the Technical Alliance from 1919, and got the former members back together to reform as Technocracy Inc.

But the cause of the Great Depression was financial, merely humans shooting themselves in their own foot, as there was no biophysical basis for the collapse of the global economy.

As Hubbert later notes:

'Our ignorance is not so vast as our failure to use what we know... I was in New York in the 30’s. I had a box seat at the depression. I can assure you it was a very educational experience. We shut the country down because of monetary reasons. We had manpower and abundant raw materials. Yet we shut the country down. We’re doing the same kind of thing now but with a different material outlook. We are not in the position we were in 1929–30 with regard to the future. Then the physical system was ready to roll. This time it’s not. We are in a crisis in the evolution of human society. It’s unique to both human and geologic history... Soon all the oil is going to be burned and all the metals mined and scattered.'

 

As Hubbert notes, there are basically two cultures: the ‘monetary culture’ and the ‘matter-energy worldview’, or the political/religious complex industrial monetary culture, now global (the BAU hegemon) and the science-based worldview. That some can compartmentalize the two views is a fact those within the matter-energy worldview can understand.

In other words the next Great Depression will be followed by the Greater Depression, which will be followed by the Greatest Depression and humans will go extinct or learn to live properly with the planet. Or as Ludwig Wittgenstein put it using fewer words, ‘understand or die’. Humans are ‘free’ to do either,.

Political and/or religious leaders lack ‘foresight intelligence’ as evidenced by the last seven thousand years of history. The economy did recover in the 1930s, especially with help from the economic stimulus of WWII, which lead to a lack of interest in the Technocracy alternative (which today might be called the Naturocracy alternative).

The belief that economic growth can and will keep on keeping on without limit will falter again. This time, however, there will be biophysical limits preventing ‘full recovery’ or any return to growth as usual for any significant period of time. Business as usual will falter and some humans may consider not hitting the wall of biophysical limits full speed ahead. Some may consider transitioning to an ecolate civilization. Design for a Viable Civilization

125. Which do you think would be worse, human population increasing up to 17 billion, or dropping down to just 7000?

Humans cannot chose to increase their population to 17 billion anymore than the reindeer of St. Matthew Island could have chosen to increase their population to 17 thousand. But we, like the reindeer, can but try.

It would then depend on who the 7,000 are. Are they among the remnant population of hunter-gatherers who live apart from technoindustrialized populations as our ancestors did for hundreds of thousands of years? Are they among the small number of subsistence agriculturalists whose low productivity agroecosystems and complex societies are managed to actually be sustainable (e.g. Kogi)?

 

Or are the 7,000 among the survivalists who stockpiled the most ammo in their bug-out bunker? If they who have the most ammo are the only ones who remain, who are they most likely to repeat the pattern, is there a third option (a second viable option), zero?

 

126. If you are tasked to give one ever lasting gift to humanity, what would that be? What is one best wish you have for the Mother Earth and all its inhabitants before you die?

For both humanity and the biosphere, aka Mother Earth, I would wish that humans come to understand the world system and learn to live with it properly as we neither understand nor live properly with life on Earth as Nature determines. As a result we are presiding over the greatest mass extinction event since the late Cretaceous. Humans seem intent on competing to see if the Anthropocene will be a greater mass extinction event than the Permian (at 96%). Actually, of course, humans are merely perusing the contingencies of short-term reinforcement like rats in a Skinner box, aka industrial society, now global. Virtually all humans lack foresight intelligence and are time blind (and energy blind and posterity blind) because that is what the social system selects for.

As any systems ecologist could explain, immortality for humans, or other species, i.e. the ability to stop aging, would be deadly to the species. Life spans vary and all are just about right as what works is what Nature selects for, and is never maximized. That Nature determines what works is foundational to understanding the planet and learning to live with it properly. Nature has all the answers. Ask questions, Listen to Nature. Stop listening to the voices in your head or those coming from other heads.

The schooling system exists to produce humans who can serve the greater system, e.g. the economy and socio-political control systems. If you are paid to do something, your service helps to growth the economy, to keep things keeping on. If you were educated by other than a broken schooling system, by an educational system based on three pillars: literacy, numeracy, and ecolacy (systems science literacy), then you would understand that the now global economic system is not remotely sustainable and will select for its own failure. The resulting ongoing mass extinction event may include humans.

As for one gift, it has already been offered, Alexander Pope's "know then thyself." If we (more than some fraction of a percent) understood the dynamics of the system we are products of and serve, then the understanding would force deliverance from our state of error, ignorance, and illusion. We would endeavor to think well (realizing that we don't) and iterate towards a better understanding of the human predicament. We would collectively stand down, let go of our hubris ways, embrace not-knowing (and degrowth) and listen to Nature. But we won't as the current socio-religio-politico-economic system does not select for long-term viable outcomes. Sorry about that in advance.

But hope springs eternal and complex systems are not only more complex than we understand, but more complex that we can understand. There are leverage points and no one knows but a few of them or what unforeseeable change may come. Understanding systems could change the rules of the game and select for a different outcome. Start with Donella Meadow's Thinking in Systems: A Primer.

Nature alone has all the answers, so hu-mans stand down.

Existential Concerns: Towards real solutions for humanity and the biosphere

 

127. Are science and religion compatible?

Science is inquiry-based, not belief-based, and embraces doubt as prerequisite for inquiry. Tautological truths tell us nothing about the what’s-out-there. Science is about not knowing, but at best iterating towards knowing and understanding the cosmos. Uncertainty is normal and certitude is error (if you want certainty, to know stuff that is true by definition, stick to math or logic).

Some fine and functional minds can compartmentalize their science and belief-based religion. Having oil and water swirling in their brains works for them. The two ways of knowing, however, are incompatible in that neither needs the other. Some individuals, conditioned from childhood to believe, need to believe and should consider fideism which is compatible with evidence/reason based skeptical thinking, e.g. Martin Gardener, see The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener.

Any organized, systematized, doctrinal religion, i.e. just about any of thousands you can name, are systems of belief. Scientists with an interest in social psychology/pathology may take an interest in all, may focus on one or a few, but not as a believer.

Is all religion belief-based? It may seem so, but not all. Buddha and Laozi likely had no intention of founding an organized religion and they were clearly inquirers and not believers themselves, even though their followers are.

Fritjof Capra, in his Tao of Physics, notes that “Science does not need mysticism and mysticism does not need science. But man needs both.” He was referring to inquiry-based religion which is antithetical to what most people mean by religion, so he had to pick another word.

Is it possible to passionately inquire into the nature of things and into one’s existential condition? Yes. For a modern example, there are the teachings of Zhen on mindful science.

