• Current Events & Politics
    Welcome Guest
    Please read before posting:
    Forum Guidelines Bluelight Rules
  • Current Events & Politics Moderators: deficiT | tryptakid | Foreigner

Population Control

I peg many of the ideas here, among people who seem to be leftist, as what we traditionally associate with radical authoritarianism.

I'm not sure what I am.
 
Last edited:
Radical authoritarianism....as opposed to moderate authoritarianism?

You're out of your depth, chum.
 
I'm glad you have something to add.

"Fascism is a form of radical authoritarian nationalism."

The views and ideas some have in here seem to have some things in common with what I've been called (fascist).

Totalitarian works better though, I think. At a glance.
 
Last edited:
L2R said:
proper allocation of resources, education and opportunity will resolve both issues. too bad capitalism and nationalism hold that back. blaming population for destruction is way misled.
Click to expand...

Source?

Even if we revert back to hunter / gather / farmer types I still don't believe the world can sustain this population, let alone the inevitable growth of it.
 
Forced sterilization. Sending people to their deaths after a certain age.
 
fair enough.

rickolasnice said:
Source?

Even if we revert back to hunter / gather / farmer types I still don't believe the world can sustain this population, let alone the inevitable growth of it.
Click to expand...

Why not? What do we lack, or what would hinder us from sustaining current or projected population growth outside of the administration and methodology of extracting resources?
 
Bardeaux said:
fair enough.



Why not? What do we lack, or what would hinder us from sustaining current or projected population growth outside of the administration and methodology of extracting resources?
Click to expand...

Nutrients within the soil needed for farming? Oil? Etc etc..

**Recent increases in the human population have placed a great strain on the world's soil systems. More than 6 billion people are now using about 38% of the land area of the Earth to raise crops and livestock.[2] Many soils suffer from various types of degradation, that can ultimately reduce their ability to produce food resources. Slight degradation refers to land where yield potential has been reduced by 10%, moderate degradation refers to a yield decrease from 10-50%. Severely degraded soils have lost more than 50% of their potential. Most severely degraded soils are located in developing countries.

According to the U.N. Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, approximately 40% of the world's agricultural land is seriously degraded. In natural conditions, only very severe meteorological events will cause erosion, as the vegetation cover, the leaf litter and the organic matter will protect the soil absorbing rain impacts and preventing soil removal. Removal of the natural vegetation cover due to practices such as: deforestation; overgrazing; or industrial farming practices (e.g. tillage), leaves the soil exposed to the action of climatic factors, such as rain and wind.
Click to expand...

Not to mention the global warming, deforestation, acidification of oceans and general climate changing stuff.

Sure it would slow down if we didn't live in a capitalist MORE MORE MORE world, but we do, and it would still be happening regardless.. just.. slower.
 
Bardeaux said:
Why not? What do we lack, or what would hinder us from sustaining current or projected population growth outside of the administration and methodology of extracting resources?
Click to expand...

Well, where do we start? The unit of food production per square metre of land is a limiting input - sure biotech *might* squeeze a few more units out but when you follow any curve of technology development the upper-reaches are exponentially more expensive to achieve than those below, which in itself in a limiting factor. Then you have to account for the fact that gains made over the last 60 years have come about as a result of the Green Revolution which harnessed the energy from fossil fuels to produce intensive nitrogen-based fertilisers. Take Australia as an example, as an old, arid continent the soils were very thin and impossible to replace as the landmass has essentially eroded as much as it possibly can without renewed tectonic activity. When t farmers arrived and started growing sheep and wheat they very quickly created dust-bowl type conditions that saw the soil blow away, they were saved by the advent of the GR but now you essentially have a situation where the vast food-bowl regions exist as a substrate into which nitrogen based fertilisers can be injected into thus ensuring crops can be grown. All of that relies on access to cheap oil which is a non-renewable source of energy, production of which is rapidly peaking, further increasing the costs of extracting more productivity from the system. Then there's water, that is another clear hard limit built into the system, all across the planet fresh water stocks are under incredible pressure, which is being exacerbated by the changing of the climate, and which brings us to the problem of outputs in the system - the planet has a finite ability to absorb the waste products of production. So you have a situation where demand is steadily increasing with no signs of abating for decades to come, meanwhile the cost of increasing supply is increasing at accelerating rates that are often exponential in nature. Basically, the whole global food system is based on the premise that we as a species will always be able to find technological fixes to overcome limitations, which isn't an immutable law of nature - indeed it violates any number of physical laws - it is an assumption based on taking a narrow window of data, based on a mere 200 years of exceptional growth that was entirely premised on a sudden and incredibly unusual access to reserves of cheap energy, and extrapolating the trend indefinitely into the future. Which is the planetary equivalent of doing this:

