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Over population derail from "Humans as non-animals"

Sooner or later, Mother Nature corrects an imbalance in the ecosystem. And when it does happens, as it surely will, what happens may not be to our liking.
Yeah, sorry, but that's bollocks.

If there were an "imbalance", it would be swiftly and very obviously corrected.

Mother Nature is a myth; There's just reality. And the reality is the Homo Sapiens is currently enjoying high population, low and declining population growth, high and increasing life expectancy, and high and improving quality of life.

And that's entirely a consequence of our technology, and our demonstrated ability to meet challenges with more technology.

Population growth was a problem; We developed safe and effective contraception.

Plague was a problem; We developed antibiotics and vaccines.

War was a problem; We have dramatically reduced its frequency, severity, and area of effect.

Famine was a problem; We eliminated it.

The reality is that life is, mostly, better for a random human today than it would have been at any time in the history of our species.

That we constantly worry that it's all going to collapse, and cherry pick our news to focus only on the places where it's not going so well, may be a significant contributor to that success. Certainly it's not objective evidence that things are bad, or are getting worse, or are about to collapse.

You know that the term "Mother Nature" is just a metaphor for how ecosystems work, where 'corrections' and extinctions do in fact happen, and that we are not exempt.
It's not a very good metaphor. Ecosystems don't function like a mother correcting her children, and if you're using mothers correcting their children as your model for understanding ecosystemic interactions, you'll make poor predictions. Who is the "mother" and who is the "child"?

It's just a figure of speech, it's not meant to be scientific or used to make predictions.
 
I heard the Mother Earth metaphor when I was a kid.

It is not meant to technically explain how the ecosystem works, it paints a picture of how we exist in relation to the environment. It does not necessarily imply any agency.

When I was working metaphor and analogy were common means of communication in a technical environment.

A processor is ’thinking’. A system ‘sees’ an electrical signal. One system ‘talks’ to another system. No exigency is inferred we all knew the meaning.


There was the pedantic going around correcting people.

So Mother Earth is a good metaphor.

In a sense the ecosystem is a natural feedback control system. Rabbit population groows and a predator population grow. At some point predator grows and prey population begins to decline, predator population declines. The cycle repeats

The natural world tends towards an equilibrium. If you8 go by evolution, our own bodies are an internal natural balance. Evolution has no agency. Homeostasis.

In Florida Pythons a non native species are wreaking havoc in the Everglades.


Fish from abroad introduced without natural checks and balances replace native species. Foreign insects can devastate pant life.

You can look at the La fires as nature, aka ‘Mother Earth’, trying to restore a natural balance.

Us humans will continue to expand until we can’t.
 
I heard the Mother Earth metaphor when I was a kid.

It is not meant to technically explain how the ecosystem works, it paints a picture of how we exist in relation to the environment.
It paints a FALSE picture of how we exist in relation to the environment. It is propaganda, and as such is worse than useless.

So Mother Earth is a good metaphor.
It's a good metaphor for simpletons.
In a sense the ecosystem is a natural feedback control system.
And in reality, it isn't.
Rabbit population groows and a predator population grow. At some point predator grows and prey population begins to decline, predator population declines.
"Just so stories" are simple but misleading. You can boil a complex web of interactions down to two variables and tell tales about the interactions of those variables, but that's not the same as actually understanding the original web of interactions, it's just a way for lazy people to kid themselves that they understand, without having to do all the hard work of actually understanding.

You have hereby persuaded yourself that ecology is simple, and that you understand it. Neither is true.

You can look at the La fires as nature, aka ‘Mother Earth’, trying to restore a natural balance.
Yes, you can, if you prefer feeling like you understand an intractible problem, over comprehending that you don't.

It's not nice to be forced to learn a lot of very difficult lessons, or admit your incompetence to advise the experts. But it is how reality works, for those who reject simplistic woo nonsense.

"Mother Earth trying to restore natural balance" is just as effective as an understanding of the problem as "God's righteous wrath".

Indeed, those two "explanations" are equally effective as obstacles to knowledge or understanding. Both provide their faithful with a pseudo conclusion, empowering them to dust off their hands and move on, falsely declaring the problem to be fully understood, and excusing themselves from any further effort to learn anything.
 
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I heard the Mother Earth metaphor when I was a kid.

It is not meant to technically explain how the ecosystem works, it paints a picture of how we exist in relation to the environment. It does not necessarily imply any agency.

When I was working metaphor and analogy were common means of communication in a technical environment.

A processor is ’thinking’. A system ‘sees’ an electrical signal. One system ‘talks’ to another system. No exigency is inferred we all knew the meaning.