 

 

 

128. Is there enough food for the population to live on or is the distribution of food not fair?

I was trained to be an agronomist, but what I learned was mainly ways and means of turning fossil fuels into food. A Hopi farmer, able to grow 4 bushels of corn per acre dryland in northern Arizona, after a 20 to 50 year fallow period, wouldn't have any knowledge to offer to help a farmer today in the Corn Belt grow 200+ bushels of corn per acre every year. If I took over a Hopi farmer's field and, with little more than a digging stick, tried to grow 4 bushels of corn, I would surely fail. Is there enough food now for 7.8 billion, or soon to be 8 billion? Yes. Agriculture currently uses about 30 percent of all energy, mostly fossil fuels, and if more were diverted by, say, doubling the cost of plane tickets and gasoline for passenger cars to reduce demand, then more land could be converted in agricultural lands and yields on all agricultural lands could be increased. FOR A TIME!

 

The amount of land put into agricultural production and the yield per hectare have both dramatically increased even faster than population has increased. The current level of food production, however, is not remotely sustainable. That we are presiding over the greatest mass extinction since the late Cretaceous is due largely to the spread of agriculture. We are consuming Earth's life-support system to turn its biomass into humans, crops, pets, and domestic animals, but only for a time. The growth of human biomass and the industrial society we consumers depend on over the last three hundred years will climax and descend. When it will climax and how fast the descent will be is unknown, but that it will happen is as certain as what happens after you through a rock up into the air as hard as you can. The exact trajectory, unlike the rock's, will just be vastly more complex, too complex to predict in detail.

Source

Is the distribution of food unfair such that if it were fairly distributed no one would be hungry or malnourished? Yes, near equitable distribution of current food production could feed all humans and their pets, and then some. BUT ONLY FOR A TIME. How much more time? No one knows, but for the rest of this century? Maybe. How maybe? I'd guess that a consensus of informed guesses would be that there is less than a 1% chance of keeping the global food production system growing to meet demand until 2100.

What's the maximum population Earth could support if all environmental productivity is diverted to humans, their pets and livestock by covering as much of the planet as possible in crops, but without energy slaves doing the work (figure 80% of humans plus many animal slaves do the work) at the expense of all other life on Earth? Maybe 600 million humans, for a time,

As unthinkable as it is to at least 99.999% of the mostly overweight (70%) urbanized servants (shoppers) of industrial society today, think that for posterity to live a prosperous life of enough without whips cracking on human or animal backs, that 60 million is a better guess as to how many humans the biosphere could support without the human footprint causing species extinction and loss of biodiversity.

Will humans choose to degrow their population? No. But that doesn't mean it can't or won't happen.

 

 

129. How many acres is the world?

Humans have a special interest in how many acres in the world support them as agricultural lands, so how many arable/pastureable acres are there on this pale blue dot? If that question is implied, the current answer is about 4.9 billion hectares of agricultural land of which 1.4 billion are arable or farmable, with the rest being grazeable by domestic livestock.

Management of Agroecosystems

Forests cover 31 percent of the global land area. Approximately half the forest area is relatively intact, and more than one-third is primary forest (i.e. naturally regenerated forests of native species, where there are no visible indications of human activities and the ecological processes are not significantly disturbed).

The total forest area is 4.06 billion hectares, or approximately 5 000 sq meters per person, but forests are not equally distributed around the globe and are rapidly being converted into agricultural lands or into tree farms for industrial wood production, not food, which is not usually considered agriculture, but is as fiber production (e.g. cotton) is clearly agricultural land use. The destruction of the planet’s forests is ongoing and is and will have a ‘bad’ outcome for life on Earth including humans whose pursuit of short-term self interest is rapidly degrading the planetary life-support system.

The State of the World’s Forests 2020

 

130: How do we solve the human population problem?

For most humans, Nature will solve the human population problem and that of our pets and livestock. Ask any population biologist how.

For some humans, point out that the only alternative is for them to agree to rapid and managed depopulation by a radical birth-off to avoid a die-off. A die-off would involve a rapid depopulation to create a viable balance between human (and pet and livestock) demands and nature's resources such that environmental productivity provides the resulting population with a prosperous and sustainably viable life. If there are too many cattle on a range, or reindeer on an island (i.e. the population is in overshoot), reduce the herd size, and sooner is better.

Those who understand the remorseless dynamic we are all captured by and are a part of will vote with their feet and move to an agreed upon area to displace the existing human population peaceably by buying them out, paying top dollar (beyond the dreams of avarice if necessary) for property such that the vast majority agree to move elsewhere.

Those who agree to rapid managed depopulation to a sustainable carrying capacity are the vast majority and initially 10 times more than the carrying capacity the land can support, but long-term food storage, diverted from being converted to meat/eggs/milk/beer, provides enough to support the excess population until natural death reduces the population.

Initially only perhaps one in thirty potentially fertile women who want to have a child could give birth to a child, but in 50 years of natural attrition by old age and other to be expected death, each fertile woman, part of a much smaller population, would need to have a bit more than two, on average, to maintain a viable population. If a plague happened, the birth rate could be increased for a time.

Anyone not understanding why rapid managed depopulation, preferably without Malthusian deaths, would be a good thing would self-select out of being part of the society of enough, aka the new world order.

 

Consumers, denizens of technoindustrial society, committed to living as a plague species, would die-off as any other species in overshoot would. The adaptive ecolate people who had voted with their feet to embrace rapid degrowth of their population and per capita consumption, and who wisely use only appropriate technology, would inherit the Earth (and not the wind) as Earth Agents.

So you have two options (excluding denial): birth-off or die-off. Be sapient, choose wisely (hint: die-off is in your best short-term self interest).

---

A comment:

You are wrong.

The United Nations claims that the world population will level off at 11 billion people, the claims you made about a “plague phase” and mass die offs are based on data when child mortality was still 70%. In the modern world many developed nations are or would be losing people were it not for immigration.

The world population will not keep growing forever, the current growth is a symptom of the demographic transition and eventually we will be faced not with the question of how to undergo a die-off as I would argue you’ve fear mongered hear; but rather how to feed and sustain 11 billion people.

 

My reply:

As David Suzuki said, ‘I hope I’m wrong about everything.’ [The ‘plague phase’ graphic is from his friend and collogue William Rees, a globally well known scientist, taken from a Biology 101 textbook.] Some questions on ‘over’ population have had over a hundred answers, and I have spent hours boiling answers down and tabulating them.

Your view is a minority one as more than half of those offering answers firmly assert that ‘overpopulation’ is a myth as ‘too many’ humans is the view of misanthropic racists who want to kill Black babies (the Left leaning) or of ecofascists who don’t believe in the capitalist growth hegemon (the Right leaning).

Virtually all of the remaining answers agree that the demographic transition will pretty much take care of any regional population problems as women are empowered and educated, and patriarchy fades (i.e. no one actually has to do anything). The only foreseeable problem will be underpopulation.

 

131: Do you think the planet is overpopulated at this time, and what do you consider to be a sustainable population of humans?

There are many opinions, and that is what Quora traffics in. Credible guesses, in my view, would be those of system ecologists and their best guess tends to be in the 500 to 600 million range. But this is a maximum and assumes all environmental productivity of the planet is diverted to humans and their pets, livestock, crops, and remaining sprawl.

