No, we shouldn’t. Our planet’s healthy carrying capacity of humans is about 2 Billion at a somewhat less-than-first-world level of totally vegan quality of life, or somewhere around 500 million at a first-world omnivore quality of life.
We are so far beyond the planet’s healthy carrying capacity that the planet is dying before our very eyes, for those with the will to actually see what’s happening. Fisheries are collapsing everywhere. Topsoil will be gone within the next 60 years. Wild populations of all animals has gone down by 60% in the last century. We are in a human-caused extinction event that rivals the worst that has happened in geological history not only in magnitude, but also in sheer velocity. Even ELE-class asteroids took centuries for the majority of their extinctions to conclude, and we’re doing it in mere decades.
Sure, the planet could “support” 10 or 20 billion or more, but only by placing 100% of all arable land under intensive use, and by fishing every inch of the ocean; whereupon all non-farmed life will be pushed to extinction and the planet’s biosphere will collapse, bring its carrying capacity rapidly down to 0 humans.
We desperately need far fewer humans on this planet, and as soon as humanly possible.
And this is where the education of women comes into play, providing even subsistence-level populations with birth control options. No parent wants to bring children into this world that they cannot effectively support, and no woman wants to be a brood mare.
Limited programs in Africa and Asia has shown this to be a wild success in slowing population growth, it just lacks widespread public funding and political will, as well as stable countries that aren’t having civil wars or genocidal religious purges.
The rise in population in developing nations is slowing, and at a much faster rate than in developed nations.
Most projections have global population plateauing in the 2090-2100 timeframe although the recent record fertility decreases in Asia and Africa may pull that forward a couple of years or decades.
I agree. The whole article is pinned on the idea that infinite economic growth is not only possible, but critical. Even given that premise, it assumes that population growth is required for that.
I don’t feel like you need to be an economist or mathematician to understand that perpetual economic growth based on finite resources is no achievable.
Maybe instead of doubling down on the old model that has driven us to ecological disaster we should look for a new one.
A fascinating article that teeter-totters between wild speculation about the condition of human society many decades in the future (which we are demonstrably bad at predicting) and tenuous cause-and-effect relationships. But there are also a lot of very interesting current statistics that I was not previously aware of.
When I was young, absolutely everyone studying the numbers was certain that overpopulation would result in the collapse of civilization at some point. Maybe sooner, maybe later, but always eventually. Now that population growth is slowing (and it's not at all certain yet that it WILL stop or reverse, just that the recent trend is toward that direction), the sentiment is that de-population is inevitable and will ALSO lead to a collapse in society.
Maybe this is a crazy idea, but what if human populations could reach a steady state? The Earth is a finite resource[1] and can only sustain so many of us. I don't have the foggiest idea how to structure or enforce such a thing but it seems like the most realistic goal.
(1. It should go without saying that off-planet human colonies are at best science fiction, and will be within our lifetimes.)
“Steady state” is impossible because of one thing, and one thing only: Capitalism.
It’s a system less than four centuries old, but absolutely requires growth at any cost: growth of the population, growth of resource extraction, growth of products produced, growth of profits. It demands infinite growth on a finite planet.
Until we move away from capitalism, any form of steady state or even degrowth will be impossible.
I was wondering how long it would take for an anti-capitalist rant to show up. :/
Anyway, capitalism does not require the extraction of natural resources. That is a problem related to building a modern civilization. There is NO WAY to have the kind of technology (and therefore quality of life) we have today without digging things out of the ground to either burn for energy or manufacture into tools or products. We're making progress on solving parts of this (e.g. renewable energy sources, recycling) but it's fundamentally intractable and orthogonal to any economic system.
If what you say is really true, then capitalism should spiral into non-existence and cease to exist whenever there is an economic downturn or decline in productivity. As it happens, we have those roughly once a decade and times get tough for some people but civilization doesn't end and eventually we pull out of it. Ergo, either world trade is not dominated by a capitalist economy, or your definition of capitalism doesn't align with reality.
From the article: "Perhaps the most extreme case is Japan, where population growth has been slowing since the 1960s. Rather than seek to reverse this pattern, Japanese authorities are now working to adjust to a much smaller population. If the current trend continues, the island nation’s population will drop from 125 million to under 90 million by 2065 and barely 50 million by 2115"
"barely" 50 million. That's 50 cities à 1 million each. Not enough?
From Wikipedia article about Japan: "Japan is the eleventh most populous country in the world, as well as one of the most densely populated and urbanized. About three-fourths of the country's terrain is mountainous, concentrating its population of 125.5 million on narrow coastal plains. [...] The Greater Tokyo Area is the most populous metropolitan area in the world, with more than 37.4 million residents."
When you look at Japan from the air what you see is mostly lush green hills with interspersed grey floodplains—grey from the dense urbanization going on there.
A Japan of 50 million people is what we had around 1920 or somesuch. Japan was not considered an empty quarter back then, quite the opposite.
