Seven Billion ... And Rising
Walden Bello | 08.11.2011 13:18 | Analysis | Ecology | Globalisation | World
The world’s population surpassed 7 billion on October 31. But except for perhaps the anti-family planning lobby, this was a milestone that few were in a mood to celebrate.
Concerns about overpopulation were present when the world hit the 6 billion mark in 1999, but they were subdued in that era of growth and — at least in the North — optimism. There was a sense then that although there would be major hurdles along the way, the world’s future could only get brighter.
Globalization, according to its apostles — foremost among them then-U.S. President Bill Clinton — was inevitable, and could only bring about a better life for all. The Kyoto Protocol had just been adopted, and although it had its flaws, it seemed to be the first step in an increasingly coordinated global effort to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
The Earth Policy Institute valiantly issued its “State of the World” warnings against overfishing, desertification, and an emerging water crisis. But many were persuaded by corporate agribusiness’ propaganda that it had developed the technological capacity to more than feed the world, and that the only remaining problem was the distribution of food, which was a logistical as well as political matter.
Malthus’ Specter?
Today’s mood could not be more different, and it’s not only because of unease over the speed with which we added another billion people since 1999.
Global capitalism is in a deep, deep funk, with the center economies caught indefinitely in the iron grip of stagnation and high unemployment. Extreme weather events have become a fact of life, yet any move towards a successor to the Kyoto Protocol continues to elude the world’s governments. Agriculture seems to be at the limits of its productive capacity, prompting many to ask: Have we walked into the Malthusian trap?
Malthus, that enigmatic Victorian figure, predicted that population growth would outstrip the capacity of the soil to produce food, leading to a demographic cataclysm that would eventually result in a smaller population in equilibrium with the soil’s productive capacity. While Malthus’ views were adopted — uneasily — by many ecologists and environmentalists, he became the bête noire of both progressive and neoclassical economists. Progressives saw his theory as an elitist, conservative effort to blame the poor for their misfortunes, while some neoclassical economists, most notably Julian Simon, saw him and his followers as underestimating the human capacity to innovate to surmount limits to production and economic growth.
The food price crisis of 2008 was, to many, a wakeup call that agriculture might be reaching its productive limits — that the problem in agriculture was no longer just distribution, but production. That crisis saw the food import bills of the least developed countries rise by 37 percent in 2008, adding 75 million to the ranks of the hungry and driving an estimated 125 million into extreme poverty.
In accounting for the causes of the rapid rise in the price of food, analysts pointed to the convergence of a number of developments to create the perfect storm: among them, World Bank- and IMF-imposed structural adjustment programs in developing countries, which severely cut government support for agriculture and reduced agricultural production; the subsidized diversion of vast amounts of corn land, especially in the United States, to feedstock for biofuels rather than food production; speculation in food commodities in financial markets; and the growing resistance of insects to pesticides and the refusal of soils to respond to more applications of fertilizer.
Food Crisis Redux
After registering lower increases for two years, prices began again to rise markedly over the last year, underlining that the 2006-2008 crisis was no fluke. In July, the average price of wheat was 45 percent higher than it was earlier, while that of corn was 89 percent higher.
This time around, though, extreme weather events caused by climate change were the central factor, reminding people how extremely fragile the links are between the soil and the atmosphere. In the last year, massive wildfires in Russia devastated hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland, forcing the government to impose a ban on grain exports; a stubborn drought in China ravaged 14 million hectares and left 14 million people short of water; unremitting rains in Pakistan devastated the country’s croplands for the second year in a row; practically the whole Australian state of Queensland, including its capital, Brisbane, was submerged by floods, with billions of dollars worth of grain, vegetables, and livestock swept away; and in the last few months, the Horn of Africa has been paralyzed by a drought that has placed some 12.4 million people at risk of famine.
In the last few weeks, it has been the turn of Southeast Asia’s rice bowls to suffer nature’s revenge for human beings’ inordinate carbon consumption. Some 1.5 million hectares of rice land have been inundated in Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, and Thailand, with 1 million hectares in Thailand, the world’s leading rice exporter, alone. An estimated 1.3 million metric tons of rice in Thailand have been lost, while in the Philippines, more than 103,000 metric tons of the standing rice crop were wiped out by the recent typhoons. Already the price of Thai rice in the international market is 26 percent higher than it was in May, and is expected to rise even more steeply.