If you ask what is the sustainable population of humans such that their footprint does not cause species extinction nor prevents the evolution of new species to replace the ones that have already gone extinct during the Anthropocene, then a reasonable, evidenced-based best guess would be about 35 million. And 99.9% of Anthropocene enthusiasts believe billions more than live now can be sustainably supported. But Nature doesn’t care what humans or any species may believe. Carrying Capacity and Overshoot

 

 

132: How does the world fail to hit targets to halt biodiversity collapse?

A slide from a presentation by Garvin Boyle contains one answer to your question.

We don’t understand it yet, not enough to be delivered from it, nor for life on Earth to be delivered from us.

Note to file

 

 

133: How do farmers help the environment?

“Agriculture is the largest contributor to biodiversity loss with expanding impacts due to changing consumption patterns and growing populations. Agriculture destroys biodiversity by converting natural habitats to intensely managed systems and by releasing pollutants, including greenhouses gases.”

Agriculture and biodiversity: a review.

This is not an extraordinary claim, but a consensus view of scientists who know enough to have an opinion. So short answer is that industrial agriculture is of no ‘help’ and low-intensity gardening using only human power and no fossil fuel inputs, direct or indirect, at best does not harm the biosphere other than by replacing parts of ecosystems with agroecosystems that serve humans assuming the area put under the human foot is limited enough to prevent loss of species diversity.

To not have a significant impact on biodiversity, a human population of forager-farmers of 35 million globally may be viable. Carrying Capacity and Overshoot

Of course, 100 percent of Anthropocene enthusiasts disagree. But Nature doesn’t care what we think, like or dislike, or want to believe.

 

134: ‘Environmental concerns and economic growth cannot co-exist.’ Do you agree?

Growth within a ‘pulsing paradigm’ is natural and normal in Nature.

Pulsing into overshoot is common and for some species it is their norm, e.g. yeast and locusts, but yeast sporulation and thrive. Humans will not.

Or when there is enough environmental productivity to exploit we’ll do the empire-building thing we’ve been doing for thousands of years with the same outcome as usual.

And where is that latte I ordered?

There will not be another ‘Hubbert’s pimple’. Carrying Capacity and Overshoot

 

135: Humans’ lives have become more complex as time has passed. And as the world grows in complexity, it becomes harder for humans to understand the world, the world’s problems, and the solutions to those problems. Is this why many people are unhappy?

Connecting increasing unhappiness/dysfunction, individual and societal, with increasing complexity is to inquire in the right direction, is to bark up a better tree than most. I answer only because the other answers are so lame as to fail to recognize a fair question when they trip over it.

To begin somewhere, our ancestors lived in groups of 5–85, 20–50 commonly, for half a million years. There were occasional dysfunctional individuals, but basically you could trust everyone with your life and did. Every day you had a life-driven purpose to get up and feed yourself and others. There was times of scarcity, but most days were not stressful and all had enough. There was time to love and learn. There was occasional conflicts with other bands, especially during hard times, but yelling and throwing things was usually enough, and no one died. You had enough, as much stuff as you cared to carry.

With agriculture in the epipaleolithic cameregionally widespread fixed settlements and increasing complexity. Social dyad numbers, a measure of complexity, increased by orders of magnitude. Hierarchy arose, elites ruled commoners, and warriors helped to grow empire. Thousands of chiefdoms arose and fell as the pattern was unsustainable, i.e. none persisted as the millennia passed. Hundreds of state level empires have come and gone, blazed into the glory that was Greece, the grandeur that was Rome. All fell, collapsed, or faded away. See Joseph Tainter’s Collapse of Complex Societies and Jared Diamond’s study of Collapse.

For the first time we are climaxing empire on a global scale. What happened to the Indus Valley Civilization, in terms of detail, will no doubt be completely different. But outcome could be the same.

The work of John B. Calhoun concerns what happens to eusocial species when population density far exceeds their Dunbar number. He observed that with each generation dysfunctional behaviors increase, his ‘behavioral sink’ of over-density living. Currently most humans live in cities and there are 47 megacities with populations of over 10 million. In the 20th century urbanites, when polled, said there were many 2–3 others they could trust with their money or their wife. In the 21st century the average is less than 1. Most live purpose-driven lives like rats in a Skinner box. Addictiion rates are soaring and per WHO a quarter have or will have a form of mental illness. Calhoun’s rats and mice didn’t have drugs to do. We are reaching Critical Mass.

 

 

 

136: Why is every human action in conflict with nature?

Pissing into the wind is not in conflict with nature. Nature doesn’t care. Building empire and seeking to conquer all (including other humans) who get in our way has a short-term pay-off, but never works long-term. We are in conflict with nature when what we do is selected against because it does not work. Nature, the nature of things, alone ‘decides’ what works and doesn’t work. We can listen or not. If we overshoot the carrying capacity of Earth’s life-support system, we will know because of the negative feedback loops, including plague that high mobility and population density select for, among other things. Our hubris ways can and will be corrected. If there are too many reindeer on an island (e.g. St. Matthew Island), their population will be corrected. A damaged nature survived. The reindeer did not. Are humans smarter than yeast or reindeer? To answer your question: Because we don’t listen to Nature who has all the answers.

Understanding the Exponential Function

 

137: Do you think that limiting the human population would be better than destroying nature looking for more resources and technologies in an endless economic growth?

Short answer, yes. As for why, humans seem to be educated to not understand why. Start with this David Suzuki quote, ‘In my opinion, no more destructive belief exists than that we have escaped the constraints imposed by nature on all other species.’ Is David Suzuki a know-nothing who just doesn’t get it? You decide.

Humans, as all Anthropocene enthusiasts know, have decoupled, by his creativity and hubris, from nature. The earth was once viewed as an illimitable plane for the taking, and humans have spent the last 10K years taking it. To do the job right, it took fossil fuels. ‘And then what?’

We are likely to find out this century. In 1944, 29 reindeer were introduced to St. Matthew Island. In 1957 there were 1,350 rather fat reindeer. In 1963 the population reached about 6,000. Imagine you are a wildlife biologist who, in 1950, was assigned to manage St. Mattew Island. You are told the reindeer were put on the island to serve as an emergency food for army personnel at a radar site. They are long gone and there are no humans on the island to check the population growth. You consider importing wolves to keep the population in check, but there are no funds for the project. You foresee the outcome and in 1965 you note that there are 42 reindeer who survived the die-off. In 1966 reindeer are extinct on the island. Any Biology 101 student should be able to guess, to explain in general what happened even though no one could have predicted in 1950 that the population would climax in 1964 and that die-off would bottom out at zero.

Now imagine you are not human. You are a reindeer and in 1963 you redouble your effort to share your concerns with the other reindeer. You had been trying to explain the nature of things to them for thirteen years. But they look around and see an island full of reindeer, so why worry? Look around. You live on a planet teeming with humans. Why worry? ‘Enjoy life while you can’ [James Lovelock].

 

 

138: How can we make this world a perfect place for both humans and animals? I wish evil never existed in this world. I also wish wars could go away.

