Convince me that the world isn't overpopulated

[icehorse]

What comes first, the chicken or the egg.

Hmmm. I'm not sure how you can cast this as a chicken / egg problem?

 

[muhammad_isa]

At some point we're going to run short of the natural resources fueling this growth of population and standard-of-living; or environmental collapse will initiate a new dark age.

Well, of course .. there are limits to growth.
Nature has its own way of dealing with that.

 

[muhammad_isa]

Hmmm. I'm not sure how you can cast this as a chicken / egg problem?

You say that it is overpopulation that is the problem.
I say that it is industrialization, and the global economic system that it caused.

 

[icehorse]

Well, of course .. there are limits to growth.
Nature has its own way of dealing with that.

I'm hoping we can avoid nature's solutions, they tend to be quite brutal.

You say that it is overpopulation that is the problem.
I say that it is industrialization, and the global economic system that it caused.

How do you feel about people living in cities at all?

 

[Valjean]

Well, of course .. there are limits to growth.
Nature has its own way of dealing with that.

Sometimes.... but occasionally we get a mass extinction when nature cannot adapt fast enough.
Analogy: Our bodies house millions of bacteria. Competition and the immune systems keep things in balance. But occasionally a species evades the system and multiplies out of control. It secretes toxins, depletes nutrients, and alters the whole equilibrium enough to kill its host.

Earth has such an infection, breeding beyond its carrying capacity.

 

[muhammad_isa]

Earth has such an infection, breeding beyond its carrying capacity.

It's all in the mind, you know

 

[Valjean]

Well, of course .. there are limits to growth.
Nature has its own way of dealing with that.

Sometimes.... but occasionally we get a mass extinction when nature cannot adapt fast enough.
Analogy: Our bodies house millions of bacteria. Competition and the immune systems keep things in balance. But occasionally a species evades the system and multiplies out of control. It secretes toxins, depletes nutrients, and alters the whole equilibrium enough to kill its host.

Earth has such an infection, breeding beyond its carrying capacity.

You [Icehouse] say that it is overpopulation that is the problem.
I say that it is industrialization, and the global economic system that it caused.

Extractive industry and a profligate economic system are, indeed, problems. But they exist to feed a wasteful and acquisitive population.
Cut the population and you cut the need for industry and resource extraction, and decrease waste and pollution.

 

[Valjean]

It's all in the mind, you know

Just look at the evidence.

 

[anotherneil]

I do not "dodge". If you think I've missed a point, I won't take offense if you reiterate it.

I'm referring to this:

Even if you could prove that there is indeed overpopulation, so what?

Wait - back up - it's not that simple. Who decides what the criteria is for overpopulation?

One issue with making the threshold for overpopulation as a function of available resources is that the threshold for overpopulation could be only 1 person. If there's not enough resources for 1 person, then there's overpopulation with a population of only 1 person.​

Convince me that the world isn't overpopulated

Ok, all I had to do was go in to around the 1:20 mark in this OP video, and already she's either being dishonest, or she's ignorant. She makes the false claim that "we've decided not to talk about it," despite that I've always been hearing about it throughout my life in many different ways...

www.religiousforums.com

And this:

Given that this is Religious Forums, I was speaking more broadly and generally about how the topic ties into religion (I sometimes like to do this), but to answer your question - not really; it's only part of it. In a broader & more abstract sense, it's essentially something along the lines that the notion of overpopulation is rather subjective and lacks some context. The main point, however - the underlying theme, is that not every issue is a problem or unsolved problem, and there can be more than one way to solve a problem. The wisdom that may be drawn is that having & keeping a free-market economy is best for solving problems.​

Convince me that the world isn't overpopulated

Ok, all I had to do was go in to around the 1:20 mark in this OP video, and already she's either being dishonest, or she's ignorant. She makes the false claim that "we've decided not to talk about it," despite that I've always been hearing about it throughout my life in many different ways...

www.religiousforums.com

Science has allowed us to delay the inevitable, no doubt.

Is this something that's supposed to follow from what I said that you're specifically responding to? If so, then I don't see how.

What's "the inevitable"?

But there will be a point at which there are hard limits to what science can achieve.

Sure - so what?

Scientific achievements involve making observations, exploring, discovering, and generalizing about nature, the environment, and the universe.

Science and engineering (in the technological sense, as opposed to some political sense) are two different things; engineering is mainly about taking scientific generalizations and looking for ways to apply them towards solving societal problems (as opposed to problems within the realm of scientific observation, exploration, and discovery).