Things can only get worse over the next few years, say climate experts.
Progressives and Population
The crisis of agricultural production has led many to give a fresh look at the population issue. Among them are people on the left. In the past, progressives tended to be lumped together with the Catholic hierarchy and Christian fundamentalists as population skeptics, though for different reasons. Some of them saw family planning as a U.S. plot to keep developing countries under its thumb, while others argued that the main problem lay in the concentration of wealth and the means of production in the hands of a few. Ending this stranglehold, they asserted, would open the way to egalitarian redistribution, which would address the problems brought about by the rise in population.
At the global level, progressives argued that overconsumption by the 20 percent that lived in the North, not population pressure from the 80 percent that lived in the South, constituted the main social and environmental challenge.
Once in power, however, progressives acknowledged that even without class inequalities, unrestrained population growth would foreclose the possibility of economic growth and development. Thus, concern over population growth outstripping food production and economic growth led China in the 1980s to institute its one-child policy, which, for all the abuses connected to it, has appeared largely positive on balance — resulting in as many as 300 million fewer births and providing the breathing space to channel significant resources from consumption to investment.
Vietnam followed suit, promoting a two-child policy that, unlike in China, was implemented non-coercively. The results have been equally positive. The country’s population growth rate is down to 1.2 percent per annum. The total fertility rate (TFR), or the average number of children per woman of reproductive age, has dropped from over 6 in 1961, when the program first began, to 2.1, a figure that demographers tag as “replacement-level fertility.” Vietnam has 88.2 million people; had there been no family planning program, it would now have 104 million people.
18.6 million fewer births has meant that Vietnam could devote more resources to upgrading the quality of education, alleviating poverty, and increasing investment. The country registered a growth rate of 7.2 percent per annum in the period from 2000-2010. By 2010, average per capita income in the country had tripled, reflecting economic growth outpacing the population growth rate.
Population Management and the East Asian “Miracle”
In adopting family planning, the post-revolutionary societies of China and Vietnam most likely drew inspiration from their East Asian capitalist neighbors. Thailand, Indonesia, South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan had found it necessary to implement strong preemptive family planning programs to create the space for economic takeoff. Although effective family planning was not the only factor explaining their rapid growth, it was a major one.
By providing access to contraceptives, state-supported family planning programs in these countries enabled women to have greater control over reproduction. The proportion of women using contraceptives in East Asia is four times the rate in Africa, and surveys have shown that the difference is largely explained by the state provision of contraceptives in East Asia. And when access to contraceptives was joined to greater access to education, the trend was for women to limit their births in order to accumulate the resources to improve their families’ living standards. Such were the dynamics of the demographic revolution in East Asia.
The End of Growth?
Yet the success of these societies in achieving high growth by managing their populations may be wiped out if the era of growth is over, as some analysts contend.
Most of the East Asian economies, and some other developing economies in Latin America and Africa, followed export-oriented development strategies that were dependent on continuing growth in the North. Yet the Northern economies, bludgeoned by the current crisis of capitalism, now face a future of stagnation or low growth. For the advanced developing economies to now shift and follow an alternative strategy of achieving growth by relying on domestic consumption seems logical, but this is easier said than done. The social classes and enterprises that formed around a 30-year-old strategy can stymie an effective transition, as has been the case in China. This is not surprising since a shift in development strategy is not simply a change in policy, but also involves a redistribution of income and economic power if the rural and urban lower classes are to be equipped with the purchasing power to be the new sources of demand.
But the bigger question faced by all developing economies, whether export- or domestic market-oriented, is whether it is still possible to follow the traditional growth strategy. To analysts like Richard Heinberg, the intersection of the financial collapse, economic stagnation, global warming, the steady depletion of fossil fuel reserves, and agriculture reaching its limits is a fatal one. It represents a far more profound crisis than a temporary setback on the road to growth. It portends not simply the end of a paradigm of global growth driven by the demand of the center economies. It means the “end of growth” as we know it. It is, in short, the Malthusian trap, though Heinberg understandably avoids using the term.
Paradoxically, the so-called least-developed countries in Africa and South Asia may have an easier time making the transition to a post-growth global economy. They are less integrated into the global economy, and many maintain agricultural sectors that have not been totally damaged by structural adjustment and liberalization. They have also been far behind in the institutionalization of the high-growth-dependent western consumption model, owing to widespread poverty. If they can combine effective family planning programs with successful redistribution initiatives and economic strategies emphasizing improvement in the quality of life, they may well pioneer the forging of a post-growth, post-globalization development strategy.
