Human race 'will be extinct within 100 years'

[Elvis]

[Bartlett's] "options" include "stopping immigration," "disease," "war," "famine," and "polution." I would not call this a progressive agenda.

It just didn't sound to me as if Bartlett was promoting those options. I have to agree with Nordic that you might be reading them into Bartlett's personal views. Again, Bartlett did express his distaste for war and killing. Disease, famine? "Is that what you want?" he asks the students.

Bartlett might favor fewer immigrants, but I'm not ready to crucify him just for that.

There is no mention of petroleum

My point exactly! PRI uses some valid data, but they seem content with the corporate status quo of a suck-it-dry petroleum-based economy (their Food video reflects that, and they are, after all, right-wing Christians). What does the suck-it-dry petroleum-based economy give us?---I hear there's a bad oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico.

Modern agriculture does use a lot of petroleum, for fuel and 'chemical' fertilizers. And Monsanto/ADM-style agribiz, if they get their way, will mean more petroleum-based fertilizers and pesticides, more tractors, more combines etc., more GM foods, and, perhaps worst, a legal corporate monopoly on the world's food, using terminator seeds and high-priced lawyers.

So I'm leery about what I've called "corporate solutions," while PRI is okey-dokey with them. If Big Ag is investing heavily in safe and clean alternative fuels, fertilizers and farming methods, I haven't heard much about it. (And I almost believed BP's pretty ads over the last few years touting their commitment to "green" practices.)

A note about the example of Brazil-- Brazil is being smart. They're powering vehicles with sugar cane alcohol, on a wide scale. "Drill, baby, drill!" sounds less smart.

Good enough, otherwise. I accept that Bartlett's focus on overpopulation is off-target. Though as far as I can see, neither set really presents a balanced equation.
Lastly, thanks for making me think harder!

[Elvis]

"The business community, my wealthy mates are completely addicted to growth because of greed...
They just want growth, growth, growth, even though it's obvious that it's not sustainable.

Yeah!

That's right, the military industrial complex, but I don't hear Bartlett demagoguing about Lockheed Martin's exponential growth.

Excellent point!

[lupercal]

[Bartlett's] "options" include "stopping immigration," "disease," "war," "famine," and "polution." I would not call this a progressive agenda.

It just didn't sound to me as if Bartlett was promoting those options.

It's one of the few documents he does supply, if you can call a PowerPoint slide a document, and normally I wouldn't, except that's all there is:

I have to agree with Nordic that you might be reading them into Bartlett's personal views.

See above. Please don't make me post it again.

Bartlett might favor fewer immigrants, but I'm not ready to crucify him just for that.

A reactionary agenda is a reactionary agenda, whether you agree with it or not.

There is no mention of petroleum

No, there isn't, and the rest of your comment is, as you've already admitted, pure "hand-waving."

Okay now look: I understand that you happen to like these Bartlett vids, and I'm not saying he's not an engaging pitchman, but so was Ronald Reagan. The fact is he's demagoguing on "overpopulation" and using it as a wedge to peddle a thoroughly reprehensible agenda, at least in my view. Your mileage may vary.

[lupercal]

Excellent point!

Thank you.

[Nordic]

The guy is a scientist and his pov is scientific.

Bartlett is a quack and he's blowing smoke up your ass, but some people like the feeling. Enjoy.

It was really heartbreaking to see. That vast beautiful landscape filled with SHIT.

Who do you think is responsible for all that development? Superstitious Catholics? Wrong:

These are the 50 largest employers in Colorado:
# Employer City Number of Employees

1 LOCKHEED MARTIN SPACE SYSTEMS Littleton 10,000
2 PETERSON AFB Peterson Afb 9,286
3 50TH SPACEWING Colorado Springs 7,000
4 UNIVERSITY OF CO-BOULDER Boulder 6,902
5 UNIV OF COLORADO HOSPITAL Denver 6,500
6 IBM Boulder 5,000
7 TRANSPORTATION SAFETY OFFICE Denver 5,000
8 COLORADO STATE UNIVERSITY Fort Collins 4,900
9 SCHRIEVER AIR FORCE BASE Colorado Springs 4,800

http://www.acinet.org/acinet/oview6.asp ... &nodeid=12

That's right, the military industrial complex, but I don't hear Bartlett demagoguing about Lockheed Martin's exponential growth. Why is that, I wonder?

Wow. You are proving to be a narrow-minded and extremely prejudiced person who only sees what they want to see, and only sees what they THINK they see. It's like you do a strawman to yourself.