This could be a real question, not yet another lure cast out to fish for titillating answers. Who doesn’t wish war and harm to humans, animals, and Earth’s life-support system could go away? Modern humans seem to little know that they are living as pathogens on a world they are entirely products of, like all other lifeforms, such that there could be no more perfect place for them to live by continuing to evolve. We cannot make the world perfect, but we could cease to live like pathogens on it. No biophysical laws of the universe would be violated if we learned to understand the planet and came to live properly with it as our ancestors, until recently, did for eons.

If the learned protest that we do not live in the best of all possible worlds, we should then ask if the obvious is because the world is imperfect or is it we who are living badly on it? Perhaps the problem of Utopia is the lack of Utopians to live in it. All other life on Earth live and thereby persist. We sleep.

So to answer: Know then thyself. Think of ‘evil’ as ‘to miss the mark’, to hit what you should not be aiming for. We aim to decouple from Nature, to be different in kind, to rule all we survey, to be exceptional, supreme and to live in our supremacy forever. We believe that the laws of Nature, that apply to all other life on Earth, do not apply to us. We swim in a belief-based sea of error, ignorance, and illusion of our own making which could be unmade by not believing in belief.

Nature doesn’t care what you believe, so why should you? To understand the pathology of belief is to be delivered from it. Do not believe in Nature. Any concept you may form of life, the universe and everything is a concept, a model, a belief, a social construct that is not the What-is, the what is out there apart from our concepts of it. A climate model is not the climate. To create an imperfect model of Earth’s climate one must listen to the nature of things. To think is to listen. Consider data. Ask questions, question everything. There are no true stories. At best we can iterate towards truer stories by listening to Nature who has all the answers.

“The mind clings to its image of the world. We call it real only because of our Ignorance. Do not seek after the truth, merely cease to cherish your opinions.” Loose interest in the voices in your head and the prattle of others. Listen to the still small whispers of the What-is.

 

 

139: What percent of the world is not educated?

Not being educated, I have to wonder—what would an educated human look like? I’m pretty sure 100% of all corvids are educated, but I’m not so sure about humans. I wouldn’t know an educated person if I tripped over them, so what would those who might be educated have to say?

“Education: that which reveals to the wise, and conceals from the stupid, the vast limits of their knowledge.... 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 [sapient, educated], the more he distrusted everything he knew.” — Voltaire

“Knowing that you do not know is the best. Not knowing that you do not know is an illness.... True words are not pleasing. Pleasing words are not true. Those who are right do not argue. Those who argue are not right. Those who know are not learned. Those who are learned [educated] do not know.” — Lao Tzu

“Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language.” — Ludwig Wittgenstein

I’m guessing the bewitched are neither intelligent nor educated, so I’m obviously not educated (merely schooled).

I was schooled, but the schooling system failed to mention that we consumers, we products of an industrial society that is not remotely sustainable (they don't teach that either), that we who spend hours a day looking a screens…. “don’t know shit from apple butter.” But my mother, a product of the hills of Appalachia, did. But she is dead, which makes the number smaller. I have an advanced degree in computational socio-biometrics, but, sorry, I can’t calculate what percentage of us are not educated (to the nearest order of magnitude).

 

 

140: What is the optimal population for our planet and how could we humanely get there (for context, I recently read that there are more people than rats)?

Before the Neolithic (agriculture), Earth supported less than 10 million humans. With forced labor, especially in agriculture (e.g. slavery, serfdom), the Earth might be able to support 500–600 million, for a time, without fossil fuel inputs, but maximizing food production by diverting as much of the planet’s environmental productivity to humans and their crops, livestock, and pets would not be optimal for life on Earth, including for humans.

The optimal population for humans would involve a human/crop/livestock/pet footprint that did not cause species extinction, i.e. loss of biodiversity. We exceeded optimal about 3–4 thousand years ago and are presently causing a 100 to 1,000 times greater species extinction rate than prior to human dominion with the raise of empire building. We went into absolute overshoot about 1970, but we went into unsustainable empire building and regional overshoot millennia ago.

Those who think that 500 million humans could be supported using forced human and animal labor are thinking maximum. Optimal would be in the 10–50 million range. See: Carrying Capacity and Overshoot

And as for how to get there, there is the die-off and birth-off options. The humane way would be to determine the carrying capacity of an area (humans don’t get a vote). To sustain that population, each birth would replace each expected death within the optimal population, not the existing population. Initially few could have children, perhaps one in several hundred fertile women, but within one lifetime women would need to have about 2.1 children on average. The rapid depopulation would be by natural death, not by starvation or conflict. If, before there are no more fossil fuel inputs, grain and dry goods food production were diverted from animal feed production and stored anoxically, no one would die of starvation during the birth-off period of 50–70 years. Alternatively, we keep on keeping on until we can’t, resulting in a scarcity induced die-off which will be far less humane as usual.

 

 

141: Are we today, in a scientific and technological age, on the right path to solve the problems of human injustice and exploitation? Why?

The rich (two families on left) and the many not as rich on right whose lifestyles the rural 'poor' (subsistence farmers who rarely buy food and may make $1/day) hope to enjoy someday [in Tanzania, a presidential democratic republic, multi-party system with an independent Judiciary].

The image above comes from an article, Inequality, Poverty, and Injustice, and the following lengthy comments were occasioned by considering a possible error in interpretation:

'Most of us have played the popular game Monopoly, where players compete to gain control of all the money and property. Each player starts with the same amount of money from which to buy property and build homes or hotels. Players move around a game board by the a roll of the dice. Thus, there is an element of skill (players must choose when to buy or trade property, when to build houses or hotels) and an element of chance (the roll of the dice). The game ends when one player has successfully ‘monopolized’ (owns) all the money and property.

In the game of Monopoly the playing field is equal, every player starts the game with the same amount of money. Every player has the same opportunity to roll the dice and advance (unless they go to jail). Every player follows the same set of rules. Imagine instead if one person started the game with a hundred times more money than the other players?...'

To skip to the end, to answer your question, no. We are living in a monetary culture, now globalized, and science and technology is valued ‘for the milk and cheese and profit it brings’ (as Eckhart said of God). M. King Hubbert was a scientist who clearly saw the way of things. The ‘matter energy systems worldview’ is far from mainstream and its narrative of humans on a pale blue dot is incompatible with the humancentricism of the default BAU culture [see The Solutionatique]. And solutions will not be based on the short-term self interests of the monetary culture, nor upon reductionist silo science. The ‘better view’ of Hubbert is systems science, thinking in systems, which allows for the possibility of understanding the system dynamic we are captured by and could maybe thereby be delivered from.

When we see 'the great divide' such as imaged above, when we see such disparity in wealth, most humans think immediately of sinful and immoral personal characteristics such as greed, avarice, selfishness, or insensitivity to the plight of others. We want to remove the privilege from the wealthy and boost the privilege of those disenfranchised from power and wealth. We want to lay blame and punish malefactors. These are 'good' moral judgments – 'good' motives, or were among our hunter-gatherer ancestors.