It will not be easy though.
Dilemmas
The current dilemmas of our planet of 7 billion are well summed up by Richard Heinberg in his latest book, The End of Growth:
“Perhaps the meteoric rise of the finance economy in the past couple of decades resulted from semi-conscious strategy on the part of society’s managerial elites to leverage the last possible increments of growth from a physical, resourced based economy that was nearing its capacity. In any case, the implications of the current economic crisis cannot be captured by unemployment statistics and real estate prices. Attempts to restart growth will inevitably collide with natural limits that simply don’t respond to stimulus packages or bailouts. … Burgeoning environmental problems require rapidly increasing amounts of efforts to fix them. In addition to facing limits on the amount of debt that can be accumulated in order to keep those problems at bay, we also face limits to the amounts of energy and materials we can devote to these purposes. Until now the dynamism of growth has enabled us to stay ahead of accumulating environmental costs. As growth ends, the environmental bills for the last two centuries of manic expansion may come due just as our bank account empties."
http://www.focusweb.org/
Globalization, according to its apostles — foremost among them then-U.S. President Bill Clinton — was inevitable, and could only bring about a better life for all. The Kyoto Protocol had just been adopted, and although it had its flaws, it seemed to be the first step in an increasingly coordinated global effort to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
The Earth Policy Institute valiantly issued its “State of the World” warnings against overfishing, desertification, and an emerging water crisis. But many were persuaded by corporate agribusiness’ propaganda that it had developed the technological capacity to more than feed the world, and that the only remaining problem was the distribution of food, which was a logistical as well as political matter.
Malthus’ Specter?
Today’s mood could not be more different, and it’s not only because of unease over the speed with which we added another billion people since 1999.
Global capitalism is in a deep, deep funk, with the center economies caught indefinitely in the iron grip of stagnation and high unemployment. Extreme weather events have become a fact of life, yet any move towards a successor to the Kyoto Protocol continues to elude the world’s governments. Agriculture seems to be at the limits of its productive capacity, prompting many to ask: Have we walked into the Malthusian trap?
Malthus, that enigmatic Victorian figure, predicted that population growth would outstrip the capacity of the soil to produce food, leading to a demographic cataclysm that would eventually result in a smaller population in equilibrium with the soil’s productive capacity. While Malthus’ views were adopted — uneasily — by many ecologists and environmentalists, he became the bête noire of both progressive and neoclassical economists. Progressives saw his theory as an elitist, conservative effort to blame the poor for their misfortunes, while some neoclassical economists, most notably Julian Simon, saw him and his followers as underestimating the human capacity to innovate to surmount limits to production and economic growth.
The food price crisis of 2008 was, to many, a wakeup call that agriculture might be reaching its productive limits — that the problem in agriculture was no longer just distribution, but production. That crisis saw the food import bills of the least developed countries rise by 37 percent in 2008, adding 75 million to the ranks of the hungry and driving an estimated 125 million into extreme poverty.
In accounting for the causes of the rapid rise in the price of food, analysts pointed to the convergence of a number of developments to create the perfect storm: among them, World Bank- and IMF-imposed structural adjustment programs in developing countries, which severely cut government support for agriculture and reduced agricultural production; the subsidized diversion of vast amounts of corn land, especially in the United States, to feedstock for biofuels rather than food production; speculation in food commodities in financial markets; and the growing resistance of insects to pesticides and the refusal of soils to respond to more applications of fertilizer.
Food Crisis Redux
After registering lower increases for two years, prices began again to rise markedly over the last year, underlining that the 2006-2008 crisis was no fluke. In July, the average price of wheat was 45 percent higher than it was earlier, while that of corn was 89 percent higher.
This time around, though, extreme weather events caused by climate change were the central factor, reminding people how extremely fragile the links are between the soil and the atmosphere. In the last year, massive wildfires in Russia devastated hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland, forcing the government to impose a ban on grain exports; a stubborn drought in China ravaged 14 million hectares and left 14 million people short of water; unremitting rains in Pakistan devastated the country’s croplands for the second year in a row; practically the whole Australian state of Queensland, including its capital, Brisbane, was submerged by floods, with billions of dollars worth of grain, vegetables, and livestock swept away; and in the last few months, the Horn of Africa has been paralyzed by a drought that has placed some 12.4 million people at risk of famine.