It isn't the proverbial scientist's job to solve any societal problems, so you can say that one hard limit on science is that it's not engineering.

Yes, in practice or reality there's some overlap between science and engineering, including scientists doing some engineering & vice versa; in that case your "hard limit" would simply be where that overlap with engineering ends.

Those solutions to societal problems that engineers come up with are either propagated through the market for financial profit, or they're given away for free. When solutions to societal problems are propagated through the market for financial profit, there's nothing government can do to make a free market any free-er; government can only get in the way of solutions to societal problems. Same goes with solutions to societal problems that are given away for free; all government can do is either get in the way or stay out of the way.

I'm not saying we shouldn't have government; there is a role that government plays in society, which is to be like a referee. It should only serve as a referee. Imagine a referee giving points to a sport team that it didn't earn because it didn't score points, or redistributing points from the losing team to the winning team. This is analogous to what politicians are doing when they try to take the role of government beyond just serving like a referee. It would inherently be a conflict of interests for a referee to be working for one of the teams. An example would be something like politicians saying that they've solved the poverty problem by changing the threshold for where the poverty line is; that doesn't put real food on plates or real roofs over heads; the market - and only the market - can achieve this!

This is the sort of thing that Orwell was taking issue with in the book "1984" when the state propaganda media would speak of fake increases in chocolate rations. Orwell identified as a proponent of socialism, yet he felt compelled to criticize it because he saw that it was in the business of delivering a bunch of BS rather than real results, yet strangely he didn't quite see the big picture showing that socialism can only deliver a bunch of BS.

When politicians can't pass the buck with problems caused by government interference in the market anymore, it seems to me that they conjure up concepts such as overpopulation to pin the blame on them.

And why? Why, why, why do humans need to continue to grow their populations?

This seems like quite a loaded question.

What do you mean by "need"? Humans continue to grow their populations, without some need for it necessarily playing some sort of role in it. First establish that it is due to a need; don't jump ahead and/or skip this part.

Humans generally have been and are growing their populations, but on more than one occasion I've come across media reports or articles covering reductions in increase rates of populations and even places with population decline.

I want to live on a planet where we appreciate nature.

So do I.

Where we think that an eagle's life is as valuable as ours.

Do you also want to think of those farm animals (that you reference further down) as having a life that's as valuable as an eagle's life?

The more we populate, the more other species go extinct.

Species extinction due to population can be a two-way street between humans and any non-human animals, and between any non-human animals. Extinction can also be due to natural effects not involving any species different from the one being affected. Species extinction has been happening long before humans showed up on the scene; one example is dinosaurs, which involves many species of animals.

And even if you don't care about other species, they are CRUCIAL to our survival. For example, if we make bees extinct, humans will follow shortly thereafter. And we DO NOT KNOW the complete ecosystem that bees need to survive.

I happen to have quite a bit of knowledge of honeybees. Along with some friends, we tried our hands at beekeeping, but didn't succeed because we relied on an environment where apparently the main resource was raspberry plants for a very brief amount of time. The hives did very well during that few weeks, but then they had to swarm probably because they got very large and needed to go where there were better resources. In another attempt, they were annihilated by small hive beetles.

If you're referring to plant pollination, just take a look at flowers and you'll see all kinds of activity involving insects other than bees. Aside from that, if bees were to go extinct, I think nature would still be able to manage by adapting, just like it has always been doing.

The free market, just like in all other situations, still applies; when the population of honeybees drops, the supply of honey drops, meaning that the price goes up. This will draw more people to get into beekeeping because they can make bank & in turn this will help increase or at least mitigate any reduction in honeybee population.

The math is very, very poor for this sort of solution. Yes, osmosis works. But it takes equipment, and mining, and so on to produce, and it's many, many orders of magnitude too small to handle the needs of 8 billion people.

We don't need to find sources of freshwater for all 8 billion people; many billions of people already have existing sources of freshwater. The idea of implementing something like reverse osmosis would be a matter of supply and demand, just like honeybees, and is a problem or challenge that the free market is capable of working on to find solutions.

Consider that it takes over 2000 gallons of fresh water to make a pound of beef. Chicken is a little better, only 500 gallons. Vegetables are better but it still requires many gallons of fresh water to produce a pound of veggies.

How many gallons of water does a human being take?

That pound of beef doesn't keep that 2000 gallons of water locked up indefinitely. It's still cycled through the ecosystem. Same with chickens, vegetables, and human beings.

