This is a cause for celebration.

'Morning, GG.

"You can't get there from here..."

that are willing to live childless, or have only one or two children? Is it enough to start bringing the numbers down? Obviously not, since we've increased almost a billion just in my lifetime.

And, of course, as soon as a regional population begins to drop, the drumbeats of growth for the sake of capitalism begin.

The planet is screwed.

Estamos tan jodidos!

WE are.

I chose to remain childless when I was only 12 years old. I read Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, and was sure at that point in my life that if I was to EVER be a parent, I would adopt one of the hundreds of thousands of children on this planet who have no one.

Our species is (on a macro level analysis) hedonistic, narcissistic, and childish in our perceptions of selves and others. Most of us are fear driven, and in react mode. It hurts my heart to see how thoughtlessly we navigate through life--and our children are the ones who are about to suffer the most.

It has taken me a long time to come to this understanding, and I absolutely do NOT want to slide inexorably into misanthropy. I will continue to do advocacy whenever possible, and be the change that I can be in this small part of the universe within which I am blessed to spend the last of my days.

If the majority would do the same, we could solve this problem.

Urp!

Seems like. However, it's really the town that needs change. First thing I'd start with is community composting.

eat as close to Vegan as possible. I am composting, too, in preparation for my first Bio-intensive garden in a LONG time. I've collected heirloom seeds, so that I don't have to deal with Monsanto, or any of the other ginormous agri-business crooks on the planet. I wish you the best of luck in your endeavors.

Change begins with the one...

And how to convince the rest of us to stop?

That pegs the upper bound for a sustainable world population at 20 to 50 million people.

Has to be something wrong with one of the two assumptions. Because that's smaller than the world population has been since somewhere between 1000-2000 BCE. And we obviously weren't using too much in the way of resources per person at that point.

Everyone gets to decide for themselves what their final disposition may be. Nature will decide for those who don't.

Regarding higher populations and the assumptions:

Ever since agriculture began, we've been strip-mining the soil. That's where the extra energy to boost the population - as well as the initial planetary damage - came from. If we'd stuck to doing it with oxen and sticks, it might have been tens of thousands of years before the negative effects became visible. But we didn't.

I use a very strict definition of sustainability - something like, "The ability of a species to survive in perpetuity without damaging the planetary ecosystem in the process." This principle applies to a species' own actions, but not to external forces like Milankovich cycles, asteroid impacts, plate tectonics, etc. In fact, in order to completely fulfill this definition, even my numbers could be too high by up to an order of magnitude.

Only without the data to back me up.

Thank you

I think I'll make a stack of copies and give them as wedding presents. And then again, at baby showers.


I'm so sick of all the fertile myrtles. Killing us softly with their song. I hate the romanticized myths of parenthood.

They can't hear you. They will resent you for saying it. Even the ones who can hear you can't do enough to make a shred of difference. Down that path lies nothing but darkness, despair or anger for all concerned. Ask me how I know...

*sigh*


very very sad.


Way back when I was on DU2 with a different name, you wouldn't believe the hostility I'd get when I brought up this subject. (wait...rephrase...you would TOTALLY believe the hostility)

I was outspoken, though I tried my best to be even tempered about it, no matter how ugly the responses I'd get. Guess whose posts got deleted?

I ended up getting banned--I'm convinced it was either due to this subject, or my anti-misogyny posts.

I think we must be kindred spirits! I have had only two posts blocked, but in both instances, I was trying to address sexism and/or misogyny.

AND, I have had so many people blast me for my posts about overpopulation! I am thrilled to have read what Paul has written herein; it gives me hope that more of us will see.

(I don't know that there's much we can do about it, but I am sure that the coming two decades will NOT be dull...)

"Down that path lies nothing but darkness, despair or anger for all concerned. Ask me how I know..."

You could be reading my mind. Doing the right thing has cost me so much.

I do understand the completely incredible love people have for their children, but MY love for the child I would have is too great to give it the rest of this century.
The pressure and mental abuse I've gotten for not having a baby has only assured me I'm right.. Would I want MY daughter treated this way someday? Fck no.

What kills me about people is how they don't understand what exponential growth means. They can't see the last few thousand years as a straight line and understand how fast our population has jumped. We more than quadrupled in little over half a century. How does anyone think it's a good idea to give the rest of this century to their little baby. OF COURSE once the little wonder is here we'll love and cherish it.. of course.. MAKING it is the choice that should have considered.

