Medical innovations have increased life span and reduced the death rate. The "green revolution" has increase the food supply and allowed for more people to live in the same area.
Technological innovations like steam power and the internal combustion engine have allowed society to spread to less favorable areas. If we were restricted to mostly local food production, for example, there wouldn't be a population boom in the desert of the US southwest.
So, just extrapolating from history, programs like Lovins' can be expected to stimulate more consumption, not less. So far the human race seems unable to address this conundrum. Even a place like China which has severe restrictions on population growth has not taken similar steps when it comes to resource consumption growth.
I'm afraid mother nature will be the way things are brought back into balance. It won't be pretty. Policies not Politics ---- Daily Landscape
On the other hand,
There is a significant complication in this, however... [the] world's richest nations are growing by the smallest percentages. [If] population is a function of food supply, why is the most significant growth taking place in those areas producing the least food?
Of course, the ecological footprint of the First world countries increases just as much as energy availability allows. But what does it say about human nature? When living is good, does reproduction become a lesser priority? Do we turn into competition by numbers when things are tough?
It is one of the fast-track down scenerios in the process of collapse.
Exactly. This is not the way to overcome a tough on skin change.
didn't work.
The cost of this robbery is - as you say - it makes the problem worse. Especially when they confiscate the seed needed for the next growing season.
The blessed countries will be those where people start to cooperate and care for each other (for the ultimate outliving purpose) sooner rather than later.
I absolutely agree.
And I'd better stop here before I start using the ... shudder ... "S" word.
;-)
thus the high level of neurosis in children of rich families.
the converse: if you have nothing to lose, why be sexually responsible?
there is even a market for selling your kids into slavery in very poor countries, that good invisible hand at work.
having kids in a modern society, rife with upwardly mobile fragmented families, is hard, ego-shattering work, add granma living in another town, less aunts and cousins, etc, and the post-industrial substitution of (probably hypothetical) pensions for the old paradigm support of younger family members.
nature makes millions of sperm to create very few children, dispassionately i see no logical reason that scale of waste should not extrapolate to human populations, and the deciding factor keeping so many (often half)-alive so long has indeed been the technology fix of being able to plunder and waste resources as if there were no tomorrow...
yes....and the irony is that it's emerging that if we did have an intelligent world socialism as operating system of governance, we might even be able to support larger world populations, more efficiently and with a much higher quotient of happiness.
there is a small but very determined portion of our species that is resisting this change, and either they or all of us are doomed, punto basta.
what we need is a new global sense of responsibility, and i see it a-birthing in many places, not least right here at ET.
fantastic discussion, thanks all. ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
in the midst of dwindling resources and environmental crumbling, we're having a renaissance of natalist dogma and policy. it's just another of those "beam me up" aspects of the present era. The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
There are a few exceptions, like Japan and Italy where the population is actually declining or will be shortly, but I'm not sure that birth control and educated women are the main reasons.
I don't understand what's happening in Italy (momma's boys not getting married?), but in Japan women still have an inferior social position so, I would think they would still be under pressure to marry. Perhaps they do and just have fewer children. A recent study found that the Japanese have sex less often than any other developed country.
If some of us are going to push for negative population growth then we really need to come up with social policies that will allow this to happen. Japan is now pushing for older people to stay in the work force. They haven't yet examined whether all that "work" really needs to be done at all.
Japanese men who retire find that they have nothing to do and many marriages break up at that point. They have never developed outside interests having been consumed with work. Thus they find they have little in common with their wives. New retirement laws allow the wives to get part of the husband's pension, so they have less reason to stay married. Policies not Politics ---- Daily Landscape
a whole lot of the "work" done in our mad "global economy" doesn't need to be done at all. that is perhaps the greatest tragedy of all. destroying the biosphere and working people to death to produce little plastic tchotchkes that get thrown away after 6 months. The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
You have more confidence than I ... too much of the plastic is thrown out virtually within seconds ... along with the pacakaging that is larger than what is enclosed. Blogging regularly at Get Energy Smart. NOW!!!
Antibiotic resistent bacteria are emerging from the natural interplay of Darwinian forces. The recent TB foo-foo illustrates only one of many bacterial diseases with minimum available drugs; staph and gonococcus are two more.
