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A quick google search reveals hundreds of organizations dedicated to ending world hunger. Here's one page from the university of michigan:
http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange2/current/lectures/food_supply/food.htm
Unfortunately it seems like all of these guys have the cause and effect backwards. They predict (correctly) that world population is rising quickly, and that food production can't keep up with it. Unfortunately, producing more food is like dumping gasoline on a house fire in the hopes that it'll burn the gasoline instead of your house.
Throughout history, world population has always been controlled by the available food supply. Every major advance in technology (e.g. irrigation, commercial fertilizer) and every major advance in food trade (e.g. columbian exchange) has been accompanied by a corresponding jump in population. Feeding starving people now will only enable them to reproduce so that in 20 years we have twice as many starving people and an even more severe food shortage.
It seems like such a waste of everyone's time and effort to me; the only long term solutions involve education and birth control, and the short term solution of giving them food just makes the long term problem even bigger. It seems so black and white to me, can anyone offer another side of the picture?
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Feeding the human population isn't the issue.
Peasant not beeing able to feed themselves is.
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Roffles
Pitcairn19291 Posts
Give a starving person a fish, and he'll eat for a day. Teach him to fish, and he'll eat for a lifetime.
Ending World Hunger is nice, but thinking about population control and how the population could just skyrocket in the future is quite scary.
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On October 29 2009 02:32 Boonbag wrote:
Feeding the human population isn't the issue.
Peasant not beeing able to feed themselves is.
What?
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Awesome Malthusian thinking.
But you forget we have limited resources - as soon as we run out of those, everyone's fucked!
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On October 29 2009 02:37 Roffles wrote:
Give a starving person a fish, and he'll eat for a day. Teach him to fish, and he'll eat for a lifetime.
Ending World Hunger is nice, but thinking about population control and how the population could just skyrocket in the future is quite scary.
Give a starving person a fish, and he'll eat for a day. Teach him to fish, and he'll feed himself, then use his newly aquired skills plus natural human greed to strip mine the fish population, causing future starvation.
As long as we have a market economy and liberal capitalism, there will always be starvation.
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On October 29 2009 02:38 Famehunter wrote:Show nested quote +On October 29 2009 02:32 Boonbag wrote:
Feeding the human population isn't the issue.
Peasant not beeing able to feed themselves is. What?
Two options :
You grow so you can feed your country / area's population but you can't buy goods because it doesnt bring enough money.
Or
You grow stuff for exports / the industry that isn't food and sells better and makes you able to eat and buy goods.
Poor peasants in India for instance pick the latter. >.<
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I'm just wondering why so many organizations are pouring all these resources into providing the third world with food, when it's so apparently obvious that doing so will only exacerbate the problem in the future. Everyone so far seems to be in agreement with me. I'm interested in hearing from the other side.
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^^^
I don't understand, are you seriously trying to argue against the likes of George Clooney and Bono? Obviously if people stopped taking world hunger seriously all the rich celebs wouldn't be able to feel all good about themselves. Think of it that way.
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People dont feed the hungry to end the problem of them people feeling hungry. They feed the hungry to provide themselves with a 'useful' task in their life.
Another way to view it:
You look at it at the macro scale, you don't care for individuals, they look at the micro scale, they do care about the individuals. It's like boxer microing his marines.
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The definition of the third world is that they actually can't eat propely, that's why we provide them with food -- because otherwise populations would die =[
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On October 29 2009 02:29 Biochemist wrote:A quick google search reveals hundreds of organizations dedicated to ending world hunger. Here's one page from the university of michigan: http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange2/current/lectures/food_supply/food.htmUnfortunately it seems like all of these guys have the cause and effect backwards. They predict (correctly) that world population is rising quickly, and that food production can't keep up with it. Unfortunately, producing more food is like dumping gasoline on a house fire in the hopes that it'll burn the gasoline instead of your house. Throughout history, world population has always been controlled by the available food supply. Every major advance in technology (e.g. irrigation, commercial fertilizer) and every major advance in food trade (e.g. columbian exchange) has been accompanied by a corresponding jump in population. Feeding starving people now will only enable them to reproduce so that in 20 years we have twice as many starving people and an even more severe food shortage. It seems like such a waste of everyone's time and effort to me; the only long term solutions involve education and birth control, and the short term solution of giving them food just makes the long term problem even bigger. It seems so black and white to me, can anyone offer another side of the picture?
You wrong ~~ (which may be why all those organizations do indeed exist.)
The invention of the Haber process did prevent a massive starvation disaster in Europe and ever since then there has been no starvation at all in either (western) europe or north america even though the population has increased a lot.
Point beeing that it is perfectly possible to remove hunger using technological advancment if only the political situation in general is stable.
Of course in countries unstable for other reasons (africa) the only effect was to increase the amount of starving people I agree with that. But as soon as these countries stabilize then it will indeed be possible to solve the food problem.
Demanding abstinence and birth control of an uneducated and starving population is a far more
farfetched solution than peace keeping, trade and other kinds of support meant to improve the ecconomic situation.
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Current world hunger is not related to human population exceeding Earth's carrying capacity.
At current technology levels, we can make enough to feed all of Earth's population. The problem is that Earth's food-producing capacity is not being harnessed and distributed efficiently and equitably.
Taking the pipe-dream situation when all current agriculture is replaced with high-technology, labor-intensive, capital-intensive, energy-intensive farming designed to achieve the absolute maximal yield that the earth can sustain, we can probably expect a ten-fold increase in productivity.
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On October 29 2009 02:51 KlaCkoN wrote:Show nested quote +On October 29 2009 02:29 Biochemist wrote:A quick google search reveals hundreds of organizations dedicated to ending world hunger. Here's one page from the university of michigan: http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange2/current/lectures/food_supply/food.htmUnfortunately it seems like all of these guys have the cause and effect backwards. They predict (correctly) that world population is rising quickly, and that food production can't keep up with it. Unfortunately, producing more food is like dumping gasoline on a house fire in the hopes that it'll burn the gasoline instead of your house. Throughout history, world population has always been controlled by the available food supply. Every major advance in technology (e.g. irrigation, commercial fertilizer) and every major advance in food trade (e.g. columbian exchange) has been accompanied by a corresponding jump in population. Feeding starving people now will only enable them to reproduce so that in 20 years we have twice as many starving people and an even more severe food shortage. It seems like such a waste of everyone's time and effort to me; the only long term solutions involve education and birth control, and the short term solution of giving them food just makes the long term problem even bigger. It seems so black and white to me, can anyone offer another side of the picture? You wrong ~~ (which may be why all those organizations do indeed exist.) The invention of the Haber process did prevent a massive starvation disaster in Europe and ever since then there has been no starvation at all in either (western) europe or north america even though the population has increased a lot. Point beeing that it is perfectly possible to remove hunger using technological advancment if only the political situation in general is stable. Of course in countries unstable for other reasons (africa) the only effect was to increase the amount of starving people I agree with that. But as soon as these countries stabilize then it will indeed be possible to solve the food problem. Demanding abstinence and birth control of an uneducated and starving population is a far more farfetched solution than peace keeping, trade and other kinds of support meant to improve the ecconomic situation.
That is a good point. Considering that the population in the "west" is still growing, do you think we'll eventually need another Haber-type breakthrough to prevent a second starvation crisis? I expect that the government will eventually step in and impose population control measures (which would come with a whole new set of issues).
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I don't think it's correct to assume that food production won't be able to accompany an increase in population in the future. There's a lot of room for increased production and efficiency, especially in Africa.
Anotehr problem of food aid is a dumping effect on the farmers in these countries. When the developed world dumps excess production in Africa out of solidarity we're screwing with their own ability to create a productive food supply.
EDIT: Population in Europe will decrease significantly, as well as in Japan. Population growth in the States isn't that high and is boosted by immigration. So population growth in the West isn't an imminent issue... its aging will be.
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On September 13 2009 17:19 integral wrote:
The population of any species is a function of food supply. Feeding the billions of people has done nothing to reduce the number of starving people, although it has enabled us to produce more billions. Sustaining these additional billions requires more resources than the previous billions. If these additional billions survive to reproduce, even more people are consuming even more resources.
There are more people starving and hungry in the world than ever before.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
The only way to end world hunger is for humans to live at their long-term carrying capacity. In this world, that requires a massive die-off. Education and birth control will do nothing to reduce population; there is a biological imperative to reproduce, and those that do not reproduce will be replaced by those who do reproduce. The only solution to the problem of overpopulation there has ever been and ever will be is death. Anything else is wishful thinking with no historical, ecological, or biological basis.
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On October 29 2009 03:35 integral wrote:Show nested quote +On September 13 2009 17:19 integral wrote:
The population of any species is a function of food supply. Feeding the billions of people has done nothing to reduce the number of starving people, although it has enabled us to produce more billions. Sustaining these additional billions requires more resources than the previous billions. If these additional billions survive to reproduce, even more people are consuming even more resources.
There are more people starving and hungry in the world than ever before.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. The only way to end world hunger is for humans to live at their long-term carrying capacity. In this world, that requires a massive die-off.
This is only true if the carrying capacity of the earth is less than seven billion, which is as of yet unsubstantiated in this thread.
Education and birth control will do nothing to reduce population; there is a biological imperative to reproduce, and those that do not reproduce will be replaced by those who do reproduce. The only solution to the problem of overpopulation there has ever been and ever will be is death. Anything else is wishful thinking with no historical, ecological, or biological basis.
As a last-ditch resort, there is state-sponsored fertility control and sterilization. Death camps are a resort even more drastic than those two already drastic measures.
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On October 29 2009 02:46 Biochemist wrote:
I'm just wondering why so many organizations are pouring all these resources into providing the third world with food, when it's so apparently obvious that doing so will only exacerbate the problem in the future. Everyone so far seems to be in agreement with me. I'm interested in hearing from the other side.
I think many people take a much more humane approach to this issue instead of just thinking: "Let them starve to death, that way they they won't have children who would also starve".
Despite the ever present realities of life and the world, i believe that giving human life some sort of intrinsic value is the cornerstone of human society and therefore sometimes the more practical solutions should yield in favor of the more humane ones.
As for the issue itself, i find to be rather simple to understand, is just a mather of underdevelopment and lack of modern agriculture techniques in some parts of the world, such as India, with massive land suitable for agriculture but where many farmers still use ancient methods for growing their crops, making production insufficient, and if the developed contries flood them with their cheap food, it doesn't solve anything because that just puts all those local farmers (and all those who depend on them) out of business, and it doesn't matter how cheap food is if you have no money to buy it.
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Sanya12364 Posts
Economics is such that if food becomes expensive enough, people will either conserve more, or reproduce less recognizing that it costs more to raise a child.
The other solution to overpopulation is what mankind had done through out history. War. You can count on that to severely decimate the population. Plenty of people will be willing participants, but please count me out.
Another natural phenomenon is a plague especially when there is overpopulation. That'll drastically reduce the population as well.
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People love to argue with my above post based on cornucopian ideas of increasing technology, better food distribution, universal birth control and education. Meanwhile, at our current population levels, humans are destroying the very ecosystems that keep us alive. We are the cause of one of the greatest mass extinctions in the history of the planet. Not only are non-renewable resources being rapidly depleted, we are consuming renewable resources far faster than their rate of replenishment. All of this is happening around us as we speak, among all the other insurmountable problems endemic to civilization.
Too bleak? Not even close. When confronted with the harsh realities of our biological and ecological limits, people view biology and ecology as the problem: no one wants to acknowledge that scarcity and pain and death are simply balancing mechanisms. But as long as people identify death as a problem, the real problems only get worse. Ecology doesn't care what species you are or what gods you pray to, you can't destroy/exhaust/pollute entire ecosystems and expect no consequences.
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tangeng is correct here when it comes to incentives. It works in nature, so why the hell shouildn't it work in humans.
However, there's a far easier method to end world hunger and preserve the environment:
The answer, of course, is up.
The main reason food supply is thought to be limited is simply because there is a finite amount of land, and land development tends to be linear.
However: what if in addition to expanding horizantally (for farmland), what if people expanded vertically as well?
For instance, there is a (albeit inefficient) plan to have greenhouses in abandoned large buildings vai a rotating system of water dispensing, solar powered flourescent lights, and a recycling plan. While the costs are likely high, I predict that as food prices increase, incentives will rise to not only make this new method of farming cheaper but more efficient. As we run out of natural resources, there becomes a huge incentive for people to innovate.