There was the pedantic going around correcting people.

So Mother Earth is a good metaphor.

In a sense the ecosystem is a natural feedback control system. Rabbit population groows and a predator population grow. At some point predator grows and prey population begins to decline, predator population declines. The cycle repeats

The natural world tends towards an equilibrium. If you8 go by evolution, our own bodies are an internal natural balance. Evolution has no agency. Homeostasis.

In Florida Pythons a non native species are wreaking havoc in the Everglades.


Fish from abroad introduced without natural checks and balances replace native species. Foreign insects can devastate pant life.

You can look at the La fires as nature, aka ‘Mother Earth’, trying to restore a natural balance.

Us humans will continue to expand until we can’t.
Just because it's a metaphor doesn't mean it's a good one. No, the LA Fires are not "trying to do" anything, let alone restore balance. Indeed, it's quite likely our malfunctioning power grid sparked them. Aborting little future Los Angelenos would not do anything to prevent the next fire either; if we want to reduce the likelihood of catastrophic wildfire, we should look at the causes and sources of ignition, not handwave them away as "somehow" the result of overpopulation.

And the natural world hews toward dynamic homeostasis, not perfect equilibrium. When inputs to an ecosystem change, what needs to happen to restore relative stability also changes, and there's never really a stable state that lasts for long.
 
Sooner or later, Mother Nature corrects an imbalance in the ecosystem. And when it does happens, as it surely will, what happens may not be to our liking.
Yeah, sorry, but that's bollocks.

If there were an "imbalance", it would be swiftly and very obviously corrected.

Mother Nature is a myth; There's just reality. And the reality is the Homo Sapiens is currently enjoying high population, low and declining population growth, high and increasing life expectancy, and high and improving quality of life.

And that's entirely a consequence of our technology, and our demonstrated ability to meet challenges with more technology.

Population growth was a problem; We developed safe and effective contraception.

Plague was a problem; We developed antibiotics and vaccines.

War was a problem; We have dramatically reduced its frequency, severity, and area of effect.

Famine was a problem; We eliminated it.

The reality is that life is, mostly, better for a random human today than it would have been at any time in the history of our species.

That we constantly worry that it's all going to collapse, and cherry pick our news to focus only on the places where it's not going so well, may be a significant contributor to that success. Certainly it's not objective evidence that things are bad, or are getting worse, or are about to collapse.

You know that the term "Mother Nature" is just a metaphor for how ecosystems work, where 'corrections' and extinctions do in fact happen, and that we are not exempt.
It's not a very good metaphor. Ecosystems don't function like a mother correcting her children, and if you're using mothers correcting their children as your model for understanding ecosystemic interactions, you'll make poor predictions. Who is the "mother" and who is the "child"?

It's just a figure of speech, it's not meant to be scientific or used to make predictions.
And yet, you used it to make a prediction in:

"Sooner or later, Mother Nature corrects an imbalance in the ecosystem."

By suggesting an implicit "that's just what a mother would do", you feel you've done your duty to argue for that "correction" and can make your way forward by arguing as if its eventual occurrence were a given - without ever having made that argument.
 
The issue is not the metaphor, but long term sustainability. Which includes population numbers, consumption rate and waste management. As it stands, we have not achieved long term sustainability, and the political will to address the problem appears weak.

So, if the problem of long term sustainability is not addressed, it won't be business as usual indefinitely. At some point the shit is going to hit the fan (a metaphor) and we are going to experience an ecological correction.
 
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The issue is not the metaphor, but long term sustainability. Which includes population numbers, consumption rate and waste management. As it stands, we have not achieved long term sustainability, and the political will to address the problem appears weak.

So, if the problem of long term sustainability is not addressed, it won't be business as usual indefinitely. At some point the shit is going to hit the fan (a metaphor) and we are going to experience an ecological correction.
We are planning to solve the problem of long term sustainability the same way we always have - by worrying about it when and if it becomes a problem.

Which is an excellent strategy, given our abject and woeful ignorance of what the biggest issues will be in the long term, and our even greater ignorance of what solutions will be available to address those problems.

Throughout history, we have seen that people worry about the wrong things, and fail to predict just how effective technology will be at resolving those problems that do arise (most of which are unanticipated).
 
The issue is not the metaphor, but long term sustainability. Which includes population numbers, consumption rate and waste management. As it stands, we have not achieved long term sustainability, and the political will to address the problem appears weak.