In the last few weeks, it has been the turn of Southeast Asia’s rice bowls to suffer nature’s revenge for human beings’ inordinate carbon consumption. Some 1.5 million hectares of rice land have been inundated in Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, and Thailand, with 1 million hectares in Thailand, the world’s leading rice exporter, alone. An estimated 1.3 million metric tons of rice in Thailand have been lost, while in the Philippines, more than 103,000 metric tons of the standing rice crop were wiped out by the recent typhoons. Already the price of Thai rice in the international market is 26 percent higher than it was in May, and is expected to rise even more steeply.
Things can only get worse over the next few years, say climate experts.
Progressives and Population
The crisis of agricultural production has led many to give a fresh look at the population issue. Among them are people on the left. In the past, progressives tended to be lumped together with the Catholic hierarchy and Christian fundamentalists as population skeptics, though for different reasons. Some of them saw family planning as a U.S. plot to keep developing countries under its thumb, while others argued that the main problem lay in the concentration of wealth and the means of production in the hands of a few. Ending this stranglehold, they asserted, would open the way to egalitarian redistribution, which would address the problems brought about by the rise in population.
At the global level, progressives argued that overconsumption by the 20 percent that lived in the North, not population pressure from the 80 percent that lived in the South, constituted the main social and environmental challenge.
Once in power, however, progressives acknowledged that even without class inequalities, unrestrained population growth would foreclose the possibility of economic growth and development. Thus, concern over population growth outstripping food production and economic growth led China in the 1980s to institute its one-child policy, which, for all the abuses connected to it, has appeared largely positive on balance — resulting in as many as 300 million fewer births and providing the breathing space to channel significant resources from consumption to investment.
Vietnam followed suit, promoting a two-child policy that, unlike in China, was implemented non-coercively. The results have been equally positive. The country’s population growth rate is down to 1.2 percent per annum. The total fertility rate (TFR), or the average number of children per woman of reproductive age, has dropped from over 6 in 1961, when the program first began, to 2.1, a figure that demographers tag as “replacement-level fertility.” Vietnam has 88.2 million people; had there been no family planning program, it would now have 104 million people.
18.6 million fewer births has meant that Vietnam could devote more resources to upgrading the quality of education, alleviating poverty, and increasing investment. The country registered a growth rate of 7.2 percent per annum in the period from 2000-2010. By 2010, average per capita income in the country had tripled, reflecting economic growth outpacing the population growth rate.
Population Management and the East Asian “Miracle”
In adopting family planning, the post-revolutionary societies of China and Vietnam most likely drew inspiration from their East Asian capitalist neighbors. Thailand, Indonesia, South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan had found it necessary to implement strong preemptive family planning programs to create the space for economic takeoff. Although effective family planning was not the only factor explaining their rapid growth, it was a major one.
By providing access to contraceptives, state-supported family planning programs in these countries enabled women to have greater control over reproduction. The proportion of women using contraceptives in East Asia is four times the rate in Africa, and surveys have shown that the difference is largely explained by the state provision of contraceptives in East Asia. And when access to contraceptives was joined to greater access to education, the trend was for women to limit their births in order to accumulate the resources to improve their families’ living standards. Such were the dynamics of the demographic revolution in East Asia.
The End of Growth?
Yet the success of these societies in achieving high growth by managing their populations may be wiped out if the era of growth is over, as some analysts contend.
Most of the East Asian economies, and some other developing economies in Latin America and Africa, followed export-oriented development strategies that were dependent on continuing growth in the North. Yet the Northern economies, bludgeoned by the current crisis of capitalism, now face a future of stagnation or low growth. For the advanced developing economies to now shift and follow an alternative strategy of achieving growth by relying on domestic consumption seems logical, but this is easier said than done. The social classes and enterprises that formed around a 30-year-old strategy can stymie an effective transition, as has been the case in China. This is not surprising since a shift in development strategy is not simply a change in policy, but also involves a redistribution of income and economic power if the rural and urban lower classes are to be equipped with the purchasing power to be the new sources of demand.