The miracle drug Tetracyline is now almost worthless as the transfer resistence factor from its use in cow feed - to allow the massive overstocking on feedlots w/o the steers dropping dead & to increase weight gain/feed - to humans.
The Green Revolution is over. Food production/acre hasn't increased in 20 years. In 6 of the last 8 years the production of corn, wheat, and rice hasn't met the yearly requirements. The global grainstocks have met their lowest levels in modern history. The world is one really sucko harvest away from famine.
Meanwhile, the car addicts are hoping cornfuel will be their heroin to cure their morphine addiction. People aren't listening and they aren't going to listen. It's the same reason heroin addicts don't stop shooting their drug into their veins. The global economy is addicted to oil and planetary rape and the cure rate for addiction - any addiction - is pifflesnot until the addict decides to stop.
So whatthehell ...
Most don't.
Exactly.
And this is why Lovins is so completely wrong. It is not that innovation is bad, or cannot work (some of it might work) but until or unless the addiction is addressed, any and all innovations will be turned to feed the addiction.
At best this postpones collapse. It neither evades it nor ameliorates it. It could even make it worse. The Fates are kind.
generally, recovered addicts talk about a pivotal moment of truth, a moment when they got a clear view of the wreckage that their life had become, or a moment when they lost a friend who could no longer deal with their BS, or their lover/partner left them... that kind of thing. in other words, there were consequences and those consequences suddenly came into focus and there was an Aha moment, as in Aha, I really need to stop doing this.
clearly most of the affluent West has not reached the Aha moment yet -- despite the trail of wreckage that its addiction is leaving worldwide and at home.
I note that AA is not a recruiting organisation -- it works by attraction not recruitment. they are not interested in people who aren't actively interested in joining and ready to join. I think the environmental movement may be missing something here -- a chunk of it is modeled on electoral politics, another chunk on evangelism; maybe a substantial chunk should start working on an AA analog? I'm tired and not thinking too clearly... but attraction rather than recruitment is rapidly building a "food dissident movement" w/in affluent Western nations, for the simple reason that real food tastes better than corporate fodder and most often people feel better when they eat it... ecovillages and greenish co-housing projects are generally overwhelmed with applicants (attraction rather than recruitment again)... seems to me that a one-terron lifestyle involving female emancipation, free access to contraception, ongoing education, reduced work hours, more shared and fewer hoarded resources, etc. might also attract many volunteers eager for a change.
but then there are those damned vested interests, whispering into the consumers' ear that giving up your SUV == castration and environmentalists must be stopped before they "force everyone to live in mud huts" (yaaaawn). [meanwhile the sperm count in Western industrial nations keeps dropping thanks to the massive ubiquitous toxicity of industrialism, thus effecting a kind of de facto castration. one thing the species will never run out of, it seems, is irony.] The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
Bt the way, in Spanish terrón de azúcar is a sugar cube. Small, sweet and portable. Nice visual association. Can the last politician to go out the revolving door please turn the lights off?
well a terron (which I may or may not have invented) is one person's share of Terra. which varies -- depending on how many other people there are, and on what kind of life we think is an acceptable life.
if you crowd us into 100-storey arcologies (in tiny multifunctional cells or larger multiperson dormitories) so as to reclaim the maximum amount of arable land; if we kill off every species that isn't directly useful to us (a dangerous undertaking since we have only a very poor and warped grasp of usefulness and interdependency in biotic systems) so as to redirect all photosynthetic activity on earth to feeding humans; if we produce our food by the absolute bedrock max-efficiency methods (probably algae and fungus farming on a massive scale); if we scrupulously recycle all our water and other materials, keep the absolute minimum amount of personal possessions each, live under an intrusive and comprehensive set of rules governing each person's behaviour and consumption of resources, etc etc -- my non-quantitative bet is that we could support more people "in comfort" than are now presently alive.
but the quality of that "comfort" is highly questionable -- how would such an existence differ from life in a prison? the iron discipline of space-station resource management does not make for an open and free society (back to FH's insightful quote). and the authority necessary to impose that iron discipline suggests an authoritarianism that human beings have never in history managed to implement without abuse and atrocity (another goram Milgram Experiment); we are not as well suited as bees to living in hives with draconian resource limits. (remember that bees kick out their surplus drones at season's end to starve, so that the life of the colony may continue -- though egalitarian and delightful creatures, bees are not sentimentalists and the life of each bee means very little compared to the bee polity which is the real organism.)