This is a good topic for a separate thread!

Yessir!

 

[Valjean]

If all the land and resources are being used for human needs, how is biodiversity going to be protected?

 

[muhammad_isa]

If all the land and resources are being used for human needs, how is biodiversity going to be protected?

Actually how much do you need??

 

[Valjean]

Actually how much do you need??

The question is how much we're using, vs how much nature needs.
Few organisms are as environmentally versatile as humans. Many need large, specific, natural ranges and complex interactions with other species to survive. If we break up these ranges or disrupt interdependent species we're likely to disrupt the whole natural system that supports life on Earth.
Human desires need to be subordinated to the needs of the ecosystem if a catastrophic collapse is to be avoided.

 

[anotherneil]

The free (ie: unregulated) market is one of the major causes of the problem.

Just asking for some clarification - are you trying to put words in my mouth with this "(ie: unregulated)" part, or are you just setting up a strawman to attack?

It has little interest in finding solutions. There's no profit in it. They are more motivated by increasing production and the next quarter's market returns.

Do you buy food from the market, or do you only eat what you grow yourself?

Do you own a car, or do you only walk everywhere you go?

Do you make your own clothing from plants and animals that you raised?

How are you posting on this forum? The only way I know of is to obtain electronic devices from the market that can communicate with it.

I could go on and on with one rebuttal after another to show that you yourself profit from the market, unless you're absolutely 100% self-sufficient and have some sort of magic or supernatural abilities to post things online.

Oh, wait, I suppose if you have such magical or supernatural abilities, you probably don't need to be absolutely 100% self-sufficient since you can merely conjure things up with a mere thought.

If you do have the ability to conjure up things up with a mere thought, can you tell me how you developed such a capability?

Only government has the power to monitor and regulate this.

Government has a long history if trust-busting, market and environmental regulation. It's been since the Neoliberal revolution/Reaganomics that government has been captured by the Banks and corporations, and protective regulations rolled back.

Do you think government is purely altruistic? If so, then I've got a bridge to sell you.

And what's to be done with the waste brine?

It's interesting that even though I didn't explain any details about what reverse osmosis entails you somehow know that it produces waste brine, yet either you somehow do not seem to know what's done with it.

Perhaps you actually do know what's done with waste brine (and I have a sneaky suspicion that you do know, since you're aware that reverse osmosis produces waste brine), but for the sake of our forum reader audience you wish to educate them & want to task me with doing the work? Why not just explain what's done with waste brine yourself? What's in it for me to explain what's done with waste brine from reverse osmosis?

I'll engage in debate and discussion on this forum and at my own discretion I'll decide whether or not I want to explain things when asked; in this case I'll use my discretion to not explain it to you - for free, that is. I will, however, provide something from which you can draw some wisdom for free.

These are good ideas, but are they feasible everywhere?

I think the purpose of such ideas is that they're feasible in places where conventional agriculture isn't feasible. Do you want to throw the baby out with the bathwater?

What' going to motivate corporations to spend the capital to fund such large multinational projects?

The profit motive.

It's like pulling teeth just to get them to install scrubbers on the stacks of their existing coal plants.

I think the issue you bring up here is tragedy of the commons; is it your contention that this directly relates to overpopulation in some significant way?

If so, I'd be willing to explore that. Same with your question of waste brine being discharged into the ocean or being injected into deep wells.

But who's advocating that? It had a pretty poor record in the USSR and Red China.

Yes it does, yet there are those out there who still advocate it, and there are nations today that have at least some degree of socialism, even the US at state and federal levels.

It's one thing when a nation like Russia converts from an empire to a republic, and tries to experiment with socialism or communism, fails and hopefully learns from its mistakes, but trying the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results is the definition of insanity.

Today, it's crony capitalist advocating it; it only benefits them.

Government, as regulator of consumer and environmental protection, a bulwark against monopoly, &c, is what corporatists and captive government opportunists have been attempting to "drown in the bathtub" for the past 40 years.

"Free trade" = freedom from regulation, and a return to the exploitative, wild West economy that preceeded the Great Depression and subsequent rise of Authoritarianism.

Free trade is simply letting someone set their own prices for the goods and services they offer, and letting customers decide whether or not they want someone else's goods or services; it's about keeping competition unrestricted.

It's not anarchism; free trade doesn't mean letting anyone victimize others.

Authoritarianism is the opposite of having a free market.

