The Population Bomb?
retroreport.org
The Population Bomb?
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Re: The Population Bomb?
#2Url changed from http://kottke.org/15/06/the-population-bomb-defused, which points to this. HN prefers original sources.
Re: The Population Bomb?
#3One of the things that keeps me going is a connection to nature & outdoors. When it gets severed or disrupted, perhaps by a move to a crowded area without access to trails and open spaces, I get very depressed.
Looking at footage from the video, I would be very depressed living in such crowded conditions. Maybe even suicidal.
I wonder if part of our ecological crisis is that people are so disconnected from nature, they forget or never understood how much they depend on it - not just from nutrition & ecological services standpoint, but psychologically and spiritually as well.
Re: The Population Bomb?
#4One of the things that keeps me going is a connection to nature & outdoors. When it gets severed or disrupted, perhaps by a move to a crowded area without access to trails and open spaces, I get very depressed. Looking at footage from the video, I would be very depressed living in such crowded conditions. Maybe even suicidal. I wonder if part of our ecological crisis is that people are so disconnected from nature, th…
The world is too much with us indeed.
Have you heard of Calhoun's mouse experiments? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Calhoun#Mouse_experime...
Maybe we are exhibiting the attitudes Calhoun observed in the "beautiful ones". Scary.
Re: The Population Bomb?
#5There's a nicely illustrative video by Hans Rosling here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTznEIZRkLg on the population growth.
Re: The Population Bomb?
#6For more statistics and a historical look at world population growth (including references), see the "World Population Growth" charts at OurWorldInData [ http://ourworldindata.org/data/population-growth-vital-stati... ]
Re: The Population Bomb?
#7Pure propaganda and manipulation. Guess it goes with the medium.
If the worry is "not enough young people", what is the logical continuation? When we produce lots of young people now, and those become old, we need even more young people, and so on? So population growth is the only way forward?
Not even mentioning that today fewer people are needed to take care of other people than in former times. For example one farmer can produce food for many, many more people than one hundred years ago.
It's obvious that population can not grow indefinitely. Just think of the surface of the earth. There is a limited number of square meters. Eventually you would have so many people that there would be one person per square meter.
Maybe we could even live like that. We could live in skyscrapers, or even in little boxes Matrix style and spend our days in spacious virtual reality.
But the question is: do we want to live like that? We have to also think how we want to live, and how that can be made possible.
In the same vein, I guess the world obviously can not be overpopulated. If if were overpopulated, people would start dying until it would not be overpopulated anymore. That's presumably what is already happening in some regions of the world anyway, and has always happened. In "Collapse" Jared Diamonds describes a tribe living on a small isolated island. When they get overpopulated, some members simply had to get into a canoe and paddle away, to die on the sea alone. It's not a new problem.
But again the question is, how do we want this to play out. We can let people be born and then starve to death, or we can not let them be born in the first place.
Re: The Population Bomb?
#8The population bomb went the same way as every other doom and gloom scenario - no where, people just ignored it till the zealots finally shut up.
too many people? too little food? do people even realize how much land in this world isn't being used for people or food? most issues with food and population are caused by politics and usually bad politics. population numbers didn't cause the issues, greedy and power hungry people who went unchecked do.
Re: The Population Bomb?
#9The population bomb went the same way as every other doom and gloom scenario - no where, people just ignored it till the zealots finally shut up. too many people? too little food? do people even realize how much land in this world isn't being used for people or food? most issues with food and population are caused by politics and usually bad politics. population numbers didn't cause the issues, greedy and power hungr…
By now most ecosystems are dead and many species became extinct. No matter if we eat meat or vegetables, ride cars or bikes, the biggest contributor to environmental devastation is the sheer population size. Now it is a lot, and it will be more.
Of course, once can take an anthropocentric approach. But, in my humble view, world is not only about people.
Re: The Population Bomb?
#10Idiotic article. It ignores the real decremental effects of overpopulation that are taking place presently. Moreover, 50 years is not that long. Consider how things will look in another 200 at any appreciable positive growth rate.