For instance, take the horse and buggy. People were concerned that the horse and buggy was going to lead to a major disaster, because horses ate too much and the streets were filthy, causing a public health nightmare. People were predicting how we would all die of plague caused by these horses and their excrement.
Then someone invented the automobile. And our streets are usually free of horseshit.
Of course, now we're running out of oil, and combustion engines are a (very small) contributor to global warming. People are crying how we need to stop driving or else global warming is going to rise significantly (despite how the argument that a miniscule impact will do anything to offset the aforementioned calamity). Nobody can see what's ahead right now. Somebody might invent something new to supersede the automobile, however. We just don't know.
And for you wanna be Malthusians: people have been predicting world hunger for quite some time. But people have also neglected such advances as the green revolution, which demonstrate that while land expansion may increase linearly, science expands exponentially.
Not to mention that the overwhelming majority of the new population is in developing countries. Unfortunately, they will likely be driven to war, due to strong incentives, and regardless of whatever we can do about it. While war is a terrible, terrible thing, I don't really see how we can prevent masses of people from fighting over dwindling resources (although this is restricted only to the most destitute areas of the third world).
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The problem of feeding the hungry is to look at things from too narrow a perspective, there have been countries where starvation was rife where it is now now longer the case my own country in the mid 19th century. The reasons why some countries seem stuck in starvation mode and others don't is the issue.
But first, high birth rates are the hallmark of poorer countries, this is not down to the ignorance of poor people, it is a rational response to the parents environment as suggested by this pretty old but still valid Demographic model .(Though the applicability may be arguable, the intuition makes sense to me).
The question then becomes, not how to control population growth outright but to ask why do some countries get stuck in stage 2?
Most countries (will or rather are expected to) eventually kick on to the higher population dynamic stages (approx 4bn of the 5bn citizens of the developing world can be considered to be converging with the top 1bn).
The Bottom Billion is an incredibly interesting book by Paul Collier of Oxford that analyses why certain countries don't converge with those of us lucky enough to be in the developed world.
He identifies several traps that cause such stagnation, many of which are factors that contribute to a corrupt/unstable political environment.
Without addressing the problems brought about by these traps then food aid on its own is more like throwing water on a radiator rather than fuel on a fire, it marginally improves the situation but doesn't solve the problems outlined in the link above.
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On October 29 2009 03:44 WhiteNights wrote:Show nested quote +On October 29 2009 03:35 integral wrote:On September 13 2009 17:19 integral wrote:
The population of any species is a function of food supply. Feeding the billions of people has done nothing to reduce the number of starving people, although it has enabled us to produce more billions. Sustaining these additional billions requires more resources than the previous billions. If these additional billions survive to reproduce, even more people are consuming even more resources.
There are more people starving and hungry in the world than ever before.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. The only way to end world hunger is for humans to live at their long-term carrying capacity. In this world, that requires a massive die-off. This is only true if the carrying capacity of the earth is less than seven billion, which is as of yet unsubstantiated in this thread. Show nested quote +Education and birth control will do nothing to reduce population; there is a biological imperative to reproduce, and those that do not reproduce will be replaced by those who do reproduce. The only solution to the problem of overpopulation there has ever been and ever will be is death. Anything else is wishful thinking with no historical, ecological, or biological basis. As a last-ditch resort, there is state-sponsored fertility control and sterilization. Death camps are a resort even more drastic than those two already drastic measures.
The carrying capacity of earth is far, far far less than seven billion people. Defining long-term carrying capacity is far more slippery than is proving that we have overshot it; any population that consumes resources faster than they replenish is in overshoot. If we understand the scope enlargement and the vast increase in composite carrying capacity in light of the resource drawdown of fossil fuels, immediately long-term carrying capacity drops to below what it was before the industrial revolution, due to the ongoing pollution and outright destruction of ecosystems.
I encourage debate on the matter of what long-term carrying capacity actually is, however -- when you look at all the factors involved and try to come up with a realistic argument against each one, as I once did, it's very ... enlightening. Most people don't try, however, preferring to ignore the discussion altogether and blindly put their faith in a god, or technology, or human ingenuity to solve their myriad problems.
For related reasons, I usually don't speak up when topics like this come up. People's ignorance and denial juxtaposed with the sheer magnitude of this issue makes me pretty pissed off pretty quickly.
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First fact
we currently produce enough food for everyone on earth
Current "World" Hunger =/= Global Food shortage
"World" hunger is a strictly local problem... or even more specifically and individual problem... the problem is that people are too poor to buy food.
Basically its an economic issue, the development of countries, and allowing individuals to have economic opportunities. Which means places like many African nations with severe political problems would still have hunger even if the price of bread in the West fell to a penny for a loaf... (actually hunger might even get worse in Africa because the farmers couldn't make enough money)
The Malthusian issue is not a problem because population growth rates have been falling world wide and hunger has been falling worldwide.
The "west" is not growing except through immigration (US is one of a few exceptions and the non-immigration growthrate is very low) and the "nondeveloped world" has decreasing growthrates.
so, population will top out at maybe 10 billion, and there will still be world hunger.... for probably centuries after that, even as food production continues to grow... bcause the problem isn't food production, but distribution.
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Russian Federation124 Posts
Solution to world hunger is easy:For example 1 million people are dying from hunger you kill half a million of thouse people and the other half survives because now they have enough food.
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The Tragedy of the Commons
Food and population is only solvable through restrictions on reproduction. An odious idea, but otherwise the problem will perpetuate itself. Some populations have managed to voluntarily place restrictions on themselves (without thinking of them as such) and are declining. The rest will have to, or be forced to, or die out in resource wars. Science may help agriculture provide for a growing number of people for who knows how much longer. Maybe a long time. But we are putting ourselves in debt, and there will be a crash.
On October 29 2009 04:26 integral wrote:+ Show Spoiler +The carrying capacity of earth is far, far far less than seven billion people. Defining long-term carrying capacity is far more slippery than is proving that we have overshot it; any population that consumes resources faster than they replenish is in overshoot. If we understand the scope enlargement and the vast increase in composite carrying capacity in light of the resource drawdown of fossil fuels, immediately long-term carrying capacity drops to below what it was before the industrial revolution, due to the ongoing pollution and outright destruction of ecosystems.
I encourage debate on the matter of what long-term carrying capacity actually is, however -- when you look at all the factors involved and try to come up with a realistic argument against each one, as I once did, it's very ... enlightening. Most people don't try, however, preferring to ignore the discussion altogether and blindly put their faith in a god, or technology, or human ingenuity to solve their myriad problems. For related reasons, I usually don't speak up when topics like this come up. People's ignorance and denial juxtaposed with the sheer magnitude of this issue makes me pretty pissed off pretty quickly.
Same  No one wants to hear about the consequences of peak oil. "We'll replace oil with something else" they say, ignorant of the immense retooling of infrastructure that would be necessary, even if a sufficient alternate energy source could be found and efficiently exploited.
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we have enough resources to end world hunger, but the real problem is getting the food to the people that need it. The US makes 2-3 more food than we need, the unused food is either dumped or thrown away. Getting the food to people who need it most is the real issue in my eyes.
lol Krikkitone beat me to it. 
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It has been said many times before that our current technology is perfectly able to feed every single person on the world. Yet it doesn't because of politics and a bad distribution.
However, I think the first issue to address is education; I see it right outside of my house. My idiot neighbours (actually, most of the god damned country) like their whole family living really close to themselves (imagine the issues when you have a fight with a family member). And seeing as they have some unused terrain they build little houses there for their sons, and then for their future wives and future grandsons. Of course every single house is ground floor. So with their amazing idiosyncrasy, because of not using that land by putting it to work (farming), or even just building their houses vertically; the whole block is just a concrete wasteland, when it could have been (could be) much more.
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is awesome32277 Posts
On October 29 2009 04:28 Krikkitone wrote:
First fact
we currently produce enough food for everyone on earth
Current "World" Hunger =/= Global Food shortage
"World" hunger is a strictly local problem... or even more specifically and individual problem... the problem is that people are too poor to buy food.
Basically its an economic issue, the development of countries, and allowing individuals to have economic opportunities. Which means places like many African nations with severe political problems would still have hunger even if the price of bread in the West fell to a penny for a loaf... (actually hunger might even get worse in Africa because the farmers couldn't make enough money)
The Malthusian issue is not a problem because population growth rates have been falling world wide and hunger has been falling worldwide.
The "west" is not growing except through immigration (US is one of a few exceptions and the non-immigration growthrate is very low) and the "nondeveloped world" has decreasing growthrates.
so, population will top out at maybe 10 billion, and there will still be world hunger.... for probably centuries after that, even as food production continues to grow... bcause the problem isn't food production, but distribution.
This.
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On October 29 2009 04:08 Caller wrote:
And for you wanna be Malthusians: people have been predicting world hunger for quite some time. But people have also neglected such advances as the green revolution, which demonstrate that while land expansion may increase linearly, science expands exponentially.
For example, this post and particularly this paragraph is just devastatingly ignorant. It's hard to even deconstruct the assertions involved since they're based on a completely different paradigm, one which, in my opinion, is utterly divorced from reality. "Science expands exponentially" is an utterly meaningless assertion and faith-statement.
Even if I were to take your post at face value and respond to its actual content, there is very little that is relevant. The Green Revolution was fueled, subsidized, and funded by fossil fuels and is in no way, shape, or form an "advance" in sustainable food production. Deriving food sources from the consumption of non-renewable resources is an ecological pyramid scheme. The only way a pyramid scheme can be successful is if there is an infinite supply of new investors.
"Onwards and upwards forever" might have been a tenable belief at the beginning of the 20th century, but no longer. The only way such a belief can continue to be held is if one is completely and utterly divorced from the ecological reality of the planet on which we live.
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On October 29 2009 04:26 integral wrote:Show nested quote +On October 29 2009 03:44 WhiteNights wrote:On October 29 2009 03:35 integral wrote:On September 13 2009 17:19 integral wrote:
The population of any species is a function of food supply. Feeding the billions of people has done nothing to reduce the number of starving people, although it has enabled us to produce more billions. Sustaining these additional billions requires more resources than the previous billions. If these additional billions survive to reproduce, even more people are consuming even more resources.
There are more people starving and hungry in the world than ever before.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. The only way to end world hunger is for humans to live at their long-term carrying capacity. In this world, that requires a massive die-off. This is only true if the carrying capacity of the earth is less than seven billion, which is as of yet unsubstantiated in this thread. Education and birth control will do nothing to reduce population; there is a biological imperative to reproduce, and those that do not reproduce will be replaced by those who do reproduce. The only solution to the problem of overpopulation there has ever been and ever will be is death. Anything else is wishful thinking with no historical, ecological, or biological basis. As a last-ditch resort, there is state-sponsored fertility control and sterilization. Death camps are a resort even more drastic than those two already drastic measures. The carrying capacity of earth is far, far far less than seven billion people. Defining long-term carrying capacity is far more slippery than is proving that we have overshot it; any population that consumes resources faster than they replenish is in overshoot. If we understand the scope enlargement and the vast increase in composite carrying capacity in light of the resource drawdown of fossil fuels, immediately long-term carrying capacity drops to below what it was before the industrial revolution, due to the ongoing pollution and outright destruction of ecosystems. I encourage debate on the matter of what long-term carrying capacity actually is, however -- when you look at all the factors involved and try to come up with a realistic argument against each one, as I once did, it's very ... enlightening. Most people don't try, however, preferring to ignore the discussion altogether and blindly put their faith in a god, or technology, or human ingenuity to solve their myriad problems. For related reasons, I usually don't speak up when topics like this come up. People's ignorance and denial juxtaposed with the sheer magnitude of this issue makes me pretty pissed off pretty quickly.
Carrying capacity depends strictly on what we are going to consume. It would probably easily be possible with modern technology to "support" a population of 100 billion people, if all those people got was food, maybe some shelter (a population of maybe 100 million farmers/industries that build farm machinery and 99.9 billion others that "entertain" the farmers for food). You would also have to wipe out all "natural" ecosystems and replace everything with various types of cropland/aquafarming, etc., but it would probably be possible. Probably massive indoor farms as well.
If you are talking about supporting 7 billion people at a standard of living that the upper middle class of the west currently enjoys..... Then that is probably not possible with today's technology (although that would depend on which of today's technologies was being used... if everyone was going to be at that level, a sustainable situation might be possible if we used technologies that Are current, just not common.)
In any case, the 'population problem' looks like it will solve itself as population drops.
Economic development is a different issue.
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On October 29 2009 04:59 Krikkitone wrote:
In any case, the 'population problem' looks like it will solve itself as population drops.
after all, it's only tautological
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You are arguing against reality with some cornucopian pipe-dream fantasy of a world. If you would like to discuss what is real, I would be happy to engage in a conversation with you.