to accommodate the maximum possible number of humans on earth w/in constraints of physical reality would mean evolving into a hive organism in which individuals had very little scope for freedom, living on a planet from which we have extirpated every aspect of the natural world that makes us happy, for which we were adapted in the previous 200K years or however long it's been. is that the future we want for our descendants? is it consonant with our so-called Enlightenment ideals of individual liberty?
one terron might be very small in such a model. and it might be sustainable. but is it a goal to aim for?
a slightly larger terron might yield a less oppressive and stifling culture -- one in which your neighbour is not morally obligated, as a matter of survival, to report you to the neighbourhood committee for wasting a half gallon of water, and where your diet might be more interesting, tasty, and nutritious. a larger terron yet -- several acres per person -- could yield an idyllic lifestyle with the luxury of open space, fresh produce, eggs, and moderate amounts of grass-fed meat for everyone.
or -- and this is the traditional human pattern, replicated from the earliest agricultural era through modern capitalism, and the subject of Colman's recent gloomy prognostication -- we could concentrate resource consumption in a small elite and keep everyone else on the ragged edge of malnutrition, exposure, and related diseases or just let them go on dying in droves. "one terron" for a planet of hyperconsuming billionaires is so much land and biotic productivity that the "one terron" left over for the lower classes is too small to live on.
so the question of what a one-person share of Terra looks like cannot be disentangled from the question of "how many of us should there be," which in turn cannot be disentangled from what lifestyle we think is "decent" or acceptable or happy, and (critically) how much inequality we are prepared to tolerate. there are people -- I have read their published opinions and even contended with some in person -- who contemplate with equanimity the liquidation of vast numbers of poor people, rural people, indigenes, peasants, brown people, "backward" people etc, so as to "free up resources" for a far smaller number of (presumably worthier, superior) people for whom "the American Way of Life is not negotiable". I find it hard to distinguish this from the Lebensraum justification for annexing Poland or the Conquistadores' conviction that God really meant the wealth of S America for them.
abundance -- of land, of energy, of water and food -- enables us to practise inequality in relative moral comfort and safety, because the elite (the tapeworm in my previous mini rant) can gorge itself and still leave enough over for the many to get by. scarcity, however, brings inequality into focus: as soon as resources are constrained it becomes very obvious that scarcity is in part created by the gorging and conspicuous waste of the few; and the few start thinking about getting rid of the many rather than sharing. (back to Jared Diamond).
industrial capitalism seems to be the historical trifecta. it concentrates wealth in the hands of a tiny elite with greater speed and efficiency than any previous system of accumulation and kleptocracy; it does so while simultaneously burning up raw materials and resources at a rate unprecedented in human history; and its very modus operandi is predicated on the creation of scarcity, Enclosure of the commons, etc -- and perhaps worst of all, scarcity and crisis are profit opportunities for capitalists so they have no interest in preventing same, only a short-term enthusiasm for profiting off them (Halliburton, Iraq war; NOLA, carpetbaggers and mercs; US energy policy set by the fossil lobby). a person's "share" of Terra doesn't mean anything in a hegemonic belief system to which the very notion of "sharing" is anathema...
what Gini coefficient is acceptable? what minimal lifestyle is acceptable? for how many centuries do we want our culture to persist w/o crashing? if we have answers to these questions, then with a great deal of effort and some uncertainty we can answer the question of what a terron is, which in turn will offer an answer to "how many of us should there be?"
one thing I know for certain -- as a technogeek and as a simple primate -- is that infinite growth is a fantasy, and therefore the mainspring of faith that drives our culture is irremediably broken. climax ecosystems are stable; runaway proliferation of any one species dooms that species and many others in the web around it.
another thing I know for fairly certain is that complex biotic systems (like a farm, a forest, or humanity) cannot be micromanaged and controlled with precision. they can only be encouraged and discouraged -- more like steering a boat than like carpentry, as I think someone once said? we already know many of the factors that encourage lower family size, greater equality, better public health: we have working models for many encouraging guidance signals. women's emancipation, universal literacy and freedom of communication; suppression of monopolies and encouragement of micro and regional commerce; land reform; sustainable agriculture; least-toxic manufacturing; prioritising public transit over private autos; human-scale urban design; participatory democratic institutions, devolving authority to the most local level possible; the powerful notion of "human rights"; wealth redistribution via taxation or periodic "jubilee years"; and so on. we have an extensive menu of excellent 'steering mechanisms' that tend towards lower family sizes, lower resource consumption, better public health and longevity, less violence, and happier people.
and all of them, without exception, are antithetical to maximum profit-taking.
we do seem to be in the Greenland Colony Predicament; in order to survive and thrive we have to change the foundational assumptions of our culture. can it be done? The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
I just took their quiz (again).