But the bigger question faced by all developing economies, whether export- or domestic market-oriented, is whether it is still possible to follow the traditional growth strategy. To analysts like Richard Heinberg, the intersection of the financial collapse, economic stagnation, global warming, the steady depletion of fossil fuel reserves, and agriculture reaching its limits is a fatal one. It represents a far more profound crisis than a temporary setback on the road to growth. It portends not simply the end of a paradigm of global growth driven by the demand of the center economies. It means the “end of growth” as we know it. It is, in short, the Malthusian trap, though Heinberg understandably avoids using the term.
Paradoxically, the so-called least-developed countries in Africa and South Asia may have an easier time making the transition to a post-growth global economy. They are less integrated into the global economy, and many maintain agricultural sectors that have not been totally damaged by structural adjustment and liberalization. They have also been far behind in the institutionalization of the high-growth-dependent western consumption model, owing to widespread poverty. If they can combine effective family planning programs with successful redistribution initiatives and economic strategies emphasizing improvement in the quality of life, they may well pioneer the forging of a post-growth, post-globalization development strategy.
It will not be easy though.
Dilemmas
The current dilemmas of our planet of 7 billion are well summed up by Richard Heinberg in his latest book, The End of Growth:
“Perhaps the meteoric rise of the finance economy in the past couple of decades resulted from semi-conscious strategy on the part of society’s managerial elites to leverage the last possible increments of growth from a physical, resourced based economy that was nearing its capacity. In any case, the implications of the current economic crisis cannot be captured by unemployment statistics and real estate prices. Attempts to restart growth will inevitably collide with natural limits that simply don’t respond to stimulus packages or bailouts. … Burgeoning environmental problems require rapidly increasing amounts of efforts to fix them. In addition to facing limits on the amount of debt that can be accumulated in order to keep those problems at bay, we also face limits to the amounts of energy and materials we can devote to these purposes. Until now the dynamism of growth has enabled us to stay ahead of accumulating environmental costs. As growth ends, the environmental bills for the last two centuries of manic expansion may come due just as our bank account empties."
http://www.focusweb.org/
Walden Bello
Comments
Hide the following 13 comments
But we are usually unfair to Malthus
08.11.2011 14:22
a) He was early in using DATA (birth and death and marriage records).
b) He was arguing that populations were in stable equilibrium with food supply. That means if something else moved the population up or down would return to the initial state. As always "stability" means against a small enough peturbation.
c) He concluded that this wasn't happening because people engaged in less sex (celibacy)
His ACTUAL list of "things that might limit human population" always includes one final item besides the more familiar "war, pestilence, fami9ne, etc. etc. This final item "vice" he does not define. I want you to note two things. One, that this item is almost always left off the list when malthus is discussed. The second is that perhaps we need to ponder what a clergyman of his time could have meant by "vice", one that could limit population. Did he perhaps use "vice" as a code word for "sex without procreation" (birth control, etc.).
And yes, Malthus was very important for "ecology" because realizing that what he was saying must apply to animals provided the driving force behind evolution.
As to "blame the poor" --- Malthus is nowhere talking about blame, whether the population is made up of rich or poor, etc. He's talking about "is", not "ought". And the later Victorians and "Neo-Malthusians" who were (mis)using him in this were ignoring the "and humans will NOT be adjusting by having more or less sex" as well as that "vice". Idiotic to balme the poor for having too many babies when you have already concluded they have no choice/control in the matter.
MDN
Extreme weather may also be caused by weather modification
08.11.2011 21:05
Extreme weather may be caused by weather modification in addition to or instead of global climate change or global warming.
History Channel Documentary on weather modification
And the elites' policies involve abolishing (or significantly hampering) the real job of the EPA and allowing radioactive fallout from Fukushima to enter the food chain in the entire northern hemisphere.
The FDA has been intent on "regulating" natural sources of nutrition and medicine and instead promoting dangerous drugs that treat the symptoms of diseases (diseases that are in many cases caused by nutritional deficiency anyway) like scorched earth antibiotics, genetically engineered pharmaceuticals like statins and insulins, and psychopharmacological drugs. Just look at the rash of drug recalls recently.
So this article seems to support some agenda by ignoring the real death machines and instead encouraging new policies of control on the working class' use of resources and energy. Al Gore still takes plane trips across the planet, so he is only preaching energy use reduction for the masses -- not the elites
Anonymous
So what
08.11.2011 21:14
Member of planet
if we want fantasy
09.11.2011 02:05
Unfair distribution is a problem BUT isn't why there is a sustainable limit. And crazy estimates like 19 billion are based on money, not real things. A failure to understand that the richest people living on thousands ot times what the the poorest have to live on are not eating thousands of times more food, not even ten times as much food (think about it).