Is the solution to unrig the game such that everyone has a fair and equitable start? Otherwise people might not want to play the game with enthusiasm. If perfect justice and equality were achieved for all 18-year-olds, if everyone enjoyed playing the game of growth and exploitation for its own sake, of pursuing short-term self interest, then surely we would be living in the best of all possible worlds. But what if 'the game' we are all playing and have been since empire-building started 6-11K years ago, is rigged as are other games, such as Monopoly and chess. There is one winner, and then it is GAME OVER for them too. In the game of life, for a species, GAME OVER means extinction. What if the only way to win the dissipative structure game is to not play it?

In the small world that we used to inhabit not 100 years ago, taking action on such morally responsible thoughts did not occur to prevent the BAU world we live in. Would ethically motivated actions have saved humanity from today's predicament? And, what is the best response now? What would have been the best response 100 years ago? Things have changed rapidly, and are still changing rapidly. Do we have the sapience now that we did not have 100 years ago? Has 100 years of history sharpened our wits? We need to better understand what is happening! Perhaps we can find some wisdom in the examination of a board game.

But, let’s start at the beginning. Good or bad? From what point of view? The point of view of the wealthy, of the poor, of posterity living 100 years later, or of Nature? Is Nature the forgotten player in this panorama? What morally acceptable solution would leave more room for Nature and also give us more equality?

Let’s try to think of egality from the point of view of a systems scientist. If per capita consumption had been virtually and consistently equal across the entire population (0.8-1.2 range, 1=enough), the entire picture might look more like the right side with maybe a few more trees and slightly bigger backyards. The population could and likely would have grown faster (doubling per capita prosperity would likely lower death rate) assuming economic growth and production was the same. Eventually the land would fill up, and we are back to subsistence living in an unsustainable situation. So, equality of access to wealth would not offer much hope for the long term. It would not be enough of a change to BAU to be sustainable.

Assume one person on left for every hundred on right and each person on left earns $1K/day in income. They consume a hundred times more stuff/energy (other than food and other self-limited consumption, e.g. hair-dryers per person) than those on the right (earning $10/day in income). Eliminate all those on the left and redistribute their stuff/income. Those on the right could double their consumption, but only for a time as the SYSTEM (socio-economic control system) would collapse sooner. Increased consumption and reduced production from the lack of services provided by the elites would cause the economic/socio-political system to fail sooner. And then what?

If those on the right could buy more cars, TVs, washing machines—doubling their energy use, then what? Under the current system, in which the economy is growing, both sides can get richer, so there can be co-existence and persistence, for a time, of a global growth system that is not remotely sustainable (that growth will surely continue is belief-based).

Oh, wait, that is what they did 100 years ago and what we are still trying to do. With scarcity induced conflict and breakdown of social control and service subsystems, those on the right could kill those on the left, loot their stuff, cut the trees for cooking fuel and ultimately collapse the economy they depend on. And then what?

For a 'sustainable' community, envision a human biology friendly village size of perhaps 20-50 forager-gardeners living prosperously on local environmental resources provided by an area much larger (maybe 100 ha per forager-gardener) than pictured (about 2.7 ha shown), and only after depopulation and environmental restoration.

Per capita consumption of industrial products would be much less or even zero. At least two things are needed to make this vision sustainable. There must be room for Nature. And, there must be a limit on the number of people inversely proportional to consumption.

Lord Man becomes our future's past. All would spend most of their day having face-time with loved ones they trusted with their lives while working together, perhaps four hours a day, to support their lifestyles free from the very long list of pathologies associated with modern 'civilization', These would include acne, Alzheimer's, arthritis, atherosclerosis, asthma, some cancers (e.g. lung, breast, and colorectal cancer), carpal-tunnel syndrome, chronic liver disease/cirrhosis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, colitis, irritable bowel syndrome, malnutrition, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, metabolic syndrome, chronic kidney failure, osteoporosis, PCOD, diverticulitis, gallstones, rickets, dental caries, stroke, depression, OCD, suicide, chronic stress, addiction/anxiety/bipolar/personality/psychotic/eating disorders, substance abuse, obesity, ideology, and vascular dementia.

But, how can we establish this eutopian goal, when we have failed time and again in the past? We must understand why we have failed. There may be some hint in a common board game. In the board game of Monopoly everyone starts out in a state of perfect equality and the rules apply to each with perfect fairness and justice for all. No one starts with more money nor can anyone print Get Out of Jail Free cards at will.

Nevertheless, the game is rigged. It really does not matter who owns what at any given time. It is the rules of the game that select for the inevitable outcome: Eventually one player gets it all and then GAME OVER, including for the 'winner'. We are playing (badly) a game on a global board – a game for which the rules are rigged. If the ultimate outcome is not what we intend, then we must stop playing the game.

The current national and global systems define the 'rules of the game' and working tirelessly for more equality and justice is a distraction – a morally necessary but ultimately a futile distraction. The political, religious, and industrial subsystems: the media, the military, the legal, and the educational subsystems—the whole shebang—is based on the contingencies of short-term self interest. They are instrumental institutions that embody the rules—they are the SYSTEM that selects for its own endgame and determines our inability to win it. Voting for or against some policy, or tweaking policies to the Right or Left, is merely like players in the game rolling the dice, hoping for luck, but selecting for the as-usual raise and fall outcome.

In the game of global Monopoly, the only way to win, as with Russian roulette, is to not play the game. We are all players who strut our stuff for a time, but who cannot foundationally change the rules of the game. Our only alternative is to not play the game, to vote with our feet and consider playing a different game that selects for a different outcome. The question that we desperately need to figure out is this: What rules will lead to a sustainable and functional society? A sustainable outcome that is dysfunctional, as Orwell envisioned, is achievable by 2184 (or maybe 2984).

We are all products of and serve Hubbert's 'monetary culture' within which his 'matter-energy system worldview' is an externality valued 'for the milk and cheese and profit it brings'. Changing horses (e.g. from race horse to plow horse) is an option. An 'ecolate' culture, a matter-energy system culture, would select for a different, better or worse, outcome.

The prosperity of a village would depend on a system of global governance that defines limits to 'development' and prevents a slightly larger community from conquering a neighboring one to set in motion the remorseless dynamic leading to Lord Man. The global governance would provide information services, apart from protection from conquest, so any villager who wants to be literate, numerate, and ecolate could be.

All Gaians living on the pale blue dot, having stood down from their hubris heights, would live such functional lives as possible in a naturocracy (rule by the nature of things) as the millennia pass. Or Nature, being unkind, allows for failure. And so extinction could be our GAME OVER if almost all of us keep on keeping on (and too few vote with their feet).

Oh, and 'the great divide'? There isn't one. The $1/day humans want to make $2/day and if you are making a thousand a day, think of all the good you could do if you made two thousand. Enthusiasm varies. As I understand more of the dynamics of the Anthropocene, my enthusiasm for serving it dims, but there are no differences in kind between ultra elites and slum dwellers.

