Human race 'will be extinct within 100 years'

[Cosmic Cowbell]

Ah yes, the good old days, before there were so goddam many fucking people! Stupid animals.

Yes, because weather is certainly an outside factor affecting population group stasis.

Heh...while I agree that weather does indeed occur outside, in the spirit of the article, I was asking more if the general idea that most, if not all, of the living natural world has never been able to directly affect climate/weather globally as a byproduct of it's own actions in existing, can be agreed upon as a general loose fact. In essence, it's "outside" of it's direct control.

If this is a basic given (no semantics please), then do we only exclude our species exclusive responsibility for the global effect on climate through the actions of our existence only when it suits us. Does it remain "outside" only when convenient?

BTW - nice to see so much "hope" in a single thread.

[barracuda]

But if you think the issue of human waste disposal has not improved immeasurably in the last hundred years you're barking up the wrong tree. FYI, as recently as 1950, the city used to channel untreated raw sewage directly into the Santa Monica Bay. Ah yes, the good old days, before there were so goddam many fucking people! Stupid animals.

That's not even the point.

But it is exactly the point. Because the Hyperion sewage treatment plant that you complained about being such a smelly, distressing aspect of the fact of overpopulation in Los Angeles is actually an example of how individuals with a real interest in the condition of their environment can join forces to productively make changes which benefit not only themselves, but also the ecosystems surrounding them. The Hyperion was sued by concerned users of the bay to halt sludge pumping into the water, and forced into compliance with the Clean Water act in 1987.

For its significance and impact to quality of life, in 2001 the Hyperion Treatment Plan was named one of the Top Ten Public Works project of the 20th century by the American Public Works Association.

Animals did this. Concerned ones, actively caring about the condition of the pristine beauty of the land they lived in locally, and with an eye to the future needs of their community, forcing their government agencies to create real solutions to issues that might otherwise facilitate the destruction of their ocean.

Sorry about the smell, but it's good for the fish! And far better than it used to be...

[Simulist]

Yeah, human animals!

Human animals can accomplish amazing things — especially when we're not deluding ourselves with magical thinking (a.k.a. "God will fix our mess, 'cause we're the badass Crown of God's Creation" — and similar fantasies).

[Nordic]

Well, no actually you did miss my point, but whatever. I'll take full responsibility for not communicating it effectively. Not your fault.

My brain hurts from all the writing I did this morning. (not here)

[barracuda]

Yes, because weather is certainly an outside factor affecting population group stasis.

Heh...while I agree that weather does indeed occur outside, in the spirit of the article, I was asking more if the general idea that most, if not all, of the living natural world has never been able to directly affect climate/weather globally as a byproduct of it's own actions in existing, can be agreed upon as a general loose fact. In essence, it's "outside" of it's direct control.

If this is a basic given (no semantics please), then do we only exclude our species exclusive responsibility for the global effect on climate through the actions of our existence only when it suits us. Does it remain "outside" only when convenient?

I'm not sure how to approach this without resort to semantics. You are discussing global climate change as a conscious effect produced by humans, whereas I doubt seriously that any of it was consciously engineered. I mean, growth factors involving rain forest age affects the weather both in the immediate area of the forest itself, as well as producing far-reaching global effects. The survival and reproductive imperatives of the forest have no more or less moral exclusivity than do the actions of men, at least if we are in agreement with Nordic that we are just animals.

BTW - nice to see so much "hope" in a single thread.

I think that has to do with the fact that many of the issues surrounding this conversation have solutions which don't altogether depend upon flights of sheer fancy, but hover disturbingly close to actual possibilities.

[Elvis]

Hey, animals are people too. Just ask my cat.

[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.

There's a name for this piece of strawmanning sophistry, but I forget. What's wrong with, "Therefore humans should (in their own interest) intelligently manage the resources they need to survive"?

Sounds like that strawman "slipped" on the ice, and fell down the "slope" on his ass.

Ouch. You chaps sure are unfriendly sometimes.

There's a name for this piece of strawmanning sophistry, but I forget.

You forget? Jack, you are letting your standards slip. Besides which, I don't believe it is a strawman. I was just trying to succintly sum up the basic logic behind one argument supporting the idea of "overpopulation." Someone somewhere in this thread said something along the lines of "can you imagine any of our problems being easier to solve with more people?" And I guess you are supposed to think, goddamn it no, more people just means worse problems! But mankind can create problems, mankind can solve problems. Mankind can do a great many things, for good and ill. But how can mankind itself be the problem? It's upside down thinking.

You see, I worry that the "overpopulation" advocates from their phoney elite "environmentalist" organisations wouldn't accept my argument. I fear they would say, yes mankind can solve its problems with ingenuity and good management, but that those solutions can only come from the technocrats in the developed world. The global poor, they would say, offer nothing in the way of solutions, and much in the way of problems. So let's enrich them I say, then they wouldn't be so poor and so problematic. Colonialism and exploitation carry on today, and present serious problems, amongst them the maintenance of vast inequity. Humans develop stable populations in the modern world when supplied with the basic amenities of life. So lets work towards supplying all the world's people with those things, before we bemoan the fact that there is simply too many of them.