As soon as I understood our species is causing a mass-extinction I knew I couldn't be part of it. I'm hoping we'll be back down to 1 billion by the end of this century.

It's based on the idea that our population will oscillate down a series of "stair-steps": dropping as we puncture the sustainability limits, falling below them, partially recovering, only to fall again, recover, fall, recover.

I started with 8 billion people in 2030. I assumed each cycle would take three generations (100 years) to complete the fall and then spend three more in recovery, for a total cycle time of 200 years. I then assumed each drop would take out 60% of the population , and each rise would add back half the population lost.

In 2,000 years we would be back to a sustainable population of about 40-50 million. The biggest drop would be in the first 100 years, from 2030 to 2130 when we would lose a net 52 million people per year. Even that is only a loss of 0.65% pa, compared to our net growth today of 1.1% That's easily within the realms of the conceibable, and not necessarily catastrophic - at least to begin with.

It's a lot "better" scenario than a single monolithic crash from here to a hundred million, for example.

Here's what it looks like:

You've probably heard all the gradoo that I have, since I'm the only one of six sisters who chose to remain childless. You'd think I had built pipe bombs and put them in all the area elementary schools! I STILL hear grief about it, and I had a hysterectomy more than seven years ago!

I have tried and tried to explain to my students that we live in exponential times. I used the tsunami in Japan as the last example: the fact that people around the globe were watching the catastrophe in REAL TIME was mind-blowing! I think the students I had at that time were able to glimpse the concept of exponential times. It's so very new to our species, and we just haven't yet adjusted to it. I hope Gaia has a leveling event soon, so that our damage to our ecosystem isn't unrecoverable (thinking about Fukushima now--a global nuclear disaster could render this planet uninhabitable for centuries).

If they'll be pressured to make more kids too. My neighbors have a baby boy and I wonder if when he's my age he'll be expected to make more. It will be 2053 then and I bet that no matter how terrible things are, no matter how sad the next 90 years looks, the pressure on people to carry on their line, make their parents proud with a grandbaby, will be about the same.
It's just part of being an animal. It's that thinking that makes me think of us as a deadly virus to this world. All the wonderful things we do.. science, art, music.. that's amazing to US, our species. An alien would come here and observe all our progress and see us an animal in love with itself.

I'm happier every single day that I had the operation. I think I can't dread the next few decades any more and then I see things that just amaze me.. I'm shocked every day by how awful humans will be. All I'm glad for is that I saw what's coming before I made the wrong decision and gave this to MY girl.

It's just wild ass guesses, assumptions and assertions. It's not based on actual research, or anything that anyone outside DU agrees with GG on.

Please, don't embarrass yourself by giving this out to people as if it means something.

I'm just not statistics literate enough to respond.

I did interpret an upper level class in Tropical Ecology, though, and the research presented by the professor clearly showed that human overpopulation is the critical factor driving habitat destruction and extinctions.

I left that class holding back tears twice a week for a quarter.

Even without resort to any fossil fuels, we can have "energy assistance" through renewables. For example, your calculation of habitable land excludes deserts, but uninhabited deserts can be the sites of large-scale solar energy arrays that would assist people living elsewhere.

Please don't lump me in with the technological deus ex machina types who think that we can keep growing indefinitely because science will always be there with a new fix -- nuclear power or "Green Revolution" crops or whatever. There's absolutely no question that the human population is now far too high and that the problem is getting worse. The only open question is how the correction will come, and I would have to side with the pessimists who foresee famine, plague, and war as the most likely "solutions" (as opposed to a population that declines because higher living standards mean people don't need to have a lot of children to ensure survival in their old age).

Nevertheless, there's a big gap between saying that seven billion is too high and saying that anything over 50 million is too high. I recall seeing some other analysis that settled on one billion as the sustainable human population. Of course, just getting to one billion (without the widespread famine etc.) will be difficult enough.

Basically, anything but a hunter-forager puts too much indirect stress on the ecosystem in one way or another. For example, we would have to mine and refine the materials and then manufacture the equipment for renewable energy technology, regardless of where we put the resulting gear. And you have to grow food to feed the extra people that result from having the energy (resulting in habitat destruction) and give them some level of infrastructure (more impact) etc. etc.