We are today supporting 7 billion people because we are eating oil. Not directly of course, but indirectly we are eating oil. Oil converted to fertilizers so that maize can produce 150 bu/acre every year instead of just one year in three, etc. (the other two years growing legume hay that can put the nitorgen back). Oil used to pull the plows so we can eat the food from fields that would otherwise be needed to feed the oxen or horses.
Sorry, but when the oil runs out .......... Look, if we consider how many people we were able to feed before oil, not all that long ago, would be a much more realistic estimate. They were NOT incompetent farmers back then. Take another look at that chart and see how recently in our past we were only able to feed 1 billion, 2 billion.
I know this is painful. Take off your ideological blinders. Understand what "sustainable" means. We CAN'T in the long run have more poeple than is sustainable. That's not a choice, it's sad reality. The only choice we might have is HOW we end up with a sustainable population as the fossil fuels and fossil water (perhpas as important) are used up.
MDN
Globalism in action.
09.11.2011 12:17
No mention is made of the fact that the 'spike' in population from 1999 onwards is also heavily made up from the expansion of commercialism around the world most notably in China. With the expansion of commercialism comes more virile tools to collate and count the populations. Capitalism demands it knows the size of its markets so sets great store in census and population counts. In many nations, the population size has always been a big problem with massive errors in reporting accurate numbers due to social, cultural and governmental reasons along with under reporting of deaths and migration/immigration.
What we are really seeing here, is a major spike in worldwide population brought about by the spread of industrial Capitalism and its marketisation counting systems.
This isn't about a population 'spike', this is about bureaucratic visibility!
That red line on that graph suddenly leaping skyward...is Globalisation in action!
anonymous
Oh?
09.11.2011 14:02
And you think this is a problem due to capitalism?
Take off your ideological blinders. I am NOT supporting capitalism vs socialism. The latter is clearly much better in getting a fairer distribution of what there is among how many of us there are. But it isn't capitalism that is fueling our explosion in population but the growth of industrial civilization with its ability to "mine" fossil resources and while those fossil resources last to support a population far in excess of the sustainable steady state. You really do need to try to make a case. You need MORE than arguing that capitalism has been at the helm during this population explosion. You need to present arguments WHY (mechanisms) universal socialism would have led us to limit our numbers. Try going back to 19th Century expressions of what socialism could do -- have us exploit nature for the benefit of all rather than just the benefit of the few. That vision helps?
As to the steepness of the curve, that's what an exponential function looks like. If you switch to logrithmic graph paper the growth will look straight line.
I'll repeat just in case not clear enough the first time. The fight socialism vs capitalism is about the fairness of distribution. A worth while cause but NOT necessarily related to the problem of our numbers relative to the sustainable productive capacity of the planet. Not EVERYTHING is capitalism vs socialism.
MDN
Capitalism, Socialism, Globalism and Consumerism.
09.11.2011 16:32
Take off your ideological blinders. I am NOT supporting capitalism vs socialism. The latter is clearly much better in getting a fairer distribution of what there is among how many of us there are. But it isn't capitalism that is fueling our explosion in population but the growth of industrial civilization with its ability to "mine" fossil resources and while those fossil resources last to support a population far in excess of the sustainable steady state. You really do need to try to make a case. You need MORE than arguing that capitalism has been at the helm during this population explosion. You need to present arguments WHY (mechanisms) universal socialism would have led us to limit our numbers. Try going back to 19th Century expressions of what socialism could do -- have us exploit nature for the benefit of all rather than just the benefit of the few. That vision helps?
I'll repeat just in case not clear enough the first time. The fight socialism vs capitalism is about the fairness of distribution. A worth while cause but NOT necessarily related to the problem of our numbers relative to the sustainable productive capacity of the planet. Not EVERYTHING is capitalism vs socialism."
I don't understand what you mean by 19th Century expression of what Socialism can do -- 'have us exploit nature for the benefit of all rather than just the benefit of the few'.
Capitalism and Socialism are simply flip sides of the same coin. One is very good at expansion, the other very good at contraction. They are the living breathing heart and soul of western civilisation. They are not separate, they are indivisible elements that compete with each other to facilitate two polar rotations of the same policy of 'consumerism'. In terms of population of the world we inhabit, the argument is always going to be 'resources + consumption = survivability'. It has always been that way. If consumption outsrips resources then survivability is a negative. If resources outsrips consumption then we survive for another day.