My older brother was a more enthusiastic capitalist than I, and won more games of Monopoly. I've been to Las Vegas several times, but as an anthropological observer who understands how the game works. Having read most of the works of B.F. Skinner, I've never played the game. As Spinoza observed, to understand something is to be delivered from it. Understand the implications of this and you have the basis for changing the rules of the game.​

We are storytelling animals. Tell different stories such as the nature of things compels you to. Different outcomes will be selected for.

Or, to sum up my life's work in fewer words: Listen to Nature. Tell better stories. Live long and prosper.

 

142: How did humankind manage to increase the world’s population by 5 billion people in the last 100 years?

By a process of exponential competitive growth and prosperity made possible by using technology to divert more of Earth's primary productivity from other species to humans. The process began with Homo erectus' use of fire to alter their local biome to favor production of plants and animals humans hunted and gathered, and to cook foods to increase exergy, make some inedibles ediable, and reduce the need to chew food for hours a day. Soon, more than a million humans lived prosperously on the planet.

Technology, such as atlatl and Clovis points, enabled humans to prosper for a time prior to causing megafauna extinctions on four continents, but real prosperity arose with agriculture about 10k years ago that allowed sedentary populations to grow and complex societies to develop hierarchies of elites and those who serve them (e.g. soldiers, builders) over commoners/slaves who toil. Empire building began 6-11 thousand years ago and by 3-4 thousand years ago half of humans (there was about 35 million on the planet) were living in and serving unsustainable empire building. [See Past Lives of Humans]

Within the last 100 years nearly all humans have come to live in and serve a global monetary culture/empire. Like all prior empires, we have prospered, for a time. We did so not by working/enslaving multitudes of humans and animals to empower conquest, but by extracting a planetary larder of fossil fuels to empower about a hundred energy slaves per person living in industrial society. Despite a down turn after the Roaring Twenties a hundred years ago, life has been good, getting 'better' for most humans as perceived by Anthropocene enthusiasts, since about 1950, for a time (as usual).

Will we continue to grow and prosper? Some will, for a time. Globally the Euro-Sino Empire has not climaxed. But we are transitioning to climax. And then what?

It is all about environment, power, and society. Humans don't get a vote.

 

 

 

143: Can capitalism actually solve the world’s biggest problems?

Start with ‘world’s biggest problems’:

• Overpopulation.
• Overdensity complex society (e.g. cities) that select for Calhoun’s ‘behavioral sink’.
• Overdevelopment of planet’s life support system resulting in multiple system failures currently underway.
• Anthropocene mass extinction event.
• Overshoot of environmental resources exceeding carrying capacity and resulting in collapse of system, both humanity's control systems and earth’s biosphere.

And the list could go on, but pick one and ask if capitalism, socialism, communism, democracy, autocracy, corporatocracy, anarchy, etc. is part of the problem or its solution.

The bigger question is: are there political solutions? The answer is blowing in the wind for all to see if they would. So down with democracy, capitalism (et al) and up with naturocracy, the rule of natural laws (e.g. thermodynamics) by recognizing that we are Gaia’s guests and not her masters.

Blue Planet Club

 

 

 

144: What is the best way to save peace, humanity, and nature?

What is the best way to live in peace, and save humanity and Nature (aka Gaia)?

Without modern (last 10k years) technoindustrial empire-building humans, there would be peace enough. Once you have a condition of peace, of a mature and functioning biosphere maximizing empower, you could save it by not exploiting it for short-term self interest as a metastasizing cancer does within a human body. If we lived in peace, as in lack of conflict between groups of humans (typically due to scarcity, real or imagined) and our lack of conflict with Nature perceived as a planet for the taking, then the planet's life-support system would persist as the eons passed. So, how best to save humanity from its pathologies and the biosphere, such functionality as is left, from continued unsustainable development (by humans)?

Few know that the Galactic Park Ranger has been on vacation for the last 70 thousand years. She had regretted failing to notice the meteor that ended the reign of dinosaurs and gave rise to mammalian assent. There had been an inquiry by the Federation Academy and she promised to do better.

When she left to go home to reproduce, a blessing she had been working eons to earn, she had noted with interest the rise and spread of the bipedal apes on one continent. In just 10 million years they had speciated into many forms most beautiful and most wonderful. There were several million individuals of the new genus in total. Due to changing conditions as usual, one species had been reduced to only a few thousand. It was at risk of extinction, but Nature is unkind, and the failure of one species is not at all a threat to life on Earth.

Even Oomicrons can be wrong. Systems are not only more complex than Oomicrons know, they are more complex than even Oomicrons can know. Dogs don't understand calculus and humans don't understand systems such as Oomicrons do, within their limits. Who could have foreseen that a pathetic naked ape, nearing extinction, would or could in just the passing of a few tens of millennia, come to preside over the greatest mass extinction event since the late Cretaceous, one that could rival even that of the Permian?

The answer was obvious and could have been foreseen. This was the conclusion of the Federation's second inquiry. There was a planetary vat of fossil fuels and a technology developing ape. Imagine a pile of gunpowder and a five-year old with a box of matches. What could go wrong? Klaatu decided to pass away to make room for another Oomicron. Even Oomicrons live, in peace, within limits.

So, how to save humanity and the biosphere? I'm just a human, so ask an Oomicron. Of course we could design a viable civilization and learn to live within limits. Or go extinct. Do we have a choice? No.

'Understand or die.' ― Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1889-1951. Or from Spinoza: To understand something is to be delivered from it, so.... Humans stand down and listen to Nature who has all the answers.

 

 

145: In your opinion, what is the biggest problem affecting the world currently?

"The world", planet Earth, has a biosphere, a life-support system, aka Gaia, Nature, Mother, Aluna..., but all complex systems, e.g. your body, are subject to pathologies, e.g. the exponential growth of cancer or an infection. Humans, members of the genus Homo of which there used to be many species until H. sapiens sapiens came along, have acquired technology without the understanding to place limits on it's use.

We now have a planet in overshoot driven by severe human overpopulation, overdevelopment, and overdensity human living that selects for dysfunctional behaviors, e.g. empire building and exponential growth that seems like a good thing, which it is, for humans, for a time. Technology, together with the presumption of human supremacy by Lord Man, is the proximal problem, together with lack of understanding of the planet and how to live with it properly, i.e. sustainably as the eons pass, which is the distal problem. As Ludwig Wittgenstein summed 'it' (our problem) up succinctly, "Understand or die."

We are failing to understand as evidenced by our Anthropocene enthusiasm. We, our technoindustrial monetary culture, are presiding over a mass extinction event that could, if we just keep on keeping on, rival that of the Permian, i.e. cause a 90+% extinction event that would include us. A passing alien geologist from Oomicron, viewing the remains of life on Earth and figuring out its cause, would not consider humans sapient.