Here's how I explained it in the FB comment thread:

Yes, to build a solar array in the desert we would have to use metal that had been mined at some point -- but one of our technological improvements is in recycling. I'll make a wild unsupported guess that all current U.S. electricity consumption could, if need be, be met from renewable facilities built entirely of materials scavenged from dumps and landfills. Of course, it would be more expensive to do it that way, but it's obvious that there'll be some adjustments to living standards in the scenarios we're discussing.

I will, with somewhat more confidence, predict that our descendants (perhaps c. 100 years from now?) will be mining our dumps and landfills for useful materials, chiefly metal.

Catabolism will definitely be part of the process, but I have no way of factoring it in. I tend to view most new (non-recycled) technology as part of the problem rather than part of the solution. But tech will definitely play a role one way or another.

As far as I can tell, the main human evolutionary advantage is our ability to communicate innovative ideas about how to degrade thermodynamic gradients. We'll keep doing that till the buzzards get the last one of us.

Clearly.

The question is, what do we do? You may not like the GMO companies, but they are some of the few people actively addressing it. They argue that GMO crops can support the increased population... The solution from science. The question is, how far will people be willing to go with that GMO trip, especially when the alternative is famine? I mean, will we start getting "eco-babies" (maybe branded as 'smart babies') that are GMO people, designed to need much less food, but have strong minds? (I'm picturing something looking like a human version of the popular 'grey' aliens. Little bodies, big brains). Or will we just have a point decades from now where TSHTF, the governments throw up their hands, and anarchy reigns and nature works its course?

It could also just manifest as a population slow down, which would start out with reduced life expectancy, than move on to increased infant mortality rate and so on, the markers of third world countries in the first world. But regardless, what we're talking about here is a force of nature playing out. The question is what can be done from a policy perspective to mitigate the damage from these long term scenarios?

It's just part the pedagogical attempt to frame what we're doing in terms of the ecosphere's tolerance.

What do we do?

I've been saying for a couple of years now that we will each do whatever we think is appropriate to the circumstances, in whatever part of "the world" we can reach. The outcome is utterly unforeseeable, because it depends on how the efforts of all 7 billion of us converge, co-operate and compete. and it will be different from place to place - climate change impacts will vary, resources vary, social structures vary, values and belief systems are different all over the world.

The best we can do is to do our best:

Stay awake to what's happening around us.
Don't get hung up by other peoples' shoulds and shouldn'ts.
Examine our values, and if they aren't in alignment with we think the world needs, change them.
Stop blaming people. They are as much victims of the times as we are - even the CEOs and politicians.
Blame, anger and outrage wastes precious energy that we are going to need for more useful work.
Laugh a lot, at everything - including ourselves.
Hold all the world's various beliefs and "isms" lightly, including our own.
Forgive others. Forgive ourselves. For everything.

That's what I think we could do that would be helpful. If we get all that personal stuff right, then doing the physical stuff about food housing, transportation, energy, politics etc. will come easy. Or at least easier. And we will have a lot more fun doing it.

I like your logic and 7 BILLION is definitely not gonna work!

50 million is where we were in 1,000 BC; 500 million the world population circa 1,500 AC. http://www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/history/world-population-growth.htm

I have to think that the magic number is somewhere in between, but so much depends on the terms of the populations and technologies employed.

Last edited Mon Mar 25, 2013, 04:17 PM - Edit history (1)

However, I do try and justify it this way: it's based on the last year and population numbers I can point to and confidently say, "At that point we were still a sustainable species."

I chose 50,000,000 because it accords well with the high end of H-G population densities, that were maintained with virtually zero growth (less than .007% per year) from the time of the Toba supervolvcano eruption in 75,000 BC until ~10,000 BC (Agriculture Day on Planet Earth). Over the next 9,000 years (to 1000 BC, the day I picked as our sustainability departure point) the growth rate almost doubled to 0.012%. It more than doubled again over the next 3,000 years, to 0.025% from -1000 to 1900. Then we hit the hyperexponential big times. The growth rate rose to 0.9% from 1900 to 1950, then to 1.7% from 1950 to 2010. It's slacked off again now, but only to the rate we were at in 1945, at the start of the baby boom.


Our growth rate today is about 100 times higher than it was during the H-G and early agricultural eras - the last time IMO we can reliably say that the human presence on the planet was sustainable.