We do agree that the population problem will solve itself, but I don't think you will like how population problems solve themselves in reality.
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On October 29 2009 05:13 integral wrote:
You are arguing against reality with some cornucopian pipe-dream fantasy of a world. If you would like to discuss what is real, I would be happy to engage in a conversation with you.
We do agree that the population problem will solve itself, but I don't think you will like how population problems solve themselves in reality.
What is real? You claim logical correctness by inductively asserting the continuation of trends in biological and ecological decline, but refuse to inductively extend the progress of science. Sure, the idea that science will solve all of our problems is faith based, but the claim to certainty that science will not solve all of our problems is faith based as well.
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I don't claim to certainty that science will not "solve all of our problems", I'm merely strongly skeptical that it will based on the evidence. (Can't prove a negative anyway.) I'm not a prophet, nor am I prescient, but when people talk about what is theoretically possible based on faulty premises and irrelevant paradigms instead of what is actually currently real, it pisses me off and I respond strongly. I trust that you asking "what is real" does not indicate a semantic or philosophical skepticism towards empirical evidence, merely skepticism that what I am talking about is grounded in said evidence.
I'm pretty sure that very few people who have responded in this thread with their uninformed conjecture here wants to engage in an actual discussion, however; rather than actually looking at the evidence or understanding the relevant subjects, it's far easier to make proclamations and unsupported assumptions based on no evidence at all -- in fact, evidently based on nothing but sheer unadulterated ignorance. If I am wrong and people want to actually go into population ecology and the relevant subjects of carrying capacity and resource drawdown, I am more than willing. Unlike others here, I am not talking out of my ass, and though it will no doubt be perceived that I have my head firmly lodged in it, I don't really care -- this is a hugely important topic and it's extremely frustrating to me that people are absolutely clueless and have no idea that they are.
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On October 29 2009 03:22 Biochemist wrote:Show nested quote +On October 29 2009 02:51 KlaCkoN wrote:On October 29 2009 02:29 Biochemist wrote:A quick google search reveals hundreds of organizations dedicated to ending world hunger. Here's one page from the university of michigan: http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange2/current/lectures/food_supply/food.htmUnfortunately it seems like all of these guys have the cause and effect backwards. They predict (correctly) that world population is rising quickly, and that food production can't keep up with it. Unfortunately, producing more food is like dumping gasoline on a house fire in the hopes that it'll burn the gasoline instead of your house. Throughout history, world population has always been controlled by the available food supply. Every major advance in technology (e.g. irrigation, commercial fertilizer) and every major advance in food trade (e.g. columbian exchange) has been accompanied by a corresponding jump in population. Feeding starving people now will only enable them to reproduce so that in 20 years we have twice as many starving people and an even more severe food shortage. It seems like such a waste of everyone's time and effort to me; the only long term solutions involve education and birth control, and the short term solution of giving them food just makes the long term problem even bigger. It seems so black and white to me, can anyone offer another side of the picture? You wrong ~~ (which may be why all those organizations do indeed exist.) The invention of the Haber process did prevent a massive starvation disaster in Europe and ever since then there has been no starvation at all in either (western) europe or north america even though the population has increased a lot. Point beeing that it is perfectly possible to remove hunger using technological advancment if only the political situation in general is stable. Of course in countries unstable for other reasons (africa) the only effect was to increase the amount of starving people I agree with that. But as soon as these countries stabilize then it will indeed be possible to solve the food problem. Demanding abstinence and birth control of an uneducated and starving population is a far more farfetched solution than peace keeping, trade and other kinds of support meant to improve the ecconomic situation. That is a good point. Considering that the population in the "west" is still growing, do you think we'll eventually need another Haber-type breakthrough to prevent a second starvation crisis? I expect that the government will eventually step in and impose population control measures (which would come with a whole new set of issues).
At least in europe the population isn't really growing anymore though afaik. I doubt population control will be necessary, it's a general trend that as soon as a region become advanced and rich enough the birth numbers decrease significantly. (It's happened literally everywhere so far, no reason to believe it won't continue)
But well yes, technological breakthroughs of various kinds will be very necessary if the goal is to support ~10 billion people at the living standard we have come to expect in the west. Which is necessary if we actually want the birth numbers to drop by themselves. I don't think food production will be a major challenge though, so much food is just wasted nowadays (fish fed to chickens, stockpiles in europe allowed to rot to keep prices up, good farmland used for housing, efficient farms seized by governements in zimbawe or venezuela etc) No we can produce an absolutely insane amount of food if we needed to.
The problem will be more along the lines of rare minerals running out, finding reliable energy sources etc. I'm very optimistic about our ability to tackle these problems though.
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On October 29 2009 06:04 integral wrote:
I don't claim to certainty that science will not "solve all of our problems", I'm merely strongly skeptical that it will based on the evidence. (Can't prove a negative anyway.)
We must view the world so differently ~~
Look at the world two hundred years ago and the problems people had then. Lack of food, death by common sicknesses, sanitary problems and so on.
They are all "solved" now, of course we have a bunch of other problems in their place but I see no reason why we wouldn't be able to solve them as well. And more importantly I see no reason why we wouldn't be able to lift the rest of the world to our standard.
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On October 29 2009 04:42 uglymoose89 wrote:we have enough resources to end world hunger, but the real problem is getting the food to the people that need it. The US makes 2-3 more food than we need, the unused food is either dumped or thrown away. Getting the food to people who need it most is the real issue in my eyes. lol Krikkitone beat me to it.
And it has actually been more harmful. The US makes way more food than we need, so we have an obese population. However, there are still plenty of food that gets dumped to other countries. What it does is drive local farmers out of business and just made them more dependent on foreign aid. Most organizations would rather have rich countries donate cash rather than food because of this. The cash theoretically allows people to purchase more food and still keep their local farmers in business.
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GMOs are the solution to world hunger yet people are afraid of fish in their stawberries so people die of hunger.
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The easiest way is to let starving people starve to death. Many are starving because their countries don't have the economy or even the size to feed a population as large as they have.
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They are all "solved" now, of course we have a bunch of other problems in their place but I see no reason why we wouldn't be able to solve them as well.
Lack of food, death by common sicknesses, and sanitary problems are solved? What planet do you live on?
I see no reason why we wouldn't be able to lift the rest of the world to our standard.
The history of the industrial revolution and its coincidence with colonialism, and how it has developed into the current situation of economic imperialism, plus an examination of the sheer magnitude of the resources required to maintain a first world existence, juxtaposed with an examination of resource availability, overpopulation and ecological limits should give you a few reasons.
The idea of a "demographic transition" where everyone in the world is able to live at a "First World" standard of living is so fantastic it should be outlawed from the realm of serious discourse. You might as well base your argument on the existence of a benevolent fairy in the sky that guides economic expansion. Hell, maybe you could call it the "invisible hand" or perhaps the "ultimate resource". Economists would be proud.
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The whole "omg the world won't have enough food in the future" is a highly exaggerated argument. Yes the population is increasing at a high rate but the Earth is huge and we still have a lot of land that is not used for much of anything. The problem is what was said before with the resources we have now being underutilized or wasted. Western nations waste A LOT of food. Its a complex issue though as stability in countries were this is happening as well as greed factors influence it a lot.
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On October 29 2009 06:53 integral wrote:Show nested quote +They are all "solved" now, of course we have a bunch of other problems in their place but I see no reason why we wouldn't be able to solve them as well. Lack of food, death by common sicknesses, and sanitary problems are solved? What planet do you live on? Show nested quote +I see no reason why we wouldn't be able to lift the rest of the world to our standard. The history of the industrial revolution and its coincidence with colonialism, and how it has developed into the current situation of economic imperialism, plus an examination of the sheer magnitude of the resources required to maintain a first world existence, juxtaposed with an examination of resource availability, overpopulation and ecological limits should give you a few reasons. .
I thought it was fairly obvious that I was talking about the "western" world in my first statement, and no people don't die from hunger around here. (at least not in numbers worth talking about)
So let's see; you claim that there aren't enough resources. There _is_ enough food, this is simply true at least for the moment.
And even if (which I admit is a real risk) the oceans collapse we will simply have to grow algae and eat them instead. (Tons on projects working on this, most focusing on using them for fuel right now though)
Then we have the question of energy which we as of right now don't have an answer for, however new energy sources have always been developed and will continue to be developed as long as there are people who find science fun. New ideas are tested constantly. Sooner or later one will work, that is just the way it is.
Then we have the issue of rare minerals, and even the not so rare ones which are continually used up and which are absolutely essential. Yes fine, sooner or later we will run out. The rest of the solar system has more than enough though and with an expedition to mars planned within the coming 100 years or so it's only a question or time before we start to extract them.
If someone told the people in europe 500 years ago that there was room for 700 million people all living in comparable luxury there they would have laughed. Advancement is a wonderful thing and during the entire human history it has never ever stopped. No reason to think it will stop now, on the contrary I'd say it's going faster now than ever before.
You think it is naive to belive in progress and new inventions, looking back in history I would say it is naive to not believe in them.
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I'm pretty sure we have more than enough food to feed everyone, but the distribution is very unequal.
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On October 29 2009 04:28 Krikkitone wrote:
First fact
we currently produce enough food for everyone on earth
Current "World" Hunger =/= Global Food shortage
"World" hunger is a strictly local problem... or even more specifically and individual problem... the problem is that people are too poor to buy food.
Basically its an economic issue, the development of countries, and allowing individuals to have economic opportunities. Which means places like many African nations with severe political problems would still have hunger even if the price of bread in the West fell to a penny for a loaf... (actually hunger might even get worse in Africa because the farmers couldn't make enough money)
The Malthusian issue is not a problem because population growth rates have been falling world wide and hunger has been falling worldwide.
The "west" is not growing except through immigration (US is one of a few exceptions and the non-immigration growthrate is very low) and the "nondeveloped world" has decreasing growthrates.
so, population will top out at maybe 10 billion, and there will still be world hunger.... for probably centuries after that, even as food production continues to grow... bcause the problem isn't food production, but distribution.
I totally agree with this.
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Klackon, I can't really respond to your post since you didn't really respond to mine except to bastardize what I said and set up a straw man, and make bald assertions like "that is just the way it works".
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On October 29 2009 06:53 integral wrote:Show nested quote +They are all "solved" now, of course we have a bunch of other problems in their place but I see no reason why we wouldn't be able to solve them as well. Lack of food, death by common sicknesses, and sanitary problems are solved? What planet do you live on?
If for some reason a world superstate was instituted with the political will to make sacrifices in first-world living standards (again, not very realistic, but for the moment I am referring only to the technical feasibility,) it would be possible to bring the entire world up to a pared-down first-world living standard.
By pared-down, I mean after stripping out the luxuries - adequate food (enough to eat), shelter (massive block apartments are good enough), sanitary infrastructure (running water and sewage disposal), education, and basic medicine - so the word "first-world" with its connotations of "American" is fairly misleading; think about bringing the world up to, say, a Croatian living standard. The world is well within its capacity to provide food for its people - eliminating meat production, for starters, would already expand the food that already feeds the world many-fold. Shelter and education can also come without excessive spending. The real big-ticket item is perhaps the infrastructure necessary to provide, say, running water, sewage disposal, and stuff like that, which is not cheap, but if, say, 20% of disposable world GDP was redirected into building infrastructure for third-world countries it could be done.
What we're talking about is not technical impossibility, but political.
On October 29 2009 04:26 integral wrote:Show nested quote +On October 29 2009 03:44 WhiteNights wrote:On October 29 2009 03:35 integral wrote:On September 13 2009 17:19 integral wrote:
The population of any species is a function of food supply. Feeding the billions of people has done nothing to reduce the number of starving people, although it has enabled us to produce more billions. Sustaining these additional billions requires more resources than the previous billions. If these additional billions survive to reproduce, even more people are consuming even more resources.
There are more people starving and hungry in the world than ever before.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. The only way to end world hunger is for humans to live at their long-term carrying capacity. In this world, that requires a massive die-off. This is only true if the carrying capacity of the earth is less than seven billion, which is as of yet unsubstantiated in this thread. Education and birth control will do nothing to reduce population; there is a biological imperative to reproduce, and those that do not reproduce will be replaced by those who do reproduce. The only solution to the problem of overpopulation there has ever been and ever will be is death. Anything else is wishful thinking with no historical, ecological, or biological basis. As a last-ditch resort, there is state-sponsored fertility control and sterilization. Death camps are a resort even more drastic than those two already drastic measures. The carrying capacity of earth is far, far far less than seven billion people. Defining long-term carrying capacity is far more slippery than is proving that we have overshot it; any population that consumes resources faster than they replenish is in overshoot. If we understand the scope enlargement and the vast increase in composite carrying capacity in light of the resource drawdown of fossil fuels, immediately long-term carrying capacity drops to below what it was before the industrial revolution, due to the ongoing pollution and outright destruction of ecosystems.