disco-stu.jpg


uU392Px.gif


And even if we were to get away from the long term risk assessment for just a moment and go back to the idea of exponential cost increases to achieve incremental production benefits in an environment where demand constantly growing. We live in a highly interconnected global economy where a hiccup in one region can cause untold chaos in another. Just a few years ago, back in 2008, there were a few hiccups in the global food supply chain, Europe had an exceptionally hot summer (climate change) that knocked out their grain crops, while simultaneously the US was diverting food crops into ethanol production, the combined effect of which rippled through the global grain price causing staple crops all across the less-developed world to triple and quadruple overnight. Suddenly, a dirt-poor family in Bolivia couldn't afford to buy the corn or quinoa that they relied on to survive and were pushed even further below the poverty line. While such a minor price correction probably didn't even register to most rich, entitled westerners unless they happened to be trading in primary resources market and saw a dip in their portfolio, for vast swathes of the planet's population it resulted in very real and tangible suffering. maybe not quite starvation and famine but the point is that the global food market is incredibly sensitive to price-shocks and it wouldn't take much more of an impact before it does result in very real and very serious consequences that could result in the deaths of millions of people, the majority of whom live off an annual income that would be lucky to buy you or I a nice fat steak at TGI Fridays. So in an environment where demand is rising, the costs of wringing a few units of production is growing exponentially, in a system with all kinds of feedbacks and is not at all resilient to shocks of this nature, you don't even have to be talking about a MAJOR crisis (i.e. when that actually cause rich, entitled westerners like you or I to sit up and take notice) before your dealing with consequences of arrse-fuck proportions

The Cornucopian assumptions built into our economic system are so staggeringly absurd that it doesn't take a huge amount of thinking to see how flimsy the whole edifice really is - the worst of which is that we can simply take a very limited data-set and extrapolate into eternity. Just because a crisis of apocalyptic proportions hasn't happened yet does not mean it cannot ever happen.
 
Agriculture really isn't my forte, but aren't there hypothetical alternatives to simply tilling over arable land or mowing down forests to access more? Rather than using one dimensional farming techniques, what about harnessing our ability to build upwards in creating many story urban agricultural centers? With the use of hydroponics, synthetic nutrient systems etc, we could certainly minimize the amount of fertile soil necessary to yield more produce and also drastically minimize the amount of necessary land. A key issue here would be water, of course. But again, with more capital, technological investment and manpower invested in water reclaimation it seems like we could address the issue. I'm talking here about sustaining the current population, or maybe the population size in the near future.

As for the distant future, can we expect birthrates to continue on course as they are now as global development continues or if the majority of the world were to be lifted out of poverty? This is why I asked earlier what factors lead to higher birthrates than others?. The answer seems to be things like wealth distribution and education, which is observable within American or Australian society as well as within a greater, global context. So are we really doomed if we were to hypothetically eliminate poor distribution of wealth and resources and poor (or even arbitrary) administration of capital?
 
We are a long way from exhausting our resources. Being trapped on a finite sized planet it's silly to assume we wouldn't reach a limit but efficiency in food production hasn't even been scratched. It is possible to grow and sustain a human using cheap hydroponic systems in a small one room apartment. Extrapolate that across an entire high rise apartment and you would have little problem feeding a vastly more dense population than we have now.

Of course as things tighten we may no longer enjoy steak topped with seafood, but before we get to that extreme I imagine humans will learn to be less wasteful and start reusing and recycling more efficiently. Our throw away society will not be sustainable forever but we have billions of more people to accommodate on the planet before a true Armageddon style ending.
 
I do live in the tropics and grow all year round.

I went from a house with a backyard to an apartment. My backyard veggie patch was only 3mx5m, but I was able to grow all my fresh vegetables, from corn to bok choy, broccoli to more watermelons and pumpkin that I could possibly eat. When I moved to my apartment I started growing in pots, and it still blows me away how much I could grow in such a small space.

Carrots and potatoes are really easy to grow in dense, shallow pots. These aren't mine, put it gives you an idea...
imagejpg1-2.jpg


My sister in law was the one who actually put me onto to small pot vegetable gardens. She doesn't have the same luxury of year round subtropical weather that I do, but still manages to feed her household of two vegetarians, without the need to supplement from the market if she really did not mind such a boring diet.

Water would be the biggest hurdle for this sort of pot growing, but I live in the tropics and rainwater isn't really in short supply.

Fertiliser is really only limited by human ingenuity and council regulations preventing one from playing with ones own shit.

My fairly crude attempts at horticulture could be extrapolated across every balcony and every apartment of a thirty story complex, I can't imagine how a vast marketplace of varied produce could not be produced. And this is before you even attempt far more efficient hydroponics and even a rooftop fish farm.

I have many friends who live in off grid communities in far more hostile farming ecologies that what I have described. Social disorder would be a far greater threat than lack of nutrition.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top