Do you live in Colorado? Do you see what businesses filled in the gaps between Denver and Boulder? I don't think it was ANY of those businesses you list, and furthermore, your list, which provides you with a lovely balm for your prejudiced narrow mind, doesn't show the growth rates of any of those businesses.

Obviously you're someone who has no interest in any conversation or any information that might actually seep into your locked brain, because you have already made up your mind.

And where do you get off calling a professor of physics a quack? What exactly are YOUR qualifications to spread the bullshit you're spreading?

I'm actually pretty shocked at your delusional level of brainlock. It's an ugly level of prejudice you're displaying. Ugly as hell.

[lupercal]

It's an ugly level of prejudice you're displaying. Ugly as hell.

Okay I'm prejudiced against military contractors, spooks and charlatans. So sue me.

[Elvis]

There is no mention of petroleum

Quote:
No, there isn't, and the rest of your comment is, as you've already admitted, pure "hand-waving."

Let me put it this way: PRI's explanation assumes hydrocarbon-burning business as usual, and more of it. So how's that working out for us?

At least Bartlett takes that into account.

By this, I'm not attacking PRI (or defending Bartlett's thesis on overpopulation), just pointing out that petroleum and the way we misuse it is an unavoidable part of the equation.

[Nordic]

It's an ugly level of prejudice you're displaying. Ugly as hell.

Okay I'm prejudiced against military contractors, spooks and charlatans.

Right. And Bartlett is none of those things.

So you're just hating.

The guy is on your side but you're too prejudiced to even SEE it.

Which is really fucked up.

But hey, whatever.

[lupercal]

Let me put it this way: PRI's explanation assumes hydrocarbon-burning business as usual, and more of it. So how's that working out for us?

Elvis I understand what you're saying and I don't disagree that developing alternatives to fossil fuels and fertilizers is critically important for a whole raft of reasons. But that's a separate issue from population. BP didn't kill the Gulf because there are too many people in the world, they did it because BP is a predatory multinational operated for the benefit of lawless profiteers in the UK and US with the full cooperation of those governments. The British government even owns a share of BP. Blaming its crimes on "overpopulation" only diverts attention from the real criminals, and that's been the function of Malthusian discourse since even before Malthus. Swift said as much in "A Modest Proposal" in 1729, 27 years before Malthus was born. Britain and its trading companies were just as monstrous, depraved and irresponsible in 1650, when the world population was somewhere around 500 million, as they are now. The problem is not population and it's extremely dangerous to pretend it is.

[wintler2]

Elvis I understand what you're saying and I don't disagree that developing alternatives to fossil fuels and fertilizers is critically important for a whole raft of reasons. But that's a separate issue from population.

You can only separate resource depletion and population in argument; in the real world, an irreducibly complex and interdependent place, they are inextricably linked.

BP didn't kill the Gulf because there are too many people in the world, they did it because BP is a predatory multinational operated for the benefit of lawless profiteers in the UK and US with the full cooperation of those governments.

Your argument here makes no sense: because BP didn't deliberately 'kill' the GoM that proves population isn't an issue? Try again.

The British government even owns a share of BP. Blaming its crimes on "overpopulation" only diverts attention from the real criminals, and that's been the function of Malthusian discourse since even before Malthus.

I am with you on bringing corporate criminals to justice, but dismiss your insistent framing of it as an either/or choice and your tediously predictable use of the Malthusian smear.

Britain and its trading companies were just as monstrous, depraved and irresponsible in 1650, when the world population was somewhere around 500 million, as they are now. The problem is not population and it's extremely dangerous to pretend it is.

Nice rhetoric, shame about the logic. Just because imperialism is still with us does not mean overpopulation isn't. Ever consider things might change in 360 years? In which time population has increased 13x.

[Elvis]

I understand what you're saying and I don't disagree that developing alternatives to fossil fuels and fertilizers is critically important for a whole raft of reasons. But that's a separate issue from population.

Again, I don't think population size and resource availability are necessarily discrete issues independent of one another, but in general I get what you're saying, and I've learned a lot in this thread, thanks.

I just now clicked 'preview' and saw wintler2's response---well put:

You can only separate resource depletion and population in argument; in the real world, an irreducibly complex and interdependent place, they are inextricably linked.

[Hammer of Los]

You can only separate resource depletion and population in argument; in the real world, an irreducibly complex and interdependent place, they are inextricably linked.

Resource depletion is undesirable.