We don't need to "reverse or slow rapid depopulation". We must become less people. What we need is to learn how to do that with a minimum of suffering. If we don't, our suffering will be ensured, for a long, long time.
If you aren't willing to pay people lots of cash to have kids, and then pay for every aspect of raising those kids, then you obviously do not think it is that big of a problem.
Educated people don't have kids because they understand the costs and the costs don't make any damn sense unless you put a huge value on a traditional family lifestyle, which a lot of people don't, because once again they can't afford it.
But big businesses would rather the world burst into flames than have to spend a single cent on taxes to support the entitlements to give them a genuine working class of people, so instead the tactics we have been seeing are increased immigration and reducing the rights women have to do anything other than pump out babies.
Maybe this is why the Georgia Guidestones were demolished. They warned about overpopulation at a time capitalists are far more worried about underpopulation.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 41.6 ms ] threadWe are so far beyond the planet’s healthy carrying capacity that the planet is dying before our very eyes, for those with the will to actually see what’s happening. Fisheries are collapsing everywhere. Topsoil will be gone within the next 60 years. Wild populations of all animals has gone down by 60% in the last century. We are in a human-caused extinction event that rivals the worst that has happened in geological history not only in magnitude, but also in sheer velocity. Even ELE-class asteroids took centuries for the majority of their extinctions to conclude, and we’re doing it in mere decades.
Sure, the planet could “support” 10 or 20 billion or more, but only by placing 100% of all arable land under intensive use, and by fishing every inch of the ocean; whereupon all non-farmed life will be pushed to extinction and the planet’s biosphere will collapse, bring its carrying capacity rapidly down to 0 humans.
We desperately need far fewer humans on this planet, and as soon as humanly possible.
Limited programs in Africa and Asia has shown this to be a wild success in slowing population growth, it just lacks widespread public funding and political will, as well as stable countries that aren’t having civil wars or genocidal religious purges.
Most projections have global population plateauing in the 2090-2100 timeframe although the recent record fertility decreases in Asia and Africa may pull that forward a couple of years or decades.
I don’t feel like you need to be an economist or mathematician to understand that perpetual economic growth based on finite resources is no achievable.
Maybe instead of doubling down on the old model that has driven us to ecological disaster we should look for a new one.
When I was young, absolutely everyone studying the numbers was certain that overpopulation would result in the collapse of civilization at some point. Maybe sooner, maybe later, but always eventually. Now that population growth is slowing (and it's not at all certain yet that it WILL stop or reverse, just that the recent trend is toward that direction), the sentiment is that de-population is inevitable and will ALSO lead to a collapse in society.
Maybe this is a crazy idea, but what if human populations could reach a steady state? The Earth is a finite resource[1] and can only sustain so many of us. I don't have the foggiest idea how to structure or enforce such a thing but it seems like the most realistic goal.
(1. It should go without saying that off-planet human colonies are at best science fiction, and will be within our lifetimes.)
It’s a system less than four centuries old, but absolutely requires growth at any cost: growth of the population, growth of resource extraction, growth of products produced, growth of profits. It demands infinite growth on a finite planet.
Until we move away from capitalism, any form of steady state or even degrowth will be impossible.
Anyway, capitalism does not require the extraction of natural resources. That is a problem related to building a modern civilization. There is NO WAY to have the kind of technology (and therefore quality of life) we have today without digging things out of the ground to either burn for energy or manufacture into tools or products. We're making progress on solving parts of this (e.g. renewable energy sources, recycling) but it's fundamentally intractable and orthogonal to any economic system.
If what you say is really true, then capitalism should spiral into non-existence and cease to exist whenever there is an economic downturn or decline in productivity. As it happens, we have those roughly once a decade and times get tough for some people but civilization doesn't end and eventually we pull out of it. Ergo, either world trade is not dominated by a capitalist economy, or your definition of capitalism doesn't align with reality.
"barely" 50 million. That's 50 cities à 1 million each. Not enough?
From Wikipedia article about Japan: "Japan is the eleventh most populous country in the world, as well as one of the most densely populated and urbanized. About three-fourths of the country's terrain is mountainous, concentrating its population of 125.5 million on narrow coastal plains. [...] The Greater Tokyo Area is the most populous metropolitan area in the world, with more than 37.4 million residents."
When you look at Japan from the air what you see is mostly lush green hills with interspersed grey floodplains—grey from the dense urbanization going on there.
A Japan of 50 million people is what we had around 1920 or somesuch. Japan was not considered an empty quarter back then, quite the opposite.
We don't need to "reverse or slow rapid depopulation". We must become less people. What we need is to learn how to do that with a minimum of suffering. If we don't, our suffering will be ensured, for a long, long time.
Educated people don't have kids because they understand the costs and the costs don't make any damn sense unless you put a huge value on a traditional family lifestyle, which a lot of people don't, because once again they can't afford it.
But big businesses would rather the world burst into flames than have to spend a single cent on taxes to support the entitlements to give them a genuine working class of people, so instead the tactics we have been seeing are increased immigration and reducing the rights women have to do anything other than pump out babies.