CATEGORY ACRES
FOOD 3.5 MOBILITY 0.2 SHELTER 8.9 GOODS/SERVICES 6.2 TOTAL FOOTPRINT 19
IN COMPARISON, THE AVERAGE ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT IN YOUR COUNTRY IS 24 ACRES PER PERSON.
WORLDWIDE, THERE EXIST 4.5 BIOLOGICALLY PRODUCTIVE ACRES PER PERSON.
IF EVERYONE LIVED LIKE YOU, WE WOULD NEED 4.2 PLANETS.
Note that the biggest "expenditure" in my quiz is my house -- despite its modest size of 1100 sf -- in which I live alone at present. If I retake the quiz using my boat as my residence (which I hope will soon be the case) and asserting my future lifestyle plan of never travelling by air (as opposed to my current average of 3 hours of air travel per year) and living on a more local and seasonal food supply:
CATEGORY ACRES FOOD 2.7 MOBILITY 0 SHELTER 0.7 GOODS/SERVICES 0.5 TOTAL FOOTPRINT 4
IF EVERYONE LIVED LIKE YOU, WE WOULD NEED 1.0 PLANETS.
I don't swear that these folks' analysis is perfect; their dietary options are not granular enough to be really descriptive. but it does suggest that my project of retiring and moving onto my boat (heavily insulated, independent of shore power, less than 400 sf) and adhering more faithfully to a 200-mile diet, will indeed be a substantial reduction of my global footprint, without giving up the foods I like, my internet connection, etc.
you can live very well on 4.5 acres. or so I think. The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
Boat-based, interesting :)
:-)
PS: Thank you for many posts that have educated / made me think here ... Blogging regularly at Get Energy Smart. NOW!!!
... force everyone to live in mud huts
Technically we live in a mud hut and I'm spending 12 hours/day remodeling Yet Another mud hut.
Only it's called "adobe" and people are buying them, in my neck of the mountains, as soon as they come on the market.
the whole "mud hut" meme is imho a holdover from C16-19 colonialism and the colonisers' swaggering contempt for any architecture, any food, any religious practise, any costume, any music (etc ad naus), that wasn't the product of Anglo Europe. the subliminal message is 'those commie pinko greenies want to make Us [superior whitefolks] live like Them [backwards savages]' -- it's as stupid imho as the probably-apocryphal stories about British colonial administrators dying of heat stroke because they wouldn't give up their stodgy British diet and heavy clothing in the Indian climate. enviromentalists I think are -- for many modern, indoctrinated citizens of the corporate state -- the equivalent of the scandalous colonial who "goes native", letting the side down don'cha know, by adapting to, rather than rigidly dominating, the local biome.
houses made of mud and straw have many advantages -- of which sustainability is only one. my suspicion is that people's kneejerk fear and loathing of strawbale construction and other "ethnic" architecture has way more to do with the "ethnic" part of the association than any actual drawback of the construction method itself. I can't prove this, but the strength and irrationality of the prejudice I've encountered in individuals (anecdotal evidence) suggests that like many debates about sustainable lifestyle issues, this is not merely a technical or pragmatic discussion. some very deep emotional and ego values are engaged.
my parents, immigrants to America, would never eat sweet corn (zea mays). they hated it. why? it's delicious -- I loved it as a kid and still do. but to them, maize was something you feed to cattle. it was animal food and therefore infra dig for humans. these cultural associations are basically phobias, as powerful as any other phobia but not generally diagnosed as such; and like phobias they can be highly maladaptive and dysfunctional. the guy who can't bring himself to eat witchetty grubs in a survival situation... won't survive.
it is great that -- at last -- the colonisers are realising that adobe is a very sensible building material in the locations where indigenous people for millennia successfully used adobe. wow, how hard was that to figure out? The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