It scaled up pretty well in the US and western Europe during the post war years -- at least until Reagan and Thatcher's anti-government deregulation began
undermining the prosperity, security and opportunity of the 99%, and the money began 'trickling up' to the one-percenters.

Socialism can work well in the short run, but not in the long run. During the post war years, it simply worked well in the US because it practically had a monopoly on the overall market of countries affected by the destruction of WW2, where there was a big demand from the US for its goods & services. Perhaps it was the same sort of deal with western Europe.

Socialism can work fairly well and be sustainable in places like Hawaii, where there isn't much need for energy to provide heat during the winter & cooling during the summer; there's an abundance of food to both feed the local population as well as to export, since it's a place in the tropical zone; the demand for tourism and vacationing that it can supply also helps.

 

[icehorse]

Actually how much do you need??

It takes a lot of topsoil to grow food for the animals we eat AND for the food we eat directly. Most of the land on the planet is not fertile enough to grow crops.

So humans are over-using the fertile land the planet has, and literally wearing it out. Overusing it. And so now we're cutting down rain forests in an attempt to create more farmland. But the topsoil in rain forests is actually quite shallow and fragile, and gets "worn out" from farming quite quickly. So cutting down rain forests is a horrible idea from most any angle you can think of.

 

[icehorse]

@anotherneil -

I'm not sure I'm following why you're talking about various economic systems in this thread?

The planet has a limited carrying capacity that's independent of whatever economic systems humans create, correct?

 

[muhammad_isa]

It takes a lot of topsoil to grow food for the animals we eat AND for the food we eat directly. Most of the land on the planet is not fertile enough to grow crops.

If the planet could not sustain us, we would not be here!

So humans are over-using the fertile land the planet has, and literally wearing it out. Overusing it..

..through industrial farming, yes.
However, we do not need industrial farming to survive, despite your assumptions to the contrary.

And so now we're cutting down rain forests in an attempt to create more farmland..

..or industrial estates

..cutting down rain forests is a horrible idea from most any angle you can think of..

..but why are we doing that?
You will say it is due to population increase .. but I see it as more fundamental.
It is due to increasing industrialization due to global economics, imo.

 

[muhammad_isa]

The planet has a limited carrying capacity that's independent of whatever economic systems humans create, correct?

Yes, the resources of planet earth are finite .. as are we .. we live .. we die.

 

[icehorse]

If the planet could not sustain us, we would not be here!

The planet can sustain some people, but not an infinite number of people. What do you think the maximum number of people is?

We have 8 billion now. Could the planet sustain 20 billion? How about 100 billion? A trillion?

..through industrial farming, yes.
However, we do not need industrial farming to survive, despite your assumptions to the contrary.

You're misunderstanding me here. I agree that industrialization is a problem.

But let me ask you this, do think we should abandon our cities? Maybe we should. Because as long as most people live in cities, we will need large farms outside of the cities to feed them. And the food will need to be transported and so on.

So it seems to me if we have cities, we need some level on industrialization, problematic as it is.

 

[muhammad_isa]

The planet can sustain some people, but not an infinite number of people. What do you think the maximum number of people is?

I haven't a clue .. but there are many, many more factors to our survival than that statistic.

We have 8 billion now. Could the planet sustain 20 billion? How about 100 billion? A trillion?

This life is finite. There are many "limits to growth".
The way we live collectively, affects the things that happen to us individually.
The global economic system has a great influence on what we have to do to survive.

But let me ask you this, do think we should abandon our cities?

No .. it is up to the individual to decide where they want to be.
If survival in the cities becomes untenable, then people will decide to leave.
It is NOT good for this to happen over a short space of time, but it might .. if we
do not collectively change course from the current global economic system.

..as long as most people live in cities, we will need large farms outside of the cities to feed them. And the food will need to be transported and so on..

It is a good idea to think about it .. but like climate-change, we cannot predict with any certainty
what EXACTLY is going to happen in 20 years time .. it depends on a lot of factors,
including wars, disease and global economy etc.

..So it seems to me if we have cities, we need some level on industrialization, problematic as it is.

Well, it's about infrastructure .. what goes up, must come down.

 

[anotherneil]

@anotherneil -

I'm not sure I'm following why you're talking about various economic systems in this thread?

The planet has a limited carrying capacity that's independent of whatever economic systems humans create, correct?

What exactly do you mean by limited carrying capacity? Who decided what that limit is and why? What is that limit - give me a number or something, and how exactly it was determined.