Humans deplete resources.

Therefore humans are undesirable.

But what do we mean by resource depletion? Do we mean oil? People are using up the oil too quickly? That's why having too many humans is a problem? I guess there's no getting away from it. Yup, those pesky excess humans will just have to go.

But hang on a minute. Maybe those silly humans can learn to live without hydrocarbon burning. I think they might have to, one day. And no, I don't think they will be extinct before that happens, although I could be wrong, I have been before.

Maybe they can invest in clean renewable energy sources, and use that energy more wisely and sparingly.

Maybe economic and social justice can be maintained by seeking to provide food and shelter for all of the earth's people.

Maybe folk can stop thinking there's too many people on the planet, typically in those foreign places.

You may say I'm a dreamer etc.

Nice rhetoric, shame about the logic. Just because imperialism is still with us does not mean overpopulation isn't. Ever consider things might change in 360 years? In which time population has increased 13x.

It occurs to me that a very great many things might change in 360 years.

The rate of population increase might have changed. The human race might even be extinct, so I am told. Or we might even be off world by then. Who knows?

But why exactly do I have to lose sleep over predictions of future global population size? What function does that serve? In other words, if we grant that "something must be done" about "overpopulation," then what exactly do the "overpopulation" advocates suggest as the best course of action?

I suggest free and open access to education, far greater funds for (sustainable, local) development in the third world, and convenient free access to a range of family planning options.

But I think some "overpopulation" advocates (not here, of course) would simply prefer to pay the poor to be sterilised. They think there are far too many poor people already, and they don't want any more. I think it's a pretty unpleasant subtext. The problem is poverty, not the poor.

Really we have a massive problem with the system of generation and allocation of energy resources (and indeed of just about all the materials benefical to human life), typified by horrendous misuse, mismanagement and inequality, by which I mean the transnational corporate system of industrialised greed and exploitation.

Oh by the way, I greatly appreciate Lupercal's contributions to this thread. I like you a lot, Lupercal. Love and kisses.

[wintler2]

Now it is HoLs turn to roll out the barrel of lazy thinking and daydreams, same as others on every page of this thread. Thankyou HoL for reminding me i have better ways to use my time.

[Cosmic Cowbell]

Although this is about twenty years old, I find parts of it pertinent to this conversation. Some excerpts....

New Eye on Nature: The Real Constant Is Eternal Turmoil
Published: July 31, 1990

In a revision that has far-reaching implications for the way humans see the natural world and their role in it, many scientists are forsaking one of the most deeply embedded concepts of ecology: the balance of nature.

Ecologists have traditionally operated on the assumption that the normal condition of nature is a state of equilibrium, in which organisms compete and coexist in an ecological system whose workings are essentially stable. Predators and prey - moose and wolves or cheetahs and gazelles, for instance - are supposed to remain in essentially static balance. Anchovies and salmon reach a maximum population that can be sustained by their oceanic environment and remain at that level. A forest grows to a beautiful, mature climax stage that becomes its naturally permanent condition.

This concept of natural equilibrium long ruled ecological research and governed the management of such natural resources as forests and fisheries. It led to the doctrine, popular among conservationists, that nature knows best and that human intervention in it is bad by definition.

Now an accumulation of evidence has gradually led many ecologists to abandon the concept or declare it irrelevant, and others to alter it drastically. They say that nature is actually in a continuing state of disturbance and fluctuation. Change and turmoil, more than constancy and balance, is the rule. As a consequence, say many leaders in the field, textbooks will have to be rewritten and strategies of conservation and resource management rethought.

Some scientists now say that ecological communities of plants and animals are inherently unstable, largely because of idiosyncratic differences in behavior among communities and individuals in them. A super-aggressive wolfpack leader, for example, can greatly increase the pack's hunting efficiency and destabilize the ecosystem - just as the death of a pack leader can promote instability.

But even if ecological communities do display some sort of internal equilibrium, many scientists believe, external disturbances like climatic change, year-to-year variations in weather patterns, fires, windstorms, hurricanes and disease seldom, if ever, give the communities a chance to settle into a stable state. In this view, the climax forest, the neatly symmetrical predator-prey relationship and the bumper fish population become transient conditions at best, even in the absence of human intervention.

The real question, ecologists say, is which sort of human interventions should be promoted and which opposed.

One of the biggest human interventions, some say, is taking place now as people pour heat-trapping chemicals, mainly carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere. Many climatologists expect that this will cause the Earth's climate to warm significantly, causing especially widespread ecological dislocation.

