31–40 of 45 posts
He didn't defuse it, he just added a few more feet to the fuse. As long as Earth's population grows exponentially (or even linearly), we'll hit a wall sooner or later. Malthus is still right: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusian_catastrophe
To continue the analogy, he added more explosives to the bomb. More food begets more people.
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is high yield even a good thing? It is if you want to feed more people, More people may not be a good thing, but it often just is an inescapable reality and if you want to keep them from death by starvation you need higher yield. And I'm not sure rejecting monoculture on a patch of land is high yield. Not if you want to harvest and distribute it all and do it before it spoils and the "patch" is large enough. Then you…
Methods of harvesting and distribution depend greatly on how far one wishes to distribute the crop from the source. Which is entirely another prong in the argument for green ag. I don't necessarily agree with the local food movement on all accounts, but the question of feeding the world ultimately comes down to how much total food is necessary to feed a population, not how many diverse crops can feed a population. I…
That is to say, whith great income disparity, even when millions of people can't get enough calories, we can be throwing away moldy oranges.
Shortages of food will only make it more expensive for us, but people around the world will starve.
And a lot of people are not eating specialty foods from far off, they are barely getting enough calories from high yield starchy local crops like rice, corn, wheat etc. I am not sure how you could provide a population center like say Kinshasa with enough calories, never mind trace nutrients, without machines. Manually harvesting wheat or corn is not a way to feed the world.
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You misstate the arguments of some green farming techniques. For example, rejecting monoculture on a patch of land is low risk/high yield. 15 different crops (not 15 varieties of one crop) is much less susceptible to total failure due to a single catastrophic event than a monoculture. Secondly, is high yield even a good thing? Many crops produce more yield but do not produce more (or produce very little more) nutriti…
I find food from my garden consistently much tastier than food from the supermarket. Especially tomatoes, haricots verts, peas & lettuce. Tomatoes from the supermarket taste as if they injected 80% water. Haricots verts from the supermarket taste as if they're a month old. You wouldn't even recognize peas if you're used to frozen peas. I don't know if the difference is because of different species of plants or differ…
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Omce birth control becomes free or affordable, and societites move out of agrarian only production, that is untrue. Reliable birth control pretty much leads to voluntary replacement only reproduction
For a few generations. Eventually, the survival of the fittest kicks in, and those people who avoided birth control (from a stronger paternal feeling, etc) will restock the population.
One of the best predictors of a woman's fertility rate is their level of education. Higher education leads to fewer children on average. This is largely independent of the fertility of their parents.
Also, if you look at the third world, there are actually some good economic arguments for having more children, related to infant mortality. Your children are your 'Social Security', so you want to ensure that some survive. Paradoxically, reducing infant mortality can actually reduce fertility. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5192204318056302269
As far as alternatives go, an instructive example is post-USSR Cuba. Before 1991 they were a satellite-state which sold sugar at above market prices to the USSR and in exchange received oil and farm machinery. After the collapse they had to, essentially overnight, switch over to subsistence farming. They use low-input techniques by necessity due to the high price of fossil fuels.
In almost every Cuban town there is a microbiologist who will examine the soil from your plot and recommend biological or chemical amendments. Open spaces in Havana are populated with [collectively-run] urban gardens. They're the first country applying permaculture techniques on a large scale.
Permaculture can actually be more productive per acre than industrial agriculture, but it requires more (and more educated) labor to do so. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture
He didn't defuse it, he just added a few more feet to the fuse. As long as Earth's population grows exponentially (or even linearly), we'll hit a wall sooner or later. Malthus is still right: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusian_catastrophe
He didn't defuse it, he just added a few more feet to the fuse. As long as Earth's population grows exponentially (or even linearly), we'll hit a wall sooner or later. Malthus is still right: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusian_catastrophe
Omce birth control becomes free or affordable, and societites move out of agrarian only production, that is untrue. Reliable birth control pretty much leads to voluntary replacement only reproduction
But such subcultures are still less than 1% of the population in the developed world, so even doubling their numbers every 20 to 25 years, it will take a while for them to have a statistically significant impact.
Industrial farming is a product of economy. In our society oil is cheap and labor is expensive, and our farming techniques reflect that. As far as alternatives go, an instructive example is post-USSR Cuba. Before 1991 they were a satellite-state which sold sugar at above market prices to the USSR and in exchange received oil and farm machinery. After the collapse they had to, essentially overnight, switch over to sub…
He didn't defuse it, he just added a few more feet to the fuse. As long as Earth's population grows exponentially (or even linearly), we'll hit a wall sooner or later. Malthus is still right: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusian_catastrophe
Omce birth control becomes free or affordable, and societites move out of agrarian only production, that is untrue. Reliable birth control pretty much leads to voluntary replacement only reproduction
And it may not even generally be true. It might just be how things appear right now given current circumstances. If you cut off immigration to the US, which is driving growth, I doubt the white fertility rate would stay at or below replacement. Wages for low skill labor would rise and fertility would go up. Who knows what the birth rate in Japan would be if their economic policy were not so incompetent.
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For a few generations. Eventually, the survival of the fittest kicks in, and those people who avoided birth control (from a stronger paternal feeling, etc) will restock the population.
This sounds like the same fallacy that the movie Idiocracy is based on – even if you pass on your genes, that doesn't mean you pass on traits like demographic fertility, or intelligence. One of the best predictors of a woman's fertility rate is their level of education. Higher education leads to fewer children on average. This is largely independent of the fertility of their parents. Also, if you look at the third wo…
IQ is well known to be highly heritable. I would be very surprised if proper research came up with a null result on fertility heritability.