If we were, to say, eliminate all consumer goods production and shift that entire monstrously large sector of production elsewhere we could build enough solar plants to move the entire electricity demand of the world onto renewable energy before we ran out of fossil fuel. If for some reason it became necessary, humanity could draw down its level of environmental destruction; yes, at the cost of many first-world living standards, but not enough that we would all starve.
As for "any population which consumes resources faster than they replenish is in overshoot," that would mean that humanity was in overshoot the first time humanity extracted metal from the earth.
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On October 29 2009 07:30 integral wrote:
I can't really respond to your post since you didn't really respond to mine except to bastardize what I said and set up a straw man.
Most of your posts contained random unimportant stuff like "people who don't agree with me on this are ignorant and stupid", written in a bunch of ways (and with nicer english)
The only actual content I found was that there isnt enough resources to go around if everyone want to live at a first world standard. Yes you used words like overpopulation instead, the meaning is the same. And that is what I responded to.
(Plus the part about ecconomic imperialism but while that is a sad and important topic it has nothing to do with the subject so I left it out)
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8751 Posts
On October 29 2009 06:04 integral wrote:
(Can't prove a negative anyway.)
Wtf?
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@biochemist: correct if wrong, but is your point "lets not feed people because hunger will always be a problem and feeding it will just cause exponentially more hungry people" ?
if that is the case, then you should just stop eating now because you will always go hungry later and eating now serves no purpose, you're just wasting resources.
----Unrelated: as many have already pointed out, distribution is the problem, not production. OP seems to be a very misinformed individual.
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If for some reason it became necessary, humanity could draw down its level of environmental destruction The point is that it won't.
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On October 29 2009 08:01 Liquid`NonY wrote:Wtf?
I'm referring to the lack of falsifiability of negative statements. What is confusing?
Falsifiability is pretty important. If something has happened a certain way 500 times, we can reasonably expect it to happen again the 501st time. You can't PROVE it won't be different the 501st time -- it MIGHT be, after all -- but it'd be really stupid to bet on it being any different.
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This thread is SO BAD and has SO MANY know nothings it's unbelievable! People actually think we have a problem producing food, or transporting, or the places where food is needed the most is unstable...cus of what exactly? Answer me that.
Read this - Why Africa depends on handouts
Watch this - Food Inc.
Get educated, my god this thread is...jesus h christ!!!
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Sanya12364 Posts
Never underestimate the hand that political instability has had in making Africa poor. And all those agricultural "foreign aid packages" are roundly refuted by "Give a man a fish... teach a man to fish..."
Gifts of capital investment that Africans want would be far more effective than the direct food packages that have ravaged and destroyed their native agricultural industry.
The second side effect of foreign aid packages is that the lack of accountability in the delivery of said foreign aid packages has promoted even more corruption and political instability in Africa to the detriment of its inhabitants. Direct foreign aid packages delivered through African political entities have done net harm to that continent despite its "good intentions."
Instead, direct individual to individual micro-investments in the form of lending of equipment, capital, and money have done well. Whoever said the problem was political is correct. The primary factor hindering African development are politician - corrupt politicians on both sides. It's best not to let politicians touch the money at all.
Also all these people theorize that for some reason we will all of a sudden wake up one day be out of resources and that somehow it will be a giant shock to everyone that it happened. It's going to happen over the course of several decades. By then either food prices will have risen enough, energy prices will have risen enough, or wars and plagues will have killed enough people that people won't be starving. If over-population is a problem worry about the wars rather than the starvation.
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On October 29 2009 07:38 KlaCkoN wrote:Show nested quote +On October 29 2009 07:30 integral wrote:
I can't really respond to your post since you didn't really respond to mine except to bastardize what I said and set up a straw man. Most of your posts contained random unimportant stuff like "people who don't agree with me on this are ignorant and stupid", written in a bunch of ways (and with nicer english) The only actual content I found was that there isnt enough resources to go around if everyone want to live at a first world standard. Yes you used words like overpopulation instead, the meaning is the same. And that is what I responded to. (Plus the part about ecconomic imperialism but while that is a sad and important topic it has nothing to do with the subject so I left it out)
Yeah, that's pretty much my entire point, that the earth is finite, there are ecological limits, and anyone who thinks differently is making faith-based assertions not grounded in reality.
If you want to argue that the earth can theoretically support more humans, that's fine. The earth probably can: I will not argue with you about the maximum height of the short-term carrying capacity based on windfalls from non-renewable resources. I will, however, point out that this is resource drawdown, that this resource drawdown has led to overshoot, and that the inevitable consequence of overshoot is die-off. This is ecological reality, if you would like to continue to argue against ecological reality with unfounded ignorant conjecture then I cannot have a conversation with you because paradigmatic differences are irreconcilable. As I wrote before, if someone wants to have a discussion about what the long-term carrying capacity of earth actually is, I am more than willing to engage, but, again as I wrote before, I doubt anyone who has posted their conjecture here will enter into that conversation because 1. you have a different paradigm and 2. you have no idea what you're talking about.
Please understand, this is all I can say. I can't have a conversation with someone in a language they do not speak. I try my best not to judge the people who don't speak my language (to extend this metaphor) but from my perspective the only barrier is not being ignorant, so it's kind of hard.
Anyone who really wants to understand anything I've said in this thread should read a population ecology textbook in conjunction with Overshoot by William Catton.
Gotta run for now.
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8751 Posts
On October 29 2009 08:24 integral wrote:Show nested quote +On October 29 2009 08:01 Liquid`NonY wrote:On October 29 2009 06:04 integral wrote:
(Can't prove a negative anyway.) Wtf? I'm referring to the lack of falsifiability of negative statements. What is confusing? Falsifiability is pretty important. If something has happened a certain way 500 times, we can reasonably expect it to happen again the 501st time. You can't PROVE it won't be different the 501st time -- it MIGHT be, after all -- but it'd be really stupid to bet on it being any different.
Your attack is on the method of argument by induction. The conclusion being negative is irrelevant. And if you really want to say that arguments by induction aren't worthy of using the word 'proves' then I'm still thinking "Wtf?" with a dash of "whatever"
And when arguing deductively, how about this:
if A, then B
not B
Therefore, not A
I've proven a negative statement!
A = humans invent a means to end world hunger
B = humans are rational
Of course, humans are indeed rational, so my second premise isn't true. But if someone found a true statement that fits for B, then they could prove that humans do not invent a means to end world hunger. I suppose what you want to say now is that whatever anyone ever says fits for B, you will always doubt it. Yeah sure you can doubt anything, down to the idea that our perceptions are totally deceptive and we don't know anything, blah blah blah. But in argument, some things are accepted as true because it's useful and reasonable to do so. When all evidence relevant to a statement is reasonably considered, then it's appropriate to use the word "proves" when that statement logically entails another statement.
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Sanya12364 Posts
You do realize that trade is a stabilizing force in the world, and it smooths out local year to year variations. If there are worldwide variations on massive scale, then we're screwed no matter what. The failure of the Russian famine is due to political forces that prevented trade or corruption that diverted delivery. Not exactly what you might call an ecological phenomenon.
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On October 29 2009 08:43 integral wrote:Show nested quote +On October 29 2009 07:38 KlaCkoN wrote:On October 29 2009 07:30 integral wrote:
I can't really respond to your post since you didn't really respond to mine except to bastardize what I said and set up a straw man. Most of your posts contained random unimportant stuff like "people who don't agree with me on this are ignorant and stupid", written in a bunch of ways (and with nicer english) The only actual content I found was that there isnt enough resources to go around if everyone want to live at a first world standard. Yes you used words like overpopulation instead, the meaning is the same. And that is what I responded to. (Plus the part about ecconomic imperialism but while that is a sad and important topic it has nothing to do with the subject so I left it out) Yeah, that's pretty much my entire point, that the earth is finite, there are ecological limits, and anyone who thinks differently is making faith-based assertions not grounded in reality. If you want to argue that the earth can theoretically support more humans, that's fine. The earth probably can: I will not argue with you about the maximum height of the short-term carrying capacity based on windfalls from non-renewable resources. I will, however, point out that this is resource drawdown, that this resource drawdown has led to overshoot, and that the inevitable consequence of overshoot is die-off. This is ecological reality, if you would like to continue to argue against ecological reality with unfounded ignorant conjecture then I cannot have a conversation with you because paradigmatic differences are irreconcilable.
I've been making the point that the carrying capacity of the earth depends on capital and technology level. Theoretically, considering a situation where the entirety of the Gobi Desert has been turned into a massive solar power plant designed to power millions of hydroponic farms, one can *imagine* a long-term carrying capacity of a hundred billion.
The competing factors are:
Increasing human population above long-term carrying capacity.
Decreasing non-renewable resources means short-term carrying capacity cannot be sustained.
Increasing technology and capital level increasing Earth's long-term carrying capacity.
Nonrenewable resource drawdown doesn't need to result in die-off in one of the two following scenarios:
1.) Long-term carrying capacity is increased from below the current population to above the current population, and population control measures are implemented before we hit the absolute limit.
2.) Humanity adjusts consumption patterns in order to sustain more people off of less resources rather than continuing current consumption patterns and allowing people to die off.
Notice that neither of these apply to an ecology where the population in question is unintelligent. Standard ecological theory stating "draw-down implies overshoot inevitably leads to die-off" is predicated on the assumption that renewable long-term carrying capacity is constant, which is true when dealing with creatures which are not humans, and it is this assumption which I am objecting to.
Also, I did post about carrying capacity with respect to living standards and you ignored my previous post.
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On October 29 2009 02:41 plated.rawr wrote:Show nested quote +On October 29 2009 02:37 Roffles wrote:
Give a starving person a fish, and he'll eat for a day. Teach him to fish, and he'll eat for a lifetime.
Ending World Hunger is nice, but thinking about population control and how the population could just skyrocket in the future is quite scary. Give a starving person a fish, and he'll eat for a day. Teach him to fish, and he'll feed himself, then use his newly aquired skills plus natural human greed to strip mine the fish population, causing future starvation. As long as we have a market economy and liberal capitalism, there will always be starvation.
This is wrong on so many levels. A market economy promotes the efficient use of resources through people owning capital and the fruits of their labor- teach a man to fish, give him license to operate a fish farm, and he'll feed himself and a crapton other people while making responsible use of the fish population resource because it belongs to him and his livelyhood depends on it.
You ever seen human greed strip mine the population of cows and chickens of private property?
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Sanya12364 Posts
A lot of unsustainable activity has been promoted politically rather than through natural expression of the free will of people. There is the side-by-side comparison of the activities engaged in by the people of Mongolia with traditional agricultural methods vs their counterparts in Inner Mongolia with government promoted agricultural activities. A lot of unsustainable activities are politically facilitated under the guise of a free market but is instead the plundering of natural resources by some politically connected entity or sanctioned by some ignorant bureaucrat that ignores traditional wisdom accumulated by generations of living experience.
The market is also a powerful force in communicating scarcity and communicating future scarcity. It is why if fossil fuels or food prices were to rise, people would adapt to the rising prices by consuming less. It even means modifying behavior to reproduce less so they don't have to feed as many children. The alternative to the free market solution of communication through pricing is a political solution where it sets one body of people against another i.e. war.
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Integral, I couldn't agree more with every single one of your posts. And you're so articulate! I hadn't applied the context of depleting natural resources to this line of reasoning yet. Just because we can produce enough food to feed 7 billion people at this point in time doesn't mean we will be able to continue doing so.
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I combed 3 pages of verbage looking for one person to stand out and say "the biggest issue is international trade."
Nothing.
You really think that when people's most basic needs are not met, they care to be educated, or even has the strength to listen? Or "depletion of natural resources"... I don't even know where that came from. With modern seeds and farming techniques we're tens of times more efficient at harvesting crop from limited space.
The biggest issue is advanced countries are able to subsidize and overproduce crops, in our case, corn. Then we flood the international marketplace with cheap food, thereby destroying the agricultural economies of the poor African countries. When their subsistence farming structure collapses, we go in there, take the land and plant cash crops for export back to us, paying their poor workers pennies, and then move on.