The temperature of the earth has shifted up and down many times in past eons, ecologists point out, and ecosystems have always adjusted. But this human intervention, scientists say, threatens to force, in a century or less, vast climatic and ecological changes that have usually taken millennia. Ecologists fear that this time, ecosystems will not adjust rapidly enough to stave off catastrophe for many species.

Many observations of the behavior of animal populations in the wild, says Dr. Botkin, do not support the assumption of neat balance predicted by traditional ecological theory. One aspect of the theory says that when a population of animals moves into an area, it grows gradually to a level of abundance at which its environment will allow it to be sustained indefinitely, and then remains at that level. Another says that predator and prey populations in a given ecosystem oscillate in numbers, with one population at a peak while the other is at a low point and vice versa, thereby creating an equilibrium over time.

But in real life, says Dr. Botkin, ''when you introduce a population to a new area it goes up and then crashes, and then it doesn't remain constant. The long-term numbers vary and are much lower'' than predicted by the theory. Similarly, he said, a number of studies and observations, in the laboratory as well as the wild, show that predator-prey populations do not oscillate stably and predictably. Instead, they either fluctuate wildly and unpredictably or the prey species is eliminated and the predator species dies of starvation. In one famous experiment, paramecium microbes increased rapidly. When predator microbes were introduced, they increased, too. But in the end, the paramecia were exterminated and the predators died of starvation.

Some scientists are not quite ready to abandon entirely the concept of an inherent tendency toward equilibrium in ecosystems. A kind of equilibrium, they say, may exist on some scales of time and space.

Scale, in fact, may be very important. While there may be enormous, unbalancing disturbances and fluctuations among small populations in small ecosystems, says Dr. Pickett, the fluctuations may be dampened when the larger picture is considered, where a sort of medium-scale equilibrium might apply. An animal population that fails in one environment might not do so if allowed to range over a wider area. Dr. Botkin also said it is quite possible that while a given locality's ecology would change markedly over thousands of years, there could be recurring similarities - and thus a kind of floating equilibrium - at medium-range time scales.

That, in fact, is what Dr. Chesson, the theoretician, postulates. There may, for instance, be a limited range in which an animal population fluctuates over several hundred years. An equilibrium could be calculated by taking the average of the fluctuations. But it would be a ''real mistake,'' said Dr. Chesson, to equate this with anything ''remotely like'' the classical idea of the balance of nature.

Constant Change - Outside Factors Shape Ecosystems

Perhaps the most outstanding evidence favoring an ecology of constant change and disruption over one of static balance comes from studies of naturally occurring external factors that dislocate ecosystems.

For a long time, says Dr. Meyer of the University of Georgia, these outside influences were insufficiently considered. The emphasis, she said, was ''on processes going on within the system,'' even though ''what's happening is driven by what's happened outside.'' Ecologists, she said, ''had blinders on in thinking about external controlling factors.'

Climate and weather appear foremost among these factors. By studying the record laid down in ocean and lake sediments, scientists know that climate, in the words of Dr. Davis of the University of Minnesota, has been ''wildly fluctuating'' over the last two million years, and the shape of ecosystems with it. The fluctuations take place not only from eon to eon, but also from year to year and at every scale in between. ''So you can't visualize a time in equilibrium,'' said Dr. Davis.

Dr. Jacobson said there is virtually no time when the overall environment stays constant for very long. ''That means that the configuration of the ecosystems is always changing.''

http://www.nytimes.com/1990/07/31/scien ... rmoil.html?

Question: As pertaining to this article and the concept of "outside factors", should anthropogenic forcing of extreme climate variations be consider by definition as such?

[Nordic]

I suggest free and open access to education, far greater funds for (sustainable, local) development in the third world, and convenient free access to a range of family planning options.

But I think some "overpopulation" advocates (not here, of course) would simply prefer to pay the poor to be sterilised. They think there are far too many poor people already, and they don't want any more. I think it's a pretty unpleasant subtext. The problem is poverty, not the poor.

Yes, but I don't think you may realize it, but you're talking about two completely different things here.

In other words, some people want to help, and share.. Others want to kill and maim and hoard everything for themselves.

And we're not just talking about oil here. We're talking about water depletion, soil depletion, rain forest depletion, ocean and fisheries depletion, accelerated global warming DUE TO rain forest depletion, extinction, the loss of biodiversity ......

People are just animals, and if you've ever encountered overgrazed ranchland, it ain't that much different.