An Oomicron archaeologist could fill in the details. A million or so years before the Great Simplification, hominids acquired fire technology and used it to alter their environment to favor their hunting and gathering, but no mas,s extinctions followed. Hunting technology, developed in Africa over a long period of time such that fauna could adapt to it, also caused no mass extinctions, but as humans spread out of Africa, naive megafauna went extinct on five continents.

Some, all of whom are humans, argue that the megafauna extinctions were not mass extinctions, so naming a new epoch after humans is not called for. Okay, but the development of agriculture was a biome changer, the beginnings of the Great Simplification. With agriculture arose empire building that selected for pulsing unto overshoot regionally and build up of dysfunctional behaviors within a millennium or two. But some (humans again) argue that transitioning from depending on sustainable ecosystem services to often unsustainable agroecosystem services that divert most of the primary productivity of the biosphere to support humans and their mutualist crops, livestock and pets, is not ecocide enough, and so a new epoch should not be named after agro-empire-building man.

But the rise of industrial society, empowered by fossil fuels, soon learned to turn fossil fuels into food needed to grow the population and its consumption (for a time), was the Anthropocene mass extinction event incarnate. Or, did it begin with Newcomen's steam engine of 1712? Or with the rapidly accelerating growth enabled by coal burning in Watts' more efficient steam engine? Or maybe we should date the beginning of the Anthropocene with the appearance of radioactive isotopes and microplastics that future geologists (Oomicron or maybe human) can easily detect in geological strata. But life on earth, other than some domestic plants, livestock and pets, may beg to differ.

Imagine a small mountain of gun power and a five-year old with a box of matches. What could go wrong? Imagine a planetary larder of fossil fuels and a clothed ape with the technology to use the energy embodied in it to grow their economy, stupidly, for short-term pursuit of self interest. What could go wrong? Well, it's complicated, but imagine Gaia in the ICU facing multiple system failures. Understand or die.

And William Rees, top scientist and professor emeritus type, is not referencing Covid-19. Any population, e.g. yeast in a barrel of grape juice, a virus in a human population, or industrialized humans using fossil fuels to exploit a planetary life-support system, i.e. any population, including a metastasizing cancer, that is exponentially growing unto overshoot, is a plague. Growth is (the best thing ever) only for a time. Yeast sporulate, are adapted to overpulsing (as are locust), and will produce spores containing the information about how to do it again. We will not. We are in a plague phase and are very close to climaxing. Descent will come. Our near-term extinction (coming century or millennium) may be unthinkable, but is not impossible.

When? No one can say. It is like asking, "If I shoot an arrow into the air, exactly where and when will it hit the ground?" Maybe an eagle will swoop down and grab it when it reaches maximum height (climax) and fly off with it, ever higher (for a time). Details may be indeterminate so far as humans can figure, but that the arrow will "climax" and descend is as determinate as that your car will stop when it runs out of gas. Maybe if it is going downhill at the time, it will roll on a bit further, but it won't just keep on keeping on forever because the driver wants it to.

 

 

146: Is it true or not that every human uses resources that leave a carbon footprint that contributes to global warming? If yes then isn't the best solution population reduction and why are the most obvious solutions so difficult to achieve?

Carbon, as in our rapid release of CO2 secondary to burning a planetary larder of fossil fuels mostly within the last two hundred years, is tied directly to per capita consumption (if you are reading this, yours is above average) times population as enabled by technology over which there is little restraint in its use (if it is profitable, e.g. cars).

If we humans were sapient, if we had enough foresight intelligence, we would have considered converting hundreds of millions of years of accumulated carbon as sequestered in the earth’s surface into energy by asking, ‘And then what?’

We would have paused and thought about it, and decided, ‘Okay guys, let’s wait for the next ice age to begin and then slowly burn the fossil fuels over a period of a few millennia to slow the rate of cooling, giving us and life on earth more time to adapt. Of course, if the result is not as predicted, we’ll stop the burn, and embrace the condition now that will come anyway.

We are not getting any wiser. I have corresponded with William (Bill) Rees, know what he thinks and that he knows enough to have an opinion. He is a human ecologist among other distinctions, and co-developer of the human footprint metric.

We knew enough by the 1970s to slam on the brakes of overpopulation, overdevelopment, and oversdensity living to maybe minimize overshoot and manage descent for a prosperous way down. We didn’t and won’t (see other answers).

Rapid depopulation and degrowth of the economy would be better late than never as never means chaotic collapse. Sorry about that, all you under twenty-somethings out there. If you would rather know than believe, there is information out there, but you must be eager to learn and intent on just saying no to denial.

Lord Man will not always be so. Carrying Capacity and Overshoot

We don’t have to do anything, like the people on Rapa Nui who couldn’t stop cutting down trees didn't have to do anything. The reindeer of St. Matthew Island didn't do anything either. Rees is one source to consider. I recently read this offering, so will pick it, but consider it a start. Is Humanity Fatally Successful? which directly relates to your second question, the why question.

 

 

 

147: Can a city be sustainable?

Are modern technoindustrial cities, dependent on fossil fuels, sustainable, i.e. will they last a thousand more years? No.

Will technoindustrial cities transition to renewable solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, and biomass energy having an EROI comparable to fossil fuels? No.

Will cities that depend only on wind to move ships, and wood and food to fuel human and animal slaves (e.g. classical Athens or Rome, be sustainable even though all prior ones have not been? No, related to diminishing returns of investment in overcomplexity (see Joseph Tainter) and increasing behavioral sink over 8–12 generations that selects for loss of functional behaviors (see John B. Calhoun).

Will there ever be a sustainable city as evidenced by one or more examples? Yes. The Kogi are a remnant population of the Taironan civilization where citizens normally live in small farming communities that are sustainable and periodically gather in their city what all have a city home.

This is what a non-monument building Taironan city looks like and probably looked like 1100 years ago. Modern cities are dissipative structures, like hurricanes, that don’t last. They and the empires that give raise to them last for a time, may be full of sound and fury, but they pass away.

See Past Lives of Humans

Can a city be sustainable? Evidently, per one example, yes. Can the city you (anyone reading this) live in be sustainable? If you locked 100 people with PhDs in a room until they figured out how, could they come up with a viable plan? With one that they think is viable, yes. With one that Nature determines actually is viable? No more likely than 10e9 monkeys banging on typewriters could, or a 100 dogs understanding calculus, so don't count on clever apes fooling Nature.

But fooling themselves and others? That's what clever and eloquent apes are good at.

So don't believe anything I type. Listen to Nature instead.

 

148: Are cities good or bad for the environment?

To start: we are in overshoot. Carrying Capacity and Overshoot

Cities, without fossil fuel inputs, direct or indirect, are in their current form unsustainable, so any attempt to keep them going into further overshoot will maintain or increase the current pace of planetary destruction that is the main driver of the current mass extinction event that may rival that of the Permian. Is what we are doing bad? You decide, but Nature doesn’t care what you think. Few, if any, will have a prosperous way down. The Prosperous Way Up and Down

 

 

149: The population of our world rose from 1.6 billion to almost 7 billion in 120 years. How can we stop the world from becoming overpopulated ethically, and is this issue being addressed properly?

