Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Not sure this is the right category for my topic, but at least it is not on Trump for a change
I am having a little discussion with an acquaintance about the topic of overpopulation and our views are basically opposing:
She seems to think that it is better for people in the West not to have kids because the world is already overpopulated and heading for an abyss. I totally agree that our world is in trouble and we need to change, but to me overpopulation is an arbitrary term because there is no exact number of humans our planet can take. If we lower our standard of living, the planet can take billions more. So, the carrying capacity is virtually impossible to define in the case of humans, and accordingly scientists vastly disagree on the numbers. Think of food for instance. Americans throw away a considerable percentage of their food, while in other countries people eat every last crumb. So, if we all behaved like the latter, at the end of the day the world could take a few additional billions.
Plus, what is the point of my not having a kid in the West when I live in a country whose population is already declining, with all the societal, financial and other problems that brings? I even think it is a bit egoistic to deliberately not have kids. I am talking about 1 or 2 kids (statistically about 2 kids per woman is what it takes to maintain a society), mind you, not half a dozen like in many developing countries. Does sending a developed country into a downward spiral of overaging and ultimately even extinction really mitigate the problems excess fertility in developing countries brings?
There is also a certain racist element. Many people think of brown and Asian people when they hear the word overpopulation. Like, there are too many Africans and Asians.
Yes, it is possible to do that. And I think that we wouldn't necessarily have to lower our standard of living by much. We can build huge high-rises to house everyone, and we can grow all our food in vats. Food technology is such that these vat-grown foods wouldn't seem all that fake. We can make water from the atmosphere, and it wouldn't matter if the air outside the high-rises was foul, we can build tubes and tunnels to get around the planet. Many science fiction books are full of ideas about how technology could allow humans to survive on planets that are inimical to humans. And that's the problem. It would require a nearly complete destruction of the natural world. NO THANKS.
A clearer example of how what we could do is not what we should do is hard to come by.
I think the reason for that was simply that the world used to be very sparsely populated, it took some time for the snowball effect to hit. So, no, I don't think it has anything to do with the onset of the fossil fuel age.
I think you are too pessimistic.
For instance, the EU has implemented fishing policies prohibiting the capture of certain fish species beyond specific quota per species and year. And that has rapidly lead to a rebound of those species in overfished waters.
If we wanted to, we could fix our planet very fast. All that is missing is the will on the part of our leaders.
Yes, it does. Life is all about energy flow. And fossil fuel allowed humans to extract A LOT of stored energy from the earth, much more than we could have extracted from natural sources like burning wood, windmills, and running water over the same time period. And just as any other life form on earth would have done, we responded to the increased energy available to us by increasing our population. And then we increased our survival rates by using some of that "extra" energy to manipulate our environment so we could raise more of our offspring to their reproductive age.
Fossil fuel is the reason why we can have a chemical industry. And our modern agriculture runs on petroleum-derived chemicals. I never worry about what will happen to transportation if fossil fuels start to disappear. Humans have always found ways to get around. I worry about what will happen to humans once it gets harder to practice modern healthcare because medical "plastics" and many medicines are ultimately derived from a petroleum feedstock.
"The fundamental cause of the acceleration of growth rate for humans in the past 200 years has been the reduced death rate due to a development of the technological advances of the industrial age, urbanization that supported those technologies, and especially the exploitation of the energy in fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are responsible for dramatically increasing the resources available for human population growth through agriculture (mechanization, pesticides, and fertilizers) and harvesting wild populations." https://openstax.org/books/concepts-...man-population
I think our future is grim if we continue heedlessly down the path we are on. But I definitely agree with you that it doesn't have to be this way. We can find solutions to all the problems I mention, and many more besides. But the sooner we start to invest in non-petroleum technological development, the better.
The leaders follow the people, sooner or later. Always. The first requirement for being a leader is to get people to follow you.
And here's a footnote to ponder - a hundred years' worth of statistics clearly shows that the most efficient way to slow human reproduction is to educate girls. If you are truly worried about third-world (over)population - make girls' education a major component of foreign aid.
Yet a child born to a middle-class American family will consume, in his or her lifetime, a far greater amount of the limited resources of the world- more than twice the amount of food, for instance - than a child born in a less developed country. This is evidenced by the comments you find here in this tread.
Were it not for immigration, the demographic picture for the US would resemble Japan and Europe, with declining population and smaller carbon/environmental footprint.
And yet, a lot of these "climate change" activists say it is OK or even encourage people from the Third World to migrate to the West, thereby increasing their carbon footprint and resource consumption immensely
Yes, unfortunately most people in those countries are so busy with their material progress that they don't think beyond that, yet. Indians are replacing their rich cultural and religious heritage with material progress.
Many poor people also don't care much about the environment.
In the West, the environmentalist movement is overwhelmingly composed of Whites.
She is behind times. We are not headed for an over populated planet. In fact there is a demographic time bomb coming that will decrease the population. We are just about at peak population now.
China, with the largest population will suffer greatly in decades to come. The damage is already done, and cannot be reversed.
In 150 years there will be far fewer humans than today. The UN insists that there is a population growth crisis. But actual demographers know better.
