How long can this continue?
https://www.ecowatch.com/biomass-humans-animals-2571413930.html
“Humans account for about 36 percent of the biomass of all mammals. Domesticated livestock, mostly cows and pigs, account for 60 percent, and wild mammals for only 4 percent.
The same holds true for birds. The biomass of poultry is about three times higher than that of wild birds.”
Hate to be a bummer, but natural systems have a natural cap - a big die off. It is a ruthless and irreversible consequence of a growing population and growing prosperity and consumption. It cannot be changed or avoided. Perhaps this is why Armageddon figures so prominantly into our collective conscience. We are like fish in a bowl - either pollutants, food scarcity, war, disease or lack of space will eventually prevail.
Why? Our biology, psychology, and every endeavor of human ingenuity is focused in the direction that makes overpopulation worse. Medicine, agriculture, product design etc. all focus on trying to lengthen, improve, and increase our lives and numbers. Growth is part of who we are and it will not changed by voluntary abandonment. If liberal elites and deep thinkers want to neuter themselves for the collective good - it will be offset and consumed by the mindless breeding that occurs across the globe. Systemic collapse is the only method for population reduction other than war. The end is predicted in Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. There is no way out of this particular problem.
Rector
There’s one environmental group that does address the overpopulation time bomb directly:
http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/
I wonder how Mr Ryerson would design his program for the “depopulation is a government conspiracy” crowd. Could the US be his toughest audience?
I think the song “In The Year 2525” says it as accurately as possible in such a short song:
That’s kind of what humanity is engaged in, where the number of participants continually increases, the chairs (resources) decrease, and the music (financial system) keeps on playing non-stop. A lot of fun for the time being (for some players, at least). However, a basic rule of the game is the music must stop at some point. And when it finally does, chaos and frenzy will probably reign.
Enjoy the music while it’s playing!
Cimber99: Summary: 9 Billion to less than 1 Billion in 80 years.
Your prediction is conveniently outside of our lifetimes. I would love to bet you my entire net worth you are even more wrong than Marthus was (which is saying a lot).
Swampmama3: …only ‘intelligent’ people will see the need to restrict their breeding.
Intelligent people? It’s more like Darwin Award people.
Matt: We can transcend our evolutionary urges. We can as “intelligent people” look around, observe, and rationally think that there are just too damn many people on the planet.
Er, no. The crux of the Darwinian view is that somebody, somewhere, will not agree and continue to breed. Basic genetics; no escaping it. Besides, I can assure you from personal experience that many people won’t stop breeding without force.
And the data also shows the opposite of our “intelligent” thesis: the highest IQ places in the world are Asian (Japan/China/Korea) are also the most crowded & enviornmentally damaged.
Clearly your argument is a moral one, not a logical nor a rational one.
“Science” clearly shows that this is a train wreck waiting to happen. Only “scientists” corrupted by greed or blinding ideology believe otherwise. This mess was created largely by economists, bankers and business-people, none of which are required to spend any time studying science. They encourage the masses to consume more to “help” the economy.
Just because economists use lots or charts and numbers doesn’t make it science no matter how much they would like people to believe it is. Science is a process and methodology of analyzing the world, not about fancy abstractions. Economics is about as far from science as you can get.
Human rights is just another slogan for the fashion that gave us full suffrage - the right of all people to vote. Check your history books, it wasn’t a movement designed to spread justice, it was started by people seeking power in the left side of politics. In reality, if justice had been the objective, focus would first have been on education and then as a reward, the right to vote would have been given to those qualifying at some kind of general level.
The purpose of government is not to control its population. It is not to manipulate democracy with fashionable statements and false advertising It is to protect and maintain order. Governments stopped doing that a hundred years ago, at about the time of full suffrage. When politics became a game of vote buying.
With good government comes rules. Rules that guarantee rights and safety but at the same time restrict the stupid from abusing their freedoms. The idea that the human race, with all of its failings can be allowed to choose its own destiny is so naive its embarassing. We attempt to stop drug users or people prone to the pursuit of chemically induced pleasure from expresing their right to choose because their choices often hurt others. Clearly any excess has a cost, even if it is subtle. Unbridled freedom therefore is more often than not a recipe for disaster.
Freedom to be stupid isn’t freedom, it is incarceration for those of use who live proper (just) lives. Its not freedom the world needs, its justice.
A flight over Alaska is proof the world is not experiencing a population explosion, really? The world’s productive land is already in use for human agriculture. More than half of entire global land surface is used for farming- an area the size of South America is used for crop production with another 8.900.000.000 acres is used for livestock. And there are large areas of desert like the Sahara desert that occupies 2.370.000.000 acres where any form of agriculture is impossible. Where will all the other species on the planet live? We require a healthy environment to feed us, provide us with natural resources like clean water, to treat our sewage and waste. We require healthy and diverse forests for medicine. More than half of all medications on the pharmacy were derived from a living organism.
The point is the issue is far more complex then it appears. Meanwhile, every 365 days, 78 million more human consumers are created while during this same time period thousands of species are driven extinct.
Denialism is another form of insanity that is prevalent these days. Despite the best efforts of the denialist community to try and refute any claim that ecological collapse is actually in progress, deep down inside they acknowledge the truth. They are fully aware that a perfect storm is now forming, but the coping mechanism for these people is just to deny every piece of evidence that becomes manifest. How more obvious can these catastrophes become— a human population explosion as 78 million more human consumers are added to an existing population of 7.600.000.000 every 365 days while during this same time frame, thousands of animal and plant species are driven to extinction aka “6thMass Extinction Event” due to pollution, chemical contamination, desertification, oceanic dead zones, ocean acidification, mass coral die-offs, deforestation, groundwater depletion, etc.
“I’d like to share a revelation. It came to me when I tried to classify the human species. I realized that you’re not mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops an equilibrium with the surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area, you rapidly multiply beyond the carrying capacity of the ecosystem, and consume until every natural resource is exhausted. The only way you can survive is to metastasize the human contagion to new, unspoiled environs. There is another organism on this planet that follows a similar destructive pattern. It’s a retrovirus. The human race is a destroyer of worlds. You are a plague, and we are the cure.”
While the sane world recognizes the obvious contradiction of unlimited human population growth on a finite planet, in response the Trump administration defunded completely US international family planning programs- the definition of insanity.