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Sanya12364 Posts
So anyways I read through integral's post and came away with one economic principle from all that text.
"There is scarcity."
That was it.
@risingdragoon
I would have thought that the problem was agricultural subsidies. The direct foreign add in the form of food also hurts. I also don't know what you mean by trade. Usually in the underdeveloped nations, the foreign aid comes in the form of flooding the country with cheap food. How is that trade?
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Chronology, tangeng, do you have it?
Foreign aid is after the economy is destroyed and the people no longer able to support themselves.
The flood of cheap food in these countries is when they still had an internal agricultural economy. When the cheap foreign food floods their marketplace, the peasant will obviously buy the cheaper good instead of their locally grown food - putting their farmers out of work.
The rest is dominoes.
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I just ate a steak and I aint sharing!
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On October 29 2009 02:48 Boonbag wrote:
The definition of the third world is that they actually can't eat propely, that's why we provide them with food -- because otherwise populations would die =[
no that is not true, mexico is a 3rd world country and we are not provided with any kind of food by foreign countries.
the definition of 3rd world country has nothing to do with its ability to feed its habitats.
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On October 29 2009 08:50 Liquid`NonY wrote:Show nested quote +On October 29 2009 08:24 integral wrote:On October 29 2009 08:01 Liquid`NonY wrote:On October 29 2009 06:04 integral wrote:
(Can't prove a negative anyway.) Wtf? I'm referring to the lack of falsifiability of negative statements. What is confusing? Falsifiability is pretty important. If something has happened a certain way 500 times, we can reasonably expect it to happen again the 501st time. You can't PROVE it won't be different the 501st time -- it MIGHT be, after all -- but it'd be really stupid to bet on it being any different. Your attack is on the method of argument by induction. The conclusion being negative is irrelevant. And if you really want to say that arguments by induction aren't worthy of using the word 'proves' then I'm still thinking "Wtf?" with a dash of "whatever" And when arguing deductively, how about this: if A, then B not B Therefore, not A I've proven a negative statement! A = humans invent a means to end world hunger B = humans are rational Of course, humans are indeed rational, so my second premise isn't true. But if someone found a true statement that fits for B, then they could prove that humans do not invent a means to end world hunger. I suppose what you want to say now is that whatever anyone ever says fits for B, you will always doubt it. Yeah sure you can doubt anything, down to the idea that our perceptions are totally deceptive and we don't know anything, blah blah blah. But in argument, some things are accepted as true because it's useful and reasonable to do so. When all evidence relevant to a statement is reasonably considered, then it's appropriate to use the word "proves" when that statement logically entails another statement.
I would welcome a true statement for B. But all evidence points otherwise, to the point that I consider it "proven" that humans are in overshoot and there will be a die-off.
Yeah sure you can doubt anything, down to the idea that our perceptions are totally deceptive and we don't know anything, blah blah blah. I was responding to a dismissal of this nature when I mentioned proving a negative in the first place. Yeah sure you can say we don't know what's going to happen when Population X goes into overshoot, but every OTHER time a population has overshot there has been a die-off. I cannot be 100% certain that it will happen, but reasonably I cannot think it will not.
The difference in paradigms that I keep referring to relates to this discussion -- what I refer to as the cornucopian paradigm looks at the history of what they refer to as "progress" and points out that "progress" has happened "consistently" throughout history. They look at a problem like overpopulation and say "technology fixed all these problems, technology will fix this problem too" and will call anyone stupid who doesn't agree, just because it's happened so many times before. Human population has been increasing so far, it must continue! But this cornucopian paradigm is not scientific or even grounded, it's merely self-serving bias with an unhealthy dose of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. There is no empirical basis for "progress", no falsifiable hypotheses, indeed no substance at all beyond anecdotal evidence. Progress is thus not a legitimate entity -- it is a myth, a self-congratulatory story.
The ecological paradigm doesn't rely on fairy tales. Using populations, controlled variables and falsifiable hypotheses we have actually figured out how population works and what are the factors involved. This is real science, not TV science, not the science cornucopians hail as the beacon of progress. Using this science, there is no need to speculate what will happen when a species goes into overshoot, because we can prove it. From these experiments we can derive theorems and principles and terms, leading to the ability to make statements like "The composite carrying capacity of two environments is greater than or equal to the sum of the carrying capacities of each individual environment." or "We can break down the ways populations overshoot into four main categories: through ecological release, resource drawdown, feedback lag, and fluctuating carrying capacity."
These two paradigms simply don't communicate very well with each other. For obvious reasons I privilege the latter, but there are many who privilege the former. For what it's worth, I also think believing in a god is ridiculous at best, so I'm used to the paradigmatic differences. Only when the paradigmatic differences are about such an important topic as overpopulation do I become incensed; even though I know it doesn't help to get mad, I still do.
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On October 29 2009 10:01 TanGeng wrote:
So anyways I read through integral's post and came away with one economic principle from all that text.
"There is scarcity."
That was it.
If you had found more I would be worried. Population ecology has little to nothing to do with economics.
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Sanya12364 Posts
On October 29 2009 10:08 .risingdragoon wrote:
Chronology, tangeng, do you have it?
Foreign aid is after the economy is destroyed and the people no longer able to support themselves.
The flood of cheap food in these countries is when they still had an internal agricultural economy. When the cheap foreign food floods their marketplace, the peasant will obviously buy the cheaper good instead of their locally grown food - putting their farmers out of work.
The rest is dominoes.
So what seems to be the problem? It's either partially subsidized food that out competes the local agricultural industry or it's the completely subsidized food (free foreign aid!) that out competes the local agricultural industry.
What can you do about that? You can either stop subsidizing food or you can a huge amount of money forbidding international trade of food. That means a far smaller variety in diet and possible starvation in some nations where the population is larger than the food production capacity.
Is it really logical to point to the trade and call that the problem!?
On October 29 2009 10:38 integral wrote:Show nested quote +On October 29 2009 10:01 TanGeng wrote:
So anyways I read through integral's post and came away with one economic principle from all that text.
"There is scarcity."
That was it. If you had found more I would be worried. Population ecology has little to nothing to do with economics.
Your study of ecology makes one huge academic assumption, humans are stupid anti-social animals that don't make decisions with any foresight.
Human decisions such as the decision to reproduce fall in the economic realm. It's not ecological science.
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actually you could solve the worlds energy and food crisis by growing hemp.the seeds are edible and highly nutritous and other parts of the plant can be used for cotton material , plastics and/or oil like products.henry ford once made a car from hemp , it was stronger than steel.
these plants could also probably grow in degraded 3rd world conditions.but it is no good continually giving these people food you must give them machinery and seeds and let them get on with their own lives.
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On October 29 2009 09:52 .risingdragoon wrote:
I combed 3 pages of verbage looking for one person to stand out and say "the biggest issue is international trade."
Nothing.
You really think that when people's most basic needs are not met, they care to be educated, or even has the strength to listen? Or "depletion of natural resources"... I don't even know where that came from. With modern seeds and farming techniques we're tens of times more efficient at harvesting crop from limited space.
The biggest issue is advanced countries are able to subsidize and overproduce crops, in our case, corn. Then we flood the international marketplace with cheap food, thereby destroying the agricultural economies of the poor African countries. When their subsistence farming structure collapses, we go in there, take the land and plant cash crops for export back to us, paying their poor workers pennies, and then move on.
The reason I don't talk about the socioeconomic factors involved in world hunger is that people talk about the starvation as if it were a problem that can be fixed by feeding people, rather than an outgrowth of resource drawdown and overshoot. If we were living within our means and there were still hungry people, I would of course be talking about trade and the distribution of resources -- the problem, and its solution, would be sociological.
But if you were to address the sociological factors involved, and "solve" world hunger, you would merely exacerbate the real underlying problem of overpopulation by enabling continuing reproduction. This is why it's so important to understand the actual ecology of population, and not talk about human population as if it had no ecological basis.
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On October 29 2009 10:41 TanGeng wrote:Show nested quote +On October 29 2009 10:38 integral wrote:On October 29 2009 10:01 TanGeng wrote:
So anyways I read through integral's post and came away with one economic principle from all that text.
"There is scarcity."
That was it. If you had found more I would be worried. Population ecology has little to nothing to do with economics. Your study of ecology makes one huge academic assumption, humans are animals.
FTFY
Next you'll be telling me humans aren't bound by the same laws of ecology that other species are because we have foresight and the ability to choose whether to reproduce or not based on economic factors. If you were to look at the behavior of individuals and not that of the entire species, you might be able to make this argument. But as a species, humans follow the same exact pattern every single other species follows. We live, we consume, we reproduce, we die. If we don't have enough food, we starve to death. If we exceed long-term carrying capacity, we die-off. Humans are not exempt from any of the biological constraints that other species are, though we're certainly a bit more creative in pushing those limits as far as we can. We have a composite carrying capacity almost to the scale of the entire earth, but it's been completely supported by nonrenewable resources, and that's called overshoot, and populations die when they go into overshoot.
If you want to "fix" overshoot, you'd do well to understand the basic ecology involved, because then and only then you could apply economics to the task.
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Sanya12364 Posts
On October 29 2009 10:53 integral wrote:Show nested quote +On October 29 2009 10:41 TanGeng wrote:On October 29 2009 10:38 integral wrote:On October 29 2009 10:01 TanGeng wrote:
So anyways I read through integral's post and came away with one economic principle from all that text.
"There is scarcity."
That was it. If you had found more I would be worried. Population ecology has little to nothing to do with economics. Your study of ecology makes one huge academic assumption, humans are animals. FTFY
So that explains use of contraception and negative population growth rates in Japan? Let me know when your ecological equations can figure that out.
This is not even a problem if the politicians would just let the price of food rise. No one would even have to starve.
Not sure what you are arguing about anyways. If all you were to point out is that there is some scarcity and newly introduced stupid non-sentient populations tend to overshoot the carrying capacity, all it does is discredit those that think that we should not treat food as a scarce resource and just provide it to everyone that needs to eat.
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Russian Federation4447 Posts
Solving world hunger doesn't solve other issues that come with a massive population.
Resource deficiency is a much much bigger problem.
Consumation of Oil / Gas / Wood / Water is a much bigger issue than shortage of food.
Food is renewable. These resources are not.
Solving world hunger would only push the population of Earth to more exponential levels.
Where are the resources to for all these people? There isn't enough.
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Russian Federation4447 Posts
Integral, you're one of the only ones that make any sense in this thread.
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On October 29 2009 10:57 TanGeng wrote:Show nested quote +On October 29 2009 10:53 integral wrote:On October 29 2009 10:41 TanGeng wrote:On October 29 2009 10:38 integral wrote:On October 29 2009 10:01 TanGeng wrote:
So anyways I read through integral's post and came away with one economic principle from all that text.
"There is scarcity."
That was it. If you had found more I would be worried. Population ecology has little to nothing to do with economics. Your study of ecology makes one huge academic assumption, humans are animals. FTFY So that explains use of contraception and negative population growth rates in Japan? Let me know when your ecological equations can figure that out. This is not even a problem if the politicians would just let the price of food rise. No one would even have to starve. Not sure what you are arguing about anyways. If all you were to point out is that there is some scarcity and newly introduced stupid non-sentient populations tend to overshoot the carrying capacity, all it does is discredit those that think that we should not treat food as a scarce resource and just provide it to everyone that needs to eat.
I responded to some of this pre-emptively in an edit -- birth control and negative population growth rates in one area of the global petri dish in which population is still growing does NOT lend credence to the argument that an entire population will stop growing. In fact, all that anecdote does is support the argument that there are limits to population growth BEYOND the hard limits imposed ecologically.
But yeah your last point is exactly what this thread was talking about in the first place. Discrediting those who think we shouldn't treat food as a scarce resource and provide it to everyone that needs to eat is an unfortunate but necessary step if there were to ever be a non-catastrophic population reduction. Right now food aid programs and ever-increasing levels of food production are only making everything worse, enabling population to continue to increase despite already having massively overshot long-term carrying capacity.
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integral are my posts too dumb and ill-informed for you to bother responding to them or did you miss them
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Russian Federation4447 Posts
I recommend everyone in this thread to actually READ Integral's posts from beginning to end.
It is actually very enlightening as well as REALISTIC / REALITY.
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On October 29 2009 11:14 WhiteNights wrote:
integral are my posts too dumb and ill-informed for you to bother responding to them or did you miss them
Already replied to one, just missed your latest two.