It's odd reading all of the non biological scientists here making false assertions.
For many populations, the number of individuals is determined not by reproductive potential but by the environment. A given environment can support only a limited number of individuals of a particular population under any specific set of circumstances. Population size oscillates around this number, which is known as the carrying capacity of the environment.
It is estimated that about 25,000 years ago there may have been as many as 3 million people. Some 15,000 years later, at the close of the Pleistocene epoch, the population probably numbered a little more than 5 million, spread over the entire world. At this point, some 10,000 years ago, the establishment of agricultural communities began. In the next 5,000
years, agriculture spread throughout the world and was accompanied by a twenty fold increase in the human population - to about 100 million in 3000 B.C.
From 3000 B.C. until about 1650, human population growth slowed considerably. During this period...slightly less than 5,000 years - the population increased only five fold, to about 500 million. At about this time, however, the rapid development of science, technology, and industrialization began, bringing profound changes in human life and its relationship to nature. In the 200 years between 1650 and 1850, the population doubled, to 1,000 million (1 billion), and then it doubled again by 1930, to 2 billion.
By 1989, there were 5.25 billion people on our planet, and the population continued to grow at a rate of 1.7% a year. This meant a net increase in the world population of about 170 people every minute, more than 244,000 each day, and almost 90 million every year. Scientists predicted if this rate of increase is sustained, there will be about 6.3 billion people on earth by 2000. Scientists made a prediction and were spot on!
Now nineteen year's later we are at 7.7 billion people on this planet!
There is, however, a correlation between economic development and high birth rates. It is in the developing countries that the highest rates of population growth are found. In India, for example, which has struggled for years to feed its ever-surging population, the annual rate of population increase is 2%. Yet most Indian women do not seek help in birth control until they have three or four children. The desire for large families is deeply rooted in their culture. Moreover, in Indian tradition, children provide security for their parents in old age. Two studies of life expectancy in India have shown that, with the high death rate among children, it is necessary for a mother to bear five children if the couple is to be 95% certain that one son will survive the father's sixty fifth birthday.
Within the last few years, the rate of population growth worldwide has begun to decline, but it is too early to know if this decline represents a long-term trend or is only temporary. What has become clear, however, is that the current growth of the human population poses urgent and complex problems, made more difficult by the unequal distribution of growth and available resources. Births are occurring at the greatest rates in precisely those areas where the new arrivals have the least chance of an adequate diet, good housing, schools, medical care, or future occupations. Moreover, because the affluent citizens of developed countries are not constantly reminded of the soaring population by the problems of hunger and crowding, so evident to the poor of other countries...they may just overlook the issues associated with overpopulation.
Yet a child born to a middle-class American family will consume, in his or her lifetime, a far greater amount of the limited resources of the world - more than twice the amount of food, for instance - than a child born in a less developed country.
Yes, it does. Life is all about energy flow. And fossil fuel allowed humans to extract A LOT of stored energy from the earth, much more than we could have extracted from natural sources like burning wood, windmills, and running water over the same time period. And just as any other life form on earth would have done, we responded to the increased energy available to us by increasing our population. And then we increased our survival rates by using some of that "extra" energy to manipulate our environment so we could raise more of our offspring to their reproductive age.
Fossil fuel is the reason why we can have a chemical industry. And our modern agriculture runs on petroleum-derived chemicals. I never worry about what will happen to transportation if fossil fuels start to disappear. Humans have always found ways to get around. I worry about what will happen to humans once it gets harder to practice modern healthcare because medical "plastics" and many medicines are ultimately derived from a petroleum feedstock.
"The fundamental cause of the acceleration of growth rate for humans in the past 200 years has been the reduced death rate due to a development of the technological advances of the industrial age, urbanization that supported those technologies, and especially the exploitation of the energy in fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are responsible for dramatically increasing the resources available for human population growth through agriculture (mechanization, pesticides, and fertilizers) and harvesting wild populations." https://openstax.org/books/concepts-...man-population
I think our future is grim if we continue heedlessly down the path we are on. But I definitely agree with you that it doesn't have to be this way. We can find solutions to all the problems I mention, and many more besides. But the sooner we start to invest in non-petroleum technological development, the better.
The leaders follow the people, sooner or later. Always. The first requirement for being a leader is to get people to follow you.
And here's a footnote to ponder - a hundred years' worth of statistics clearly shows that the most efficient way to slow human reproduction is to educate girls.
Looks to me like that graph is making the point that better ag methods, including plant breeding, increase population. More food = more energy = more population. This is kind of basic to understanding any population of living things. The conclusion I draw is that when Chinese people increased their plant-breeding efforts - possibly due to exposure to what was going on in other countries - the better plants resulted in more children surviving to reproductive age.
It’s not so much the number as the type. We are have too many Africans and not enough Europeans for example.
How many is too many?
What objective criteria can be used to determine too many?
The poorest countries with no safety nets tend to have the highest birth rates.
The wealthiest countries ( does not mean there are no poor people) with the strongest safety nets tend to have the lowest birth rates.
Then there’s geographical differences, for example Lakeland, NJ where the Orthodox community reportedly has the highest birth rate in the world. Crime tends to be limited to welfare fraud.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
