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~