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We can produce food far more efficient and with greater yeilds with improved technology & farming techniques. Even in 1st world countries the best farming techniques & technology isn't being used so production is simply a fraction of what it could be. If we produce food with the best methods across the globe we'd be able to sustain a population far higher then what we have now.
If we reduced the wasted food we'd also reduce our use of food dramatically.
If need be we could always switch to hydroponics which yield far more then normal farming techniques. This is what we would do if we ever travel into space for extended times.
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On October 29 2009 02:37 Roffles wrote:
Give a starving person a fish, and he'll eat for a day. Teach him to fish, and he'll eat for a lifetime.
Ending World Hunger is nice, but thinking about population control and how the population could just skyrocket in the future is quite scary.
The world isn't full of equal opportunity. There are some very unfortunate people out there and you can't deny that.
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Sanya12364 Posts
On October 29 2009 10:53 integral wrote:
Next you'll be telling me humans aren't bound by the same laws of ecology that other species are because we have foresight and the ability to choose whether to reproduce or not based on economic factors. If you were to look at the behavior of individuals and not that of the entire species, you might be able to make this argument. But as a species, humans follow the same exact pattern every single other species follows. We live, we consume, we reproduce, we die. If we don't have enough food, we starve to death. If we exceed long-term carrying capacity, we die-off. Humans are not exempt from any of the biological constraints that other species are, though we're certainly a bit more creative in pushing those limits as far as we can. We have a composite carrying capacity almost to the scale of the entire earth, but it's been completely supported by nonrenewable resources, and that's called overshoot, and populations die when they go into overshoot.
If you want to "fix" overshoot, you'd do well to understand the basic ecology involved, because then and only then you could apply economics to the task.
The your entire premise is that humans can't identify or predict how scarce food is in the world or that human beings once identified how scarce food is in the world will won't change their reproductive behavior in account for the scarcity. Or perhaps you are just really pessimistic about the human race and wonder if all people will figure out that at a certain point it isn't such a good idea to reproduce. Or maybe it's just pessimism that the technological growth of human race will not find a substitute source of resources with energy being the key to just about everything.
Aren't there plenty good examples of people choosing not to reproduce? There are people limiting their reproduction based on how expensive it is to raise children. I'm sure not even half of them have understood this ecological argument of carrying capacity and overshoot. If energy becomes expensive or if food becomes expensive then the incentive to conserve and not reproduce will become ever larger (or there can be wars as populations bump into one another and that will kill off the population). And if need be humans will squeeze ever last bit of fossil fuel out of the shale and then spread to the stars and get energy by farming the sun in space.
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On October 29 2009 10:41 TanGeng wrote:Show nested quote +On October 29 2009 10:08 .risingdragoon wrote:
Chronology, tangeng, do you have it?
Foreign aid is after the economy is destroyed and the people no longer able to support themselves.
The flood of cheap food in these countries is when they still had an internal agricultural economy. When the cheap foreign food floods their marketplace, the peasant will obviously buy the cheaper good instead of their locally grown food - putting their farmers out of work.
The rest is dominoes. So what seems to be the problem? It's either partially subsidized food that out competes the local agricultural industry or it's the completely subsidized food (free foreign aid!) that out competes the local agricultural industry. What can you do about that? You can either stop subsidizing food or you can a huge amount of money forbidding international trade of food. That means a far smaller variety in diet and possible starvation in some nations where the population is larger than the food production capacity. Is it really logical to point to the trade and call that the problem!?
What do you mean what can you do about it? If international monetary policy is what causes a country to plunge into economy disaster, change the policies. The solutions are there. In plain sight.
But it's not getting done for reasons even more obvious.
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On October 29 2009 10:48 integral wrote:
The reason I don't talk about the socioeconomic factors involved in world hunger is that people talk about the starvation as if it were a problem that can be fixed by feeding people, rather than an outgrowth of resource drawdown and overshoot. If we were living within our means and there were still hungry people, I would of course be talking about trade and the distribution of resources -- the problem, and its solution, would be sociological.
But if you were to address the sociological factors involved, and "solve" world hunger, you would merely exacerbate the real underlying problem of overpopulation by enabling continuing reproduction. This is why it's so important to understand the actual ecology of population, and not talk about human population as if it had no ecological basis.
I'm not worried about overpopulation right now. That's a whole other can of worm.
The problem is NOT sociological, WTF? You call depriving others "sociological"? You call feeding everything, from people to chicken to pigs to cows corn, sociological? It's business, and it's irresponsible.
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On October 29 2009 04:28 Krikkitone wrote:
First fact
we currently produce enough food for everyone on earth
Current "World" Hunger =/= Global Food shortage
"World" hunger is a strictly local problem... or even more specifically and individual problem... the problem is that people are too poor to buy food.
Basically its an economic issue, the development of countries, and allowing individuals to have economic opportunities. Which means places like many African nations with severe political problems would still have hunger even if the price of bread in the West fell to a penny for a loaf... (actually hunger might even get worse in Africa because the farmers couldn't make enough money)
The Malthusian issue is not a problem because population growth rates have been falling world wide and hunger has been falling worldwide.
The "west" is not growing except through immigration (US is one of a few exceptions and the non-immigration growthrate is very low) and the "nondeveloped world" has decreasing growthrates.
so, population will top out at maybe 10 billion, and there will still be world hunger.... for probably centuries after that, even as food production continues to grow... bcause the problem isn't food production, but distribution.
Dats tha truf yo. It's a weird wheel of fuckery, but lets not act like things are getting worse, I think one day world hunger will be so rare that it is a non issue. I mean a lot has improved during the last 20 years. Baby steps.
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On October 29 2009 08:57 WhiteNights wrote:
I've been making the point that the carrying capacity of the earth depends on capital and technology level. Theoretically, considering a situation where the entirety of the Gobi Desert has been turned into a massive solar power plant designed to power millions of hydroponic farms, one can *imagine* a long-term carrying capacity of a hundred billion.
The competing factors are:
Increasing human population above long-term carrying capacity.
Decreasing non-renewable resources means short-term carrying capacity cannot be sustained.
Increasing technology and capital level increasing Earth's long-term carrying capacity.
Nonrenewable resource drawdown doesn't need to result in die-off in one of the two following scenarios:
1.) Long-term carrying capacity is increased from below the current population to above the current population, and population control measures are implemented before we hit the absolute limit.
2.) Humanity adjusts consumption patterns in order to sustain more people off of less resources rather than continuing current consumption patterns and allowing people to die off.
Notice that neither of these apply to an ecology where the population in question is unintelligent. Standard ecological theory stating "draw-down implies overshoot inevitably leads to die-off" is predicated on the assumption that renewable long-term carrying capacity is constant, which is true when dealing with creatures which are not humans, and it is this assumption which I am objecting to.
Also, I did post about carrying capacity with respect to living standards and you ignored my previous post.
If you accept that we are currently in overshoot, there is not much more to talk about. As long as all strategies toward resolving overshoot acknowledge the current ecological and biological realities of the world, I'm okay with them. So yeah, I can imagine a world with a significantly greater long-term carrying capacity than we currently have -- but whether or not it's likely to happen is another discussion entirely.
So what is sustainable in the long-term? I suppose it depends on your definition of "long-term", especially if you want to look at things in geological or cosmological time. As you wrote in your other post, "any population which consumes resources faster than they replenish is in overshoot," that would mean that humanity was in overshoot the first time humanity extracted metal from the earth. Good point, and I agree. Resource drawdown doesn't necessarily lead to overshoot if the resource is not essential or in no way increases short-term carrying capacity, but the two are correlated quite strongly. Given a human-scale definition of "long-term", it is pretty evident that stone-age technology is the only level of technology that is truly sustainable.
Even stone-age civilizations were quite destructive to their environments, however. The Middle East used to be a lush paradise, but early agriculture caused topsoil loss and massive desertification. Sedentism itself leads to resource drawdown as all available resources in a single area are consumed. A pretty strong argument can be made that hunter-gatherer bands are the only sustainable form of human society in the long-term. The only problem with this is that I honestly cannot imagine a transition to hunter-gatherer bands that does not involve some form of massive die-off. (Realistically, I'm pretty sure die-off is inevitable anyway.)
But let's play world dictator for a bit, and assume you have a grand coalition of the willing, ready and eager to all work together to create this global benign totalitarian regime of yours. How would you raise long-term carrying capacity to the level of the current population?
You should probably start by looking at the history of how population growth was enabled in the first place, starting by understanding essential concepts of scope enlargement and composite carrying capacity. I'll let William Catton himself explain this, with an excerpt from a chapter in Overshoot. source of excerpt
Carrying Capacity and Liebig's Law
To ... [understand,] we need to step outside the usual economic or political frames of thought, go back two-thirds of a century before the 1929 crash, and reexamine for its profound human relevance a principle of agricultural chemistry formulated in 1863 by a German scientist, Justus von Liebig. [2] That principle set forth with great clarity the concept of the "limiting factor" briefly mentioned in Chapter 8. Carrying capacity is, as we saw there, limited not just by food supply, but potentially by any substance or circumstance that is indispensable but inadequate. The fundamental principle is this: whatever necessity is least abundantly available (relative to per capita requirements) sets an environment's carrying capacity.
While there is no way to repeal this principle, which is known as "the law of the minimum," or Liebig's law, there is a way to make its application less restrictive. People living in an environment where carrying capacity is limited by a shortage of one essential resource can develop exchange relationships with residents of another area that happens to be blessed with a surplus of that resource but happens to lack some other resource that is plentiful where the first one was scarce.
Trade does not repeal Liebig's law. Only by knowing Liebig's law, however, can we see clearly what trade does do, in ecological terms. Trade enlarges the scope of application of the law of the minimum. The composite carrying capacity of two or more areas with different resource configurations can be greater than the sum of their separate carrying capacities. Call this the principle of scope enlargement; it can be expressed in mathematical notation as follows:
CC (A + B) > CCA + CCB
The combined environment (A + B) still has finite carrying capacity, and that carrying capacity is still set by the necessary resource available in least (composite) abundance. But if the two environments are truly joined, by trade, then scarcities that are local to A or B no longer have to be limiting.
A good many of the events of human history need to be seen as efforts to implement the principle of scope enlargement. Most such events came about as results of decisions and activities by men who never heard of Liebig or his law of the minimum. Now, however, knowing the law, and understanding also the scope-enlargement principle, we can see important processes of history in a new light. Progress in transport technology, together with advancements in the organization of commerce, often achieved only after conquest or political consolidation, have had the effect of enlarging the world's human carrying capacity by enabling more and more local populations (or their lifestyles) to be limited not by local scarcity, but by abundance at a distance.
...
Unfortunately, modern transport systems, and some aspects of modern organization, are based very heavily upon exhaustible resource exploitation. Insofar as this is true, they must eventually founder upon the rocks of resource exhaustion. But even before they might succumb to such physical disaster, the trade arrangements upon which the earth's extended carrying capacity for Homo colossus has come to depend can be torn apart by social catastrophe. [3] It is important to recognize at last that that is what happened in 1929-32. In fact, some of it began happening during, or as a repercussion of the Great War of 1914-18. emphases mine
Okay, so if you want to raise long-term carrying capacity you would need to completely eliminate resource drawdown, which completely eliminates the use of fossil fuels -- which are entirely responsible for the massive increase in scope accompanying the latest population boom.
I sure hope you're a genius dictator with some amazing, because you would have to completely retool all of society's trade infrastructure all over the world to even begin to have a chance of supporting so many billions of people.
Also, you probably want to stop pollution and the destruction of every single ecosystem on earth, considering we really need those, which means you'd also need to completely re-design all food production systems. This is still a technical problem, but I sure hope you have some good ideas, because current yields are subsidized by aggressive drawdown of the invaluable resource of topsoil.
I could go on a while, but I don't really like playing world dictator, nor do I find it a remotely plausible scenario. (Not to mention that I find it pretty reprehensible and repugnant to imagine such an impossible solution for a really fucking awful situation.) Theoretically possible, sure, but not for humans and not on this planet, and that's where I take my leave of the discussion.
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On October 29 2009 02:29 Biochemist wrote:
education and birth control
this is pretty much end thread, educated people with access to birth control have fewer children.
ignore all the guilt trips about skinny african kids and especially ignore the crazies calling for eugenics/mandatory sterilization/etc.
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While I have no opinion on this matter, it seems that Integral is dumping his estrogen on his adversaries. Do calm down a little.