Actually the human population has increased by 6.2 billion in the last 120 years. Humans, like all other animals, view more as better. Growth is good. When reindeer found themselves on St. Matthew Island where there were no predators, it was all good up until their population reached about 6,000. They had gone into overshoot when their population reached about 1,200, but system delays put off the consequence.

Subjectively, all humans view growth in human population and consumption as an unquestionable good. Only a few humans (perhaps 0.01%) can think objectively about the human problematique. Of those, maybe an equal percentage of them can think about real solutions. If, when the reindeer population on St. Matthew Island had reached 5,000, one reindeer said, 'hey guys, I think we have a problem', and one other said, 'yeah, so what do we do about it', it would not have altered the dynamic. Sorry about that.

That we are in overshoot is thinkable to some, and some of them realize what that implies. But very few can consider the possibility that we went into overshoot about 3-4 thousand years ago when the global human population reached about 35 million. Carrying Capacity and Overshoot: The Objective View.

But is the issue being addressed properly? No, not in the slightest. Look at questions on Quora about overpopulation with more than 100 answers (I have), and note that most, the majority, think it is a myth, that the failure of developed countries to maintain a birth rate high enough to replace the current population without immigration is the only population problem we have. Some believe that any 'over' population problem, if there is one, will be solved by the demographic transition. But that the unnatural decline in birth rates in developed, mostly urbanized areas of overdensity populations, is due to education and material prosperity enabled by growth. John B. Calhoun did overdensity population studies that also showed a demographic transition, but it had nothing to do with empowering or educating the female rats or mice. Critical Mass Transcript

And just asking, but what might we do to properly address our situation if we could? To avoid a die-off (an unmanaged rapid degrowth in human population/consumption), we could manage a rapid degrowth via a rapid birth-off. Let's agree that no one should die of starvation or scarcity-induced conflict (e.g. war, murder, genocide). If the planet could sustainably support 35 million (or some other number that Nature determines), then as everyone dies a natural (non-Malthusian) death, replacement births needed each year to maintain the sustainable population would be easy to determine (no one gets a vote). Initially few women who could and would have children, would have children, but in about 50 years the average woman would need to have about 2.1 children to maintain the sustainable population of 35 million as the millennia pass.

But we can't do that because in 1987 the UN (and all right thinking humans) agreed that “Parents have a basic human right to determine freely and responsibly the number and spacing of their children.” Period. No right thinking person has thought about it since. As a result, perhaps six billion humans will die in the die-off to come that 99.999% (more or less) agree can't happen. ['Yes, the Climate Crisis May Wipe out Six Billion People' by William Rees, but he's just another stupid know-nothing professor emeritus type who doesn't know enough to have an opinion.]

 

 

150: Who are the good people on this Earth?

There are people who are good in battle, at war, conquest, extraction, at building empire, but none have lasted [per Past Lives of Humans], i.e. are not viable (which is double-plus ungood or is not selected for). We who are descendants of such good people, or their slaves, are good at making money in the monetary culture of the fossil fuel empowered last empire, now global, who are presiding over the greatest mass extinction event since the late Cretaceous that may rival the scope of the Permian if we can only just keep on keeping on growing the economy (circular and green, shaped like a doughnut of course) we all serve so the poor can be good consumers too in a non-racist society of consumers.

Are there any people who are good at maintaining a viable balance between Man's demands and Nature's resources? In North America there is a remnant of the traditional Hopi who were a remnant of the prior unsustainable Pueblo civilization, who refuse to participate in the tribal government of the other Hopi who are friendly with their conquistadors and currently live in fossil fuel heated conventional housing, drive overpowered fossil-fueled vehicles, have running water (due to electric pumping) and fossil fuel produced electric. They eat prepared food from the store that probably traveled 1,500 miles to get there (mostly by fossil fuel made and fueled trucks), which as everyone knows is where food comes from, and their kids play video games and put in the usual amount of screen time when not in school being schooled, if not educated.

The traditionalists, who lost the Oraibi Split in 1906, allowed no vehicles in their villages (or photos), had no electric, grew their food, made their cloths from the cotton they grew, and some continue as best they can to live such lives as worked as the centuries pass despite incursions of the monetary culture and its ways (e.g. cars, money, churches, schools). Some traditionalists living on the fringe of the Hopi Nation may little notice the passing away of fossil-fueled technoindustrial society (e.g. they will no longer see planes flying over) if no one comes to take what they have by right of conquest during the Great Simplification to come.

In South America, there are the Kogi, a remnant population of the Tairona civilization that the Spanish genocide of 1650 missed. They are good at managing their demands on Aluna's resources as evidenced by having done so for 1,100 years following the failure of the Tairona Phase 1 and Phase 2 complex societies that collapsed because they failed to maintain a viable balance between Man's demands and Nature's environmental productivity.

Are there any other good people living viable lives on the planet? I don't know. Could we learn from Elder Brother of the latter-day Tairona? I don't know and neither do you.

This is what a non-monument building Taironan city looks like.
They have no electric, cars, or washing machines.

 

Below is what a traditionalist Hopi village looks like today. It was founded by the traditionists who split from Oraibi in 1906. In 1680 traditionalists destroyed the Spanish mission and killed 400 colonists. Today, their village has two churches. In 1894 19 Hopi men were arrested and sent to Alcatraz penitentiary for refusing to farm as told to and for refusing to send their children to the government run boarding school to be acculturated (e.g. beaten for speaking Hopi). On Alcatraz they were to be "held in confinement, at hard labor, until . . . they shall show . . . they fully realize the error of their evil ways . . . until they shall evince, in an unmistakable manner, a desire to cease interference with the plans of the government for the civilization and education of its indian wards." They would be held on the Rock from January 3 to August 7, 1895.

Records do not note how many died on Alcatraz Island doing hard labor sawing logs. Resistance continued. Below is the village the traditionalists founded after the Oraibi split in 1906. Viewing the area around the village shows some fields that may still be farmed the traditional way—without fossil fuel inputs in an area that gets less than 10 inches of precipitation per year and yields 4 bushels of corn per acre but only by leaving fields fallow for up to 50 years. In the Corn Belt, without fossil fuel inputs, farmers might hope for 25 bushels per acre on land with a shorter (15-25 year) fallow period (modern industrial agriculture produces 200 bushels of industrial corn per acre every year, for a time, but will not feed 8 billion humans long-term or even this century.

 

For more information, count the number of cars/pickups in the former traditionalist village. But no electric lines are evident and 80% speak only Hopi. Could electric and water lines be buried because the traditionalists who had not yet died demanded it?

Near the traditional village, field on left has been cultivated by machine. Field on right, below the pickup road above, shows traditional cultivation by digging stick. What were shallow pits, about 10 feet apart, for corn, beans, squash can be seen spaced far enough to collect such rain as may fall. Soils are sandy, seeds are planted deep to reach moisture from winter snow melt.

 

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