What's wrong with, "Therefore humans should (in their own interest) intelligently manage the resources they need to survive"?

Well Jack, quite clearly nothing is wrong with that. I honestly don't understand your point. Can you spell it out, as if you were explaining it to an idiot, which I clearly am?

Sounds like that strawman "slipped" on the ice, and fell down the "slope" on his ass.

And I'm sure that's terribly clever and apropos, but I have no idea what you mean either, Simulist.

It's a shame you are both being so mean to me, when I am so fond of both of you. It sure makes a fellow feel unwanted.

Still, not to worry. Perhaps we will all get lucky and Phillip will get his reincarnation wish.

I think it's called "paranoia"

Damn. You got me there, bud. I ain't denying it.

[Sounder]

Well not that it’s apparent, but humans do have the facility to change the nature and expressions of their consciousness to a degree that does not seem available to other animals.

[Simulist]

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.

There's a name for this piece of strawmanning sophistry, but I forget. What's wrong with, "Therefore humans should (in their own interest) intelligently manage the resources they need to survive"?

Sounds like that strawman "slipped" on the ice, and fell down the "slope" on his ass.

Ouch. You chaps sure are unfriendly sometimes.

Strawman arguments are unfriendly things; unfriendly responses to them should come as no surprise.

Well not that it’s apparent, but humans do have the facility to change the nature and expressions of their consciousness to a degree that does not seem available to other animals.

Not all humans have such abilities. And even if most humans were singularly unique in this way, other animals have superior abilities that humans do not possess.

[lupercal]

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.

That seems like a very reasonable assessment of the issue, HoL, and thanks for the nice words!

For some reason overpopulation is a particularly pernicious belief, not directing this at anyone here, but once someone is convinced their problems are caused by an overabundance of the wrong type of people, it's a short and slippery slope from "small families" to final solution, as that reprehensible Bartlett slide shows. Sorry Bartlett fans, I know you mean well. Family planning is one thing, but mixing it up with all sorts of unrelated woes is completely irresponsible, given what we've witnessed the last hundred years, and that Bartlett lecture, in my view, goes beyond irresponsible.

[JackRiddler]

Try it with a phrase other than "resource depletion" and maybe you'll see the illogic, or the omission of important facts that renders it invalid:

"Killing is undesirable.

"Humans kill.

"Therefore humans are undesirable."

Tell me what's wrong with that both as a syllogism and as an inferred stance to attribute to others (say, Gandhi) and maybe we can proceed.

[Hammer of Los]

I don't believe I used a straw man at all. What I did was use a form of reductio ad absurdum argument.

Try it with a phrase other than "resource depletion" and maybe you'll see the illogic, or the omission of important facts that renders it invalid:

"Killing is undesirable.

"Humans kill.

"Therefore humans are undesirable."

Tell me what's wrong with that both as a syllogism and as an inferred stance to attribute to others (say, Gandhi) and maybe we can proceed.

Did Gandhi equate more humans with more problems? Did he conflate the "problems" of humanity with the numbers of humanity?

And as a syllogism, yes your example is suggested by mine of course. You can replace "resource depletion" with anything at all you find undesirable that can be attributed to human populations, crime perhaps, or poverty, or pollution, or prejudice or anything at all. I'm glad you spotted it. That's the whole point, to demonstrate that such a line of argument is absurd.

I was intending a reductio ad absurdum argument in order to demonstrate the error in attributing our problems to an increase in human populations. The fact that some problems are human problems does not entail that humans are a problem. I was simply trying to counter what I considered a line of specious argument in some areas of the "overpopulation" debate.

Strawman arguments are unfriendly things; unfriendly responses to them should come as no surprise.

I don't believe I used a strawman, and I didn't intend to be unfriendly. I therefore apologise for any hurt feelings.

And while I'm here, might I ask again for you to explain this remark;

Sounds like that strawman "slipped" on the ice, and fell down the "slope" on his ass.

[Nordic]

HOL, I know you're a sweet guy and your heart is in the right place.

But I'm trying to show you how you're thinking in grand generalities, which is leading you to some flawed thinking. IMO (of course).

If you can step back from a justified hatred of people who advocate genocide on the behalf of a monied elite ......

Maybe I'm alone here (but i'm pretty sure i'm not), but to me, it's not the populations of the undeveloped world that are the problem. It's the populations of the developed and developing world that are the problem.

Nobody has the power to destroy like the developed world.

Civilization as we know it in the late 20th and early 21st century is quite literally a resource-depletion Ponzi scheme. Everything that so many people think of (including here apparently) as "developments" and "progress", i.e. all our technology which has given us the ILLUSION that we can support a limitless number of people, is in fact based upon the reality of stealing from the undeveloped world to fuel OURS.

I'm not saying anything here that we're not ridiculously familiar with.

But where we go from there is where we seem to differ.

I see, as the "civilized" world starts strip mining the planet to a point where it gets desperate, it's going to destroy not only land, water, but a whole lot of people as well, people who are living in relative "harmony" (for lack of a better term) with their land, water, and air.