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On October 29 2009 11:37 TanGeng wrote:Show nested quote +On October 29 2009 10:53 integral wrote:
Next you'll be telling me humans aren't bound by the same laws of ecology that other species are because we have foresight and the ability to choose whether to reproduce or not based on economic factors. If you were to look at the behavior of individuals and not that of the entire species, you might be able to make this argument. But as a species, humans follow the same exact pattern every single other species follows. We live, we consume, we reproduce, we die. If we don't have enough food, we starve to death. If we exceed long-term carrying capacity, we die-off. Humans are not exempt from any of the biological constraints that other species are, though we're certainly a bit more creative in pushing those limits as far as we can. We have a composite carrying capacity almost to the scale of the entire earth, but it's been completely supported by nonrenewable resources, and that's called overshoot, and populations die when they go into overshoot.
If you want to "fix" overshoot, you'd do well to understand the basic ecology involved, because then and only then you could apply economics to the task. The your entire premise is that humans can't identify or predict how scarce food is in the world or that human beings once identified how scarce food is in the world will won't change their reproductive behavior in account for the scarcity. Or perhaps you are just really pessimistic about the human race and wonder if all people will figure out that at a certain point it isn't such a good idea to reproduce. Or maybe it's just pessimism that the technological growth of human race will not find a substitute source of resources with energy being the key to just about everything.
The only one of these statements I agree with is the last one. Food being scarce isn't an issue, it's hardly a problem in my opinion -- it's the natural consequence of overpopulation and a precursor to die-off. Desperately attempting to avoid the inevitable consequences of overshooting long-term carrying capacity IS a problem, and should be noted as such.
Aren't there plenty good examples of people choosing not to reproduce? There are people limiting their reproduction based on how expensive it is to raise children. I'm sure not even half of them have understood this ecological argument of carrying capacity and overshoot. If energy becomes expensive or if food becomes expensive then the incentive to conserve and not reproduce will become ever larger (or there can be wars as populations bump into one another and that will kill off the population). And if need be humans will squeeze ever last bit of fossil fuel out of the shale and then spread to the stars and get energy by farming the sun in space.
Maybe then God and Zeus could have a breakdance competition and magical unicorns will frolic in our new colonized star system. As long as we're writing fiction, I mean.
Isolated examples of people choosing not to reproduce has had and will have no impact on the biological imperative of members of our species to reproduce causing our population to reproduce to its carrying capacity, whether that capacity is short-term or long-term.
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On October 29 2009 12:36 chillos wrote:
Despite having no opinion on this matter I decided to post anyway because I didn't like another poster's tone
This issue, and the amount of ignorance on the topic, makes me mad.
edit because this really deserves more than one sentence. Overpopulation is a hugely important issue regarding the current world that is very seldom understood in terms of the actual discipline dedicated to understanding population dynamics: ecology. We're not just talking about abstract entities here, very real people starve to death every day. I don't take this lightly, it's a matter of utmost importance to me that population does not overshoot so this death and suffering does not have to happen. it's also important to me that when people are talking about solutions to a problem they consider the effects of their attempted solutions. Overshoot doesn't just lead to starvation, it leads to war and genocide and unrest and political corruption, all of which create and leave behind lasting trauma. This isn't a thought experiment to take lightly, there are very real consequences to our actions that very very few people seem to take responsibility for. If I am perceived as bitchy for not taking this very lightly, well, there are worse things to be perceived as.
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Why doesn't the US or some country just bomb the entire African continent to end hunger on the continent. The productivity of that continent is extremely low with rampant diseases and poverty. Then, more educated people from the US can utilize the resources in Africa and make the entire continent more productive.
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On October 29 2009 11:23 Adeeler wrote:
We can produce food far more efficient and with greater yeilds with improved technology & farming techniques. Even in 1st world countries the best farming techniques & technology isn't being used so production is simply a fraction of what it could be. If we produce food with the best methods across the globe we'd be able to sustain a population far higher then what we have now.
If we reduced the wasted food we'd also reduce our use of food dramatically.
If need be we could always switch to hydroponics which yield far more then normal farming techniques. This is what we would do if we ever travel into space for extended times.
the more food you produce from an area of land (the more intensive) the less nutrients this food has
you may get enough calories but you will end up with diseases caused by nutrient deficiencies and malnutrition
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On October 29 2009 13:37 YianKutKu wrote:
Why doesn't the US or some country just bomb the entire African continent to end hunger on the continent. The productivity of that continent is extremely low with rampant diseases and poverty. Then, more educated people from the US can utilize the resources in Africa and make the entire continent more productive.
...What the fuck? Not even the good ol' USA could be so immortalized to do such.
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Actually, ending world hunger, increasing education and promoting birth control should all be considered equally important. I'm sure there are already plenty of organizations dedicated to each of these causes. Ending world hunger might seem more important because you can't effectively educate and encourage birth control on starving people. Gotta feed them first.
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The technology and logistics exist today to end world hunger.
What is lacking is sufficient education (farming & health best practices), appropriate public policy (moral capitalism & no financial aid checks), and adherence to timeless moral principles (hard work & uncompelled generosity).
The following 'problems' are misnamed synonyms for inadequate food distribution/supply:
-too many people
-too much food
-prolonged lifespan
-inadequate natural resources
It is foolish to suppose that we fully understand or can even accurately estimate the population this planet can support. We can't predict the weather next month or explain how your taste buds work yet. First things first.
I'm a member of the Mormon church (the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints), whose humanitarian efforts, I feel, are a good example in their organization. Charitable donations go to several focused areas, staffed primarily by volunteer missionaries, in order to do the most good for the money:
- Measles
- Neonatal Resuscitation Training
- Clean Water
- Wheelchairs
- Vision Treatment
I think religious and secular organizations such as this one, are what really make a difference where the rubber meets the road - in providing long-term sustainable training and support to those who need it. That's all we need. We just need more people involved.
Respectfully,
-0neder
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Sanya12364 Posts
On October 29 2009 12:37 integral wrote:Show nested quote +On October 29 2009 11:37 TanGeng wrote:On October 29 2009 10:53 integral wrote:
Next you'll be telling me humans aren't bound by the same laws of ecology that other species are because we have foresight and the ability to choose whether to reproduce or not based on economic factors. If you were to look at the behavior of individuals and not that of the entire species, you might be able to make this argument. But as a species, humans follow the same exact pattern every single other species follows. We live, we consume, we reproduce, we die. If we don't have enough food, we starve to death. If we exceed long-term carrying capacity, we die-off. Humans are not exempt from any of the biological constraints that other species are, though we're certainly a bit more creative in pushing those limits as far as we can. We have a composite carrying capacity almost to the scale of the entire earth, but it's been completely supported by nonrenewable resources, and that's called overshoot, and populations die when they go into overshoot.
If you want to "fix" overshoot, you'd do well to understand the basic ecology involved, because then and only then you could apply economics to the task. The your entire premise is that humans can't identify or predict how scarce food is in the world or that human beings once identified how scarce food is in the world will won't change their reproductive behavior in account for the scarcity. Or perhaps you are just really pessimistic about the human race and wonder if all people will figure out that at a certain point it isn't such a good idea to reproduce. Or maybe it's just pessimism that the technological growth of human race will not find a substitute source of resources with energy being the key to just about everything. The only one of these statements I agree with is the last one. Food being scarce isn't an issue, it's hardly a problem in my opinion -- it's the natural consequence of overpopulation and a precursor to die-off. Desperately attempting to avoid the inevitable consequences of overshooting long-term carrying capacity IS a problem, and should be noted as such. Show nested quote +Aren't there plenty good examples of people choosing not to reproduce? There are people limiting their reproduction based on how expensive it is to raise children. I'm sure not even half of them have understood this ecological argument of carrying capacity and overshoot. If energy becomes expensive or if food becomes expensive then the incentive to conserve and not reproduce will become ever larger (or there can be wars as populations bump into one another and that will kill off the population). And if need be humans will squeeze ever last bit of fossil fuel out of the shale and then spread to the stars and get energy by farming the sun in space. Maybe then God and Zeus could have a breakdance competition and magical unicorns will frolic in our new colonized star system. As long as we're writing fiction, I mean. Isolated examples of people choosing not to reproduce has had and will have no impact on the biological imperative of members of our species to reproduce causing our population to reproduce to its carrying capacity, whether that capacity is short-term or long-term.
You have no perspective on the technological advancement of the past century. Might as well be dancing with God these days compared to the people of 100 years ago. Optimism in technology might be misplaced but pessimism could be very much wrong as well. In fact, this very idea of a carrying capacity was introduced in the 19th century and it lead some to eugenics and other crimes against humanity. It's your prerogative and you can place your bets on where technology will lead us in 50 years and profit or lose accordingly.
Apparently, you don't understand the economic idea of scarcity which just means that there's a limit to the amount of goods available for use. Therefore it must be distributed and rationed among a population - usually by free market pricing - but hopefully wisely allocated to good and optimal use.
I don't see what to argue about anyhow. You're just posing the probable outcome when the most pessimistic scenario unfolds, and I don't have any objections to that analysis since it's based on that premise.
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haha yes let's kill people to stop other people from starving that makes sense
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On October 29 2009 11:37 TanGeng wrote:
Aren't there plenty good examples of people choosing not to reproduce?
There are many more of them not refraining from reproducing. And those examples tend today to be in areas where hunger is a bigger problem http://www.indexmundi.com/map.aspx?v=Birth rate(births/1,000 population)
And if need be humans will ... spread to the stars and get energy by farming the sun in space.
This is exactly the kind of crap that makes having a conversation about this impossible. Do you have any idea how much energy it takes to break orbit? Or how inhospitable space is? It lacks certain things like air, or food. Energy though is the sticking point. We are in a crunch now (look at gas prices, alleviated mildly in the last year by depression, but ticking upwards again) and you are going to throw energy at lifting masses of people or equipment into space? It's not happening.
It's a bit of a buzzkill to think we will no sooner go to Alpha Centauri than we will to Tattooine, but that's the truth of it.
Anyway, there's nothing to be gained from this thread. People would rather have their head in the sand. I would too. I live that way in fact, ignoring the idea of a world without anesthetic, oreos, fresh raspberries all the time etc and enjoying those things while they are here.
All I am hearing from all this is a lot of denial and no workable solutions. All the people claiming to be rational, not bound by religion and science believing are pretty happy to ignore science in this case. There's something to that "hope" and "irrational thought" thing after all eh?
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On October 29 2009 13:37 YianKutKu wrote:
Why doesn't the US or some country just bomb the entire African continent to end hunger on the continent. The productivity of that continent is extremely low with rampant diseases and poverty. Then, more educated people from the US can utilize the resources in Africa and make the entire continent more productive.
but if you bomb africa, you'll destroy the resources there :C
you were so close to having everything figured out
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Sanya12364 Posts
I don't see what the problem is with placing solar farms in space. There isn't an atmosphere to shield the high energy particles but it's easier to be damaged by space dust. The efficiency could be large enough to justify investment in space. Not many people would live out there but some kinds of manufacturing might benefit from zero gravity. Sending stuff up there for no good benefit is of course a terrible idea. In fact NASA is one of the worst waste of money in the US. Maybe we'll blow up the moon.
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Since the industrial revolution, feeding the world has been an easy task. We have the ability to make WAY more food than the whole world can eat. The issue has been with distribution and focal starvation due to war, corrupt governments, etc.
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The objection to "Haber process ggnore" is that natural gas which is required to make nitrogen fertilizer via the Haber process is non-renewable and therefore cannot be said to be "long-term carrying capacity." However, we probably have enough natural gas for the next, I don't know, fifty or so years at current levels... and if you consider that only 3-5% of said natural gas is used in the Haber process, if we were to try and make it last as long as possible by eliminating all non-Haber-process natural gas usage we'd have like a thousand years before we ran out, which I think is more than enough time to transition to renewables.
I will write a big post responding to the big post by integral on the previous page but I am lazy right now.
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On October 29 2009 15:21 WhiteNights wrote:
The objection to "Haber process ggnore" is that natural gas which is required to make nitrogen fertilizer via the Haber process is non-renewable and therefore cannot be said to be "long-term carrying capacity." However, we probably have enough natural gas for the next, I don't know, fifty or so years at current levels... and if you consider that only 3-5% of said natural gas is used in the Haber process, if we were to try and make it last as long as possible by eliminating all non-Haber-process natural gas usage we'd have like a thousand years before we ran out, which I think is more than enough time to transition to renewables.
I will write a big post responding to the big post by integral on the previous page but I am lazy right now.
Where did you get the idea that natural gas is non renewable? As of right now there are several methods of making it out of renewable waste (trees, dead animals etc) (There are several refineries _currently_ in operation using methods like this) And the technology improves constantly. The most common way right now though afaik is making it out of coal which is (at least on short scale) unlimited.