To say that there is a choice in this equation between Capitalism or Socialism is to argue the detail about whether we live in a state of permamnet contraction or expansion. Neither one nor the other is better at providing for 'survivability', they are simply two concurrent examples of a spinning coin on a string.
This is the system in the US Particracy (a two party state), the UK Particracy (a two party state) and every other Democracy around the world.
I strongly suspect that Capitalism and Socialism play good cop, bad cop to a world sitting in an interrogation cell being boiled by a hot lamp under duress.
And I am not saying the population was much higher in the past, it probably wasn't. The plagues in the 1400's and 1600's have seen to that. What I am saying is that population is always undercounted when estimated and always overcounted when polled. The world population is growing, but more importantly so is the mechanical art of mathematical industrial Globalisation.
anonymous
Loadsa room
09.11.2011 17:14
Yet here I am, in the UK, like a caged tiger, a product of the fascist landowner culture. A single room juncture. A slave for sure.
9ft x 5ft
don't believe everything you hear
09.11.2011 22:57
3500 * 3500 *3 * 640 / 7000000000 = 3.36 so 7 is over 100% too high. But before you jump up and down about how 3 acres per person is plenty remember that a great deal of that area is piss poor for trying to live on, arctic tundra, arid deserts, mountains, etc. There isn't on GOOD acre per person.
And just what do you have in mind here? Exterminating all other plant and animal species that aren't primarily of use to us humans? Not that that would actually work out too well (ecosystems are linked in mysterious ways) but if that's your aim I'd much rather kill you.
In any case, you Brits don't have the planet, you have just Britain. About 89,000 sq miles and 60 million humans? That works out to just a bit under 1 acre per person. Again, not all good acres. But how many people you have is not necessarily a constant the way the 89,000 sq miles is. THAT is the right way to look at this. Given that land, the good bots and the not so good bits, once the oil and coal and aquifres are gone (OK, in YOUR climate water isn't a problem) just how many humans do you expect to be able to survive there on a sustainable basis. THAT you can't change, have no choice about, will be one way or another that number or less. What choice remiansm perhaps still remains, is how we get there.
MDN
MDN your name is on the wall...
10.11.2011 20:14
Micheal
One Michael to another? (MDN is my real world initials)
10.11.2011 21:31
In any case, as an American, a rural American anarchist, why should it worry me? Sure enough unarmed sheep could trample me to death. But there be a heck of a large pile of dead sheep.
But what does that have to do with what is reality? The reality we all face is that our numbers have exploded because the food supply increased once we humans learned how to exploit fossil fuels and fossil water. Once these run out ...............
It won't be in my life time (I'm probably a LOT older than you). The fact that I am bothering to try to get folks to see means I care that they at least have some choice in how what will happen happens.
MDN
a plague on all your houses
11.11.2011 09:46
The article kinda defeats itself at points, saying it's not just distribution but production of food, but then going on to say it's distribution and other human influences (biofuels, severe weather chaos, etc).
About 70% of food is currently produced using agro-ecological methods (ie yes the use of oil is significant, but not a support to your 'less people' mooo-ing).
For as long as there is such HUGE INEQUALITY IN CONSUMPTION, I will continue with what you'd call my blinkers and say FUCK YOU, YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO TALK ABOUT POPULATION, UNTIL WE ALL CONSUME AT SUSTAINABLE LEVELS.
And that means in the UK as much as in the US of course.
tired unchallenging dogma
Why?
11.11.2011 20:30
Is our disagreement as simple as a dispute over numbers? Where have you ever seen me say that addressing unfair distribution isn't important?
Look -- what is the issue here is the estimate of the total (post fossil resource) sustainable production of this planet. And assuming this were divided fairly, how many people could that support. What is YOUR estimate for that number? Upon what do you base that estimate? After the fossil resources are gone the sustainable production of this planet would support X billion humans (and here are my calculations). Obviously if the distribution is unfair we will have less than X.
I have seen very depressing estimates as low as half a billion as well as more optimistic ones as high as two billion. You have no right to tell me to stop talking about population unless your calculated value for X is 7 billion or higher. Remember, a claculated value, not one based upon ideology or religious faith because the alternative is unthinkable.
MDN