I've always known as we run out of oil, our society will do whatever it takes to get it. Now, just look at the mountaintop removal mining, the destruction of the gulf, and the devastating, and largely unreported, disaster that is the Tar Sands in Canada.

As this continues, the earth's carrying capacity will only LESSEN. Greatly.

Therefore we're going to have mass starvations, more poverty, more desperation, and like the people in Haiti who have completely denuded their once fecund environment so that they can have cooking fires and sell, as a last resort, CHARCOAL (of all things), the people of the world, regardless of their socioeconomic status and regardless of how few resources they use presently, are going to get more and more desperate.

That includes those in the Western World who are not WEALTHY.

Which is what is happening now, and which is about to get precipitously worse.

The point being, that we now have a system in the Western world where, what, 1 farmer is able to feed 52 people? Well, THAT, my friends, is based upon a massive consumption of fossil fuels. Not only for the fertilizer, but for the machines to plant and harvest and distribute that food.

When that falls apart, and we suddenly go back to where 1 farmer is able to feed only, what, 10 people? 42 people are gonna go without food. If these people are in the Western world, what they gonna do? They're gonna steal it, and they're gonna kill anyone they have to to get it.

Thus the problem.

It's not all the "little brown people" of the world who are the problem, it's us. The Western world, and our Ponzi scheme of a food and resource consumption system.

Therefore, reducing the world's population is in everybody's best interest, but mainly ours!

My vision of the apocalypse, for instance, involves India remaining largely untouched. India feeds its own people pretty much, right? It's called labor-based agriculture. India might not even notice that the rest of the world has died off.

Now, the "developing" world is a big big problem, not because there's anything wrong with the people there in general, but because of colonialism, and the fact that people are being removed from their farms and sent to the cities. In the cities they create enormous slums while their former homes are devastated by bad agricultural practices. So they're fucked. They'll be the first to go when things get real bad.

And that's awful.

Yes, there are evil rich motherfuckers who would like to wipe out large segments of the "savages" of the world, but we've ALWAYS had those. And if the people you THINK are those people, why would they be telling us what they're up to? Why would they be pretending to be environmentalists?

The people who are actually up to that kind of evil would instead, let's say, unleash a virus upon a population particularly vulnerable to it. Like, say, AIDS. Or they would develop genome-specific viruses to be released upon said populations. Which we know they are doing. Or they would whip up acrimony between two different populations of people, fund and arm both of them, and sit back and enjoy. Which they're doing in a lot of places, especially Africa (see that other thread about the unspeakable evil in Uganda).

The people you have to look out for aren't "environmentalists". Sure, there are a few hoaxes and bad apples, but if you find yourself having severe knee-jerk reactions to anyone who professes a belief that overpopulation isn't a desirable thing, I think you're barking up the wrong tree. WAY off base.

[Simulist]

No hurt feelings either taken or intended.

And while I'm here, might I ask again for you to explain this remark;

Sounds like that strawman "slipped" on the ice, and fell down the "slope" on his ass.

Earlier, Jack had commented that "There's a name for this piece of strawmanning sophistry, but I forget."

Responding, I was suggesting that, in addition to a "strawman fallacy," perhaps the "slippery slope fallacy" might have been a component of the overall sophistry he was alluding to — but that this had seemed a failed effort.

As does my attempt to be clever in phrasing.

[barracuda]

The point being, that we now have a system in the Western world where, what, 1 farmer is able to feed 52 people? Well, THAT, my friends, is based upon a massive consumption of fossil fuels. Not only for the fertilizer, but for the machines to plant and harvest and distribute that food.

When that falls apart, and we suddenly go back to where 1 farmer is able to feed only, what, 10 people? 42 people are gonna go without food. If these people are in the Western world, what they gonna do? They're gonna steal it, and they're gonna kill anyone they have to to get it.

Sorry, but I have to nitpick some of the assumptions here. I'll use wheat as my example, for it is among the most widely consumed foodstuff on the planet.

The average size of a small farm is about 100 acres. The average yield of wheat per acre is about 42 bushels. You can make 90 loaves of whole wheat bread from a bushel of wheat. So one family farm can produce 100 x 42 x 90 loaves of whole wheat bread, or 378,000 loaves of bread. I think we can both agree that fifty-two people can't eat nearly that much bread in a year.

So let's approach the issue from the other end. Let's give each person two loaves of bread per week to eat. Each individual would eat 2 x 52 = 104 loaves per year. 378,000 loaves divided by 104 = 3,635 persons fed per small farm.

You could even halve the production number here and you could still feed a small town. This fact right here is the basis of civilisation, pure and simple. The combination of the farmers' labor and the seed of the grain and the soil have the ability to make a vast surplus of food, so vast that, when this was fully realised around ten thousand years ago, huge groups of individuals no longer had to work the land in order to eat at all. And thus was born the standing army. But just to be clear, that end result - armies at the beck of the strongest claimant to the land - is not a necessary requirement of life on this planet. At all.