Projects in working include farming algae and using them instead of dead animals.
This is totally ignoring the fact that natural gas aren't even really required for the haber process at all, if a working fusion plant is invented we might as well get the hydrogen straight from the sea, it's all a matter of energy.
Sooner or later we will need to expand into space to extract the minerals necerssary to power continued technological expansion but with recycling technieques constantly improving we have time.
The entire idea of non renewable resources is based on the assumption that technology stays right where it is right now, and there is absolutely no reason to believe that to be true.
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God damn how dumb are we...
Feeding people that can't feed themselves will only make those idiots reproduce more and make a bigger problem.
Castrate those fuckers and problem is solved.
Human life is overvalued.
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On October 29 2009 11:37 TanGeng wrote:Show nested quote +On October 29 2009 10:53 integral wrote:
Next you'll be telling me humans aren't bound by the same laws of ecology that other species are because we have foresight and the ability to choose whether to reproduce or not based on economic factors. If you were to look at the behavior of individuals and not that of the entire species, you might be able to make this argument. But as a species, humans follow the same exact pattern every single other species follows. We live, we consume, we reproduce, we die. If we don't have enough food, we starve to death. If we exceed long-term carrying capacity, we die-off. Humans are not exempt from any of the biological constraints that other species are, though we're certainly a bit more creative in pushing those limits as far as we can. We have a composite carrying capacity almost to the scale of the entire earth, but it's been completely supported by nonrenewable resources, and that's called overshoot, and populations die when they go into overshoot.
If you want to "fix" overshoot, you'd do well to understand the basic ecology involved, because then and only then you could apply economics to the task. The your entire premise is that humans can't identify or predict how scarce food is in the world or that human beings once identified how scarce food is in the world will won't change their reproductive behavior in account for the scarcity. Or perhaps you are just really pessimistic about the human race and wonder if all people will figure out that at a certain point it isn't such a good idea to reproduce. Or maybe it's just pessimism that the technological growth of human race will not find a substitute source of resources with energy being the key to just about everything. Aren't there plenty good examples of people choosing not to reproduce? There are people limiting their reproduction based on how expensive it is to raise children. I'm sure not even half of them have understood this ecological argument of carrying capacity and overshoot. If energy becomes expensive or if food becomes expensive then the incentive to conserve and not reproduce will become ever larger (or there can be wars as populations bump into one another and that will kill off the population). And if need be humans will squeeze ever last bit of fossil fuel out of the shale and then spread to the stars and get energy by farming the sun in space.
You realize there are plenty of examples of incidents in which humans have overgrown the carrying capacity of their area and then died off, right? You can 'choose' to not reproduce all you want, but unless everyone follows your lead, you're still going to overshoot during good years, then have a catastrophic crash during bad years. The entire point is that humans CAN identify how scarce food will be, but NO ONE IS DOING FUCK ALL ABOUT IT. People are focused on researching technologies to incrementally lower environmental impact per person without dealing with the other part of the equation: the amount of people.
If you think current distribution problems are large, wait until energy prices increase and we run out of hydrocarbon deposits to make plastics out of. We're running on borrowed time, but no one has the balls to step up and state that the volume of humans on the earth after the green revolution, 21st century medicine and the removal of total war has exploded beyond that which is sustainable.
We aren't sustainable now; give us 100 years at our current consumption rates and our ways of life are done for. Adding more people and increasing their rates of consumption to boot isn't going to help.
coal which is (at least on short scale) unlimited. Lol.
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On October 29 2009 23:02 L wrote:
If you think current distribution problems are large, wait until energy prices increase and we run out of hydrocarbon deposits to make plastics out of. .
lol ~~
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I don't have time to reply to everyone in this thread, but it's all been good reading. It'll be interesting to see how the earth responds to the depletion of fossil fuels. With any luck it will be a somewhat incremental transition as prices continue to rise until it's just not economically feasible to use any more.
KlaCkoN, could you elaborate why you think L's statement is so funny? Plastics have invaded every industry, and increased the profitability of some of them by orders of magnitude. It will be a serious, serious problem when nobody can afford to make them anymore.
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isnt it a case of distribution and not a case of actual supply of food that is causing hunger in certain parts of the world?
I heard somewhere that tons of food goes bad and rots every year because there's too much and no where to store it and like half the food that gets transported around Africa rots because the infrastructure is so poor.
oh and by distribution I mean wealth as well so no one starts going up my ass about that
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On October 29 2009 23:56 Biochemist wrote:
I don't have time to reply to everyone in this thread, but it's all been good reading. It'll be interesting to see how the earth responds to the depletion of fossil fuels. With any luck it will be a somewhat incremental transition as prices continue to rise until it's just not economically feasible to use any more.
KlaCkoN, could you elaborate why you think L's statement is so funny? Plastics have invaded every industry, and increased the profitability of some of them by orders of magnitude. It will be a serious, serious problem when nobody can afford to make them anymore.
Because we won't run out of hydrocarbons. Green plants or algae make them for free using solar energy, we only need to do some chemistry to get the exact hydrocarbons we need. And as I've said before there is already _right now_ several ways of doing this, these methods will improve and they will as oil prices continue to rise. In the mean time the deposits of coal under antartica are projected to be beyond gargantuan. Improvement in up stream exploration technology mean that we soon are ready to access oil sands etc, which will also ease the transition.
People seem to be affraid of some kind of scenario where we wake up one day and the oil is just gone. It won't happen like that.
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On October 30 2009 00:15 KlaCkoN wrote:Show nested quote +On October 29 2009 23:56 Biochemist wrote:
I don't have time to reply to everyone in this thread, but it's all been good reading. It'll be interesting to see how the earth responds to the depletion of fossil fuels. With any luck it will be a somewhat incremental transition as prices continue to rise until it's just not economically feasible to use any more.
KlaCkoN, could you elaborate why you think L's statement is so funny? Plastics have invaded every industry, and increased the profitability of some of them by orders of magnitude. It will be a serious, serious problem when nobody can afford to make them anymore. Because we won't run out of hydrocarbons. Green plants or algae make them for free using solar energy, we only need to do some chemistry to get the exact hydrocarbons we need. And as I've said before there is already _right now_ several ways of doing this, these methods will improve and they will as oil prices continue to rise. In the mean time the deposits of coal under antartica are projected to be beyond gargantuan. Improvement in up stream exploration technology mean that we soon are ready to access oil sands etc, which will also ease the transition. People seem to be affraid of some kind of scenario where we wake up one day and the oil is just gone. It won't happen like that.
Growing, harvesting, and extracting hydrocarbons from living organisms will never be anywhere near as cheap or easy as just digging them up and purifying them.
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MrHoon
10183 Posts
On October 30 2009 00:26 tdotkrayzbetterthanu wrote:
HURRRRRRRRRRR
what is this like your 15th account?
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On October 30 2009 00:27 Biochemist wrote:Show nested quote +On October 30 2009 00:15 KlaCkoN wrote:On October 29 2009 23:56 Biochemist wrote:
I don't have time to reply to everyone in this thread, but it's all been good reading. It'll be interesting to see how the earth responds to the depletion of fossil fuels. With any luck it will be a somewhat incremental transition as prices continue to rise until it's just not economically feasible to use any more.
KlaCkoN, could you elaborate why you think L's statement is so funny? Plastics have invaded every industry, and increased the profitability of some of them by orders of magnitude. It will be a serious, serious problem when nobody can afford to make them anymore. Because we won't run out of hydrocarbons. Green plants or algae make them for free using solar energy, we only need to do some chemistry to get the exact hydrocarbons we need. And as I've said before there is already _right now_ several ways of doing this, these methods will improve and they will as oil prices continue to rise. In the mean time the deposits of coal under antartica are projected to be beyond gargantuan. Improvement in up stream exploration technology mean that we soon are ready to access oil sands etc, which will also ease the transition. People seem to be affraid of some kind of scenario where we wake up one day and the oil is just gone. It won't happen like that. Growing, harvesting, and extracting hydrocarbons from living organisms will never be anywhere near as cheap or easy as just digging them up and purifying them.
Never is a strong word considering there are already (and we have only just started) refineries operating at least partly on the principle. But yes of course it's easier to just pick premade stuff out of the ground which is why we mostly do just that.
However when /if/, that is no longer an option we will be forced to turn to other means and there _are_ other means, that's my point.
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I love how NonY shows up just to correct a misunderstanding about logic and then just disappears.
lolol
tbh tho, this thread looks a lot like the SC2 metagame threads. Paragraph after paragraph of nice conjecture about something so complex, future, and unpredictable that we have almost no real understanding of.
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Less capitalism and more socialism would solve the problems. ez pz.
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OK, on the OP
Currently
Food Production > Food need (based on population)
World Hunger is an economic social problem, not an ecological one
especially because the "Global population problem" (the right side of the equation) Is solving itself the Nice way... population growth is dropping Worldwide, without any serious mass global starvations/wars/disease. People are having less children, because they Want to have less children (Not because food supplies are low, etc.)
As for the larger concern of non-Renewable resources, almost no resources are truly nonrenewable, "easily exploitable" resources are non-renewable, and so certain standards of living are not currently sustainable.... but technology is constantly changing the ease of exploiting resources, as well as standards of living.
So eventually, sustainable resources will be the easiest to exploit (because all the non-sustainable ones will have been exhaiusted). This will require a change in standards of living, but it will be more gradual, and probably masked by technological change (ie the s.o.l. could have expanded by 25% over a certain period with technological change, but will only expand by 10% because of the need to change from non-sustainable, easily exploited resources to sustainable, less easily exploited ones)
Solar/Nuclear. etc. aren't That much worse than fossil fuels, and we do have a lot of fossil fuels
Some Minerals may provide problems, but Junkyards will just become the new mines, or recycling takes over (like it does with platinum)
Pollution/Waste will get more and more reporcessed/eliminated.
There may definitely be entire ecosystems lost in the process, but I don't forsee any massive drop in the human population/average standard of living due to unsustainable practices. (random meteor attacks, massive wars, some random super bug possibly)
...unless we have more socialism, that could seriously mess things up (as it currently is with the developed world subsidizing their farmers)
Also humans Are different than other species ecologically in a Very important way... humans "evolve" culturally, and Very rapidly.... Malthusian predictions assume that the human r (natural growth rate) doesn't change... it does and has and will continue to do so. The current path of human Cultural evolution suggests our population problem may be not having enough children.. if we stop replacing ourselves on a global basis and eventually fade out (although there will probably be corrrections for that in the decades and centuries to come)
[note; Japan is not just some small part of the human petri dish, the Entire developed world is at/close to negative fertility rates, and fertility rates in most of the develoiped world have been falling over the past century]
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Well, In todays world almost everything is possible as long as there is money put into it. So maybe people should start taking money from places where it´s not needed like army forces. Nations like USA use alot of cash on "defence", this much--->+ Show Spoiler +the total for defense spending is between $925 billion and $1.14 trillion in 2009
Imagine how many condoms you could manufacture and spread with 1.14 trillion dollars?
Edit. Im not saying all of that $1.14 trillion is wasted money, military research does produce a lot of scientifical breakthroughs and whatnot.
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On October 30 2009 05:30 HwangjaeTerran wrote:Well, In todays world almost everything is possible as long as there is money put into it. So maybe people should start taking money from places where it´s not needed like army forces. Nations like USA use alot of cash on "defence", this much---> + Show Spoiler +the total for defense spending is between $925 billion and $1.14 trillion in 2009 . You´d have to have a few Band Aids ( or w/e they are called) to get that. And that´s just US of A and they have never needed their defence forces really or maybe in the 2´nd world war to protect their Pacific territories. I wouldn´t say that´s money well spent. Imagine how many condoms you could manufacture and spread with 1.14 trillion dollars? Edit. Im not saying all of that $1.14 trillion is wasted money, military research does produce a lot of scientifical breakthroughs and whatnot.
Yeah, but spending nearly half of the entire world total, and comfortably more than the rest of the entire 1st world......I think we can comfortably criticise it as a source of wasted money.
Starvation today is most definitely not a food production capacity issue, as we can comfortably produce enough food globally to feed to world more than once over.
It seems that some posters indicate that certain aspects of human tendencies such as reproduction and greed are biological urges and therefore it's relatively futile to invest in combating/minimizing these things. But on the other hand, the donating food to the starving areas which does lead population increase is also due to a human natural biological urge, compassion. I don't see how this can be faulted on the same grounds as the reproduction is disqualified from critique.
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EPT