So, if the problem of long term sustainability is not addressed, it won't be business as usual indefinitely. At some point the shit is going to hit the fan (a metaphor) and we are going to experience an ecological correction.
We are planning to solve the problem of long term sustainability the same way we always have - by worrying about it when and if it becomes a problem.

Which is an excellent strategy, given our abject and woeful ignorance of what the biggest issues will be in the long term, and our even greater ignorance of what solutions will be available to address those problems.

Throughout history, we have seen that people worry about the wrong things, and fail to predict just how effective technology will be at resolving those problems that do arise (most of which are unanticipated).

You are saying that long term sustainability is not yet a problem? And that if or when it does become a problem, we can find a solution without a major correction?
 
The issue is not the metaphor, but long term sustainability. Which includes population numbers, consumption rate and waste management. As it stands, we have not achieved long term sustainability, and the political will to address the problem appears weak.

So, if the problem of long term sustainability is not addressed, it won't be business as usual indefinitely. At some point the shit is going to hit the fan (a metaphor) and we are going to experience an ecological correction.
We are planning to solve the problem of long term sustainability the same way we always have - by worrying about it when and if it becomes a problem.

Which is an excellent strategy, given our abject and woeful ignorance of what the biggest issues will be in the long term, and our even greater ignorance of what solutions will be available to address those problems.

Throughout history, we have seen that people worry about the wrong things, and fail to predict just how effective technology will be at resolving those problems that do arise (most of which are unanticipated).
True, but does it make sense to always have serene faith that a solution will be always found when no solutions are are in sight? Just because it worked in the past? Do you count your chickens before the eggs are hatched?
 
As the saying goes here on the forum 'we are fiddling while Rome burns'.\

Emblematic of how us humans arr rt6imnalzng our lives. The Super Bowl is at the top of many people's minds.

We will continue until our system collapses.

It is a 'perfect storm' the metaphor from a movie. Climate change, changing demographi9cs and political dissent, and growing unrest at the bottom where working people can not afford basic expenses.

It doesn't take an historian to see historical precedents. Not the least of which are the conditions that led to the rise of Hitler.

We all have our escapes. Pop music and culture, fantasy fiction and movies, alcohol, drugs, and pot.
I see it al, the time on the streets and busses. People with their heads down in a wireless device wearing headphones.

The La fires will not male a dent on the population in general.

The political focus is always on growing the economy. That requires a growing population by natural birth or immigration.

Russia, China, South Korea , and Japan have a problem with diminishing populations and low birth rates.

A diminishing population means lower college enrollments and revenue goes down.

Here in Washington diminishing primary education students means lower financial support and school closures. Dropping art and music programs. It has been an ongoing source of contentious debate and complaint by parents.


If you do not understand population across the system you are not paying attention.
 
The issue is not the metaphor, but long term sustainability. Which includes population numbers, consumption rate and waste management. As it stands, we have not achieved long term sustainability, and the political will to address the problem appears weak.

So, if the problem of long term sustainability is not addressed, it won't be business as usual indefinitely. At some point the shit is going to hit the fan (a metaphor) and we are going to experience an ecological correction.
We are planning to solve the problem of long term sustainability the same way we always have - by worrying about it when and if it becomes a problem.

Which is an excellent strategy, given our abject and woeful ignorance of what the biggest issues will be in the long term, and our even greater ignorance of what solutions will be available to address those problems.

Throughout history, we have seen that people worry about the wrong things, and fail to predict just how effective technology will be at resolving those problems that do arise (most of which are unanticipated).

You are saying that long term sustainability is not yet a problem? And that if or when it does become a problem, we can find a solution without a major correction?
No, I am saying that all long term problems are intractible, and that while it is literally imposdible to solve them, that is not a problem because it's not our job yo solve them, and the people whose job it is, our descendants, have tools available to them that we cannot even dream of.

I am further saying that throughout history, many such problems have arisen, and yet none have proven impossible to address.

It would be remarkable if we happen to live at the first time in all of human history when the intractible long term worries about which we are obsessing just happened to be ones that our descendants cannot solve. And even if we are at that unique point, we are less well equipped than our descendants to even understand, much less resolve, the problems; And the problems won't affect us anyway.

Our job is to solve the short (<10 year) and plan for the medium (<100 years) terms. The rest is the responsibility of others. And always was.
 
does it make sense to always have serene faith that a solution will be always found when no solutions are are in sight?
Yes.

I mean, I could worry, or even panic; But neither will make any difference, so why not be calm about it?

Most medium term problems already have technical solutions. The thing we lack is the will to implement them, or the ability to grasp that they have been solved, which is a short term problem.
 
If you do not understand population across the system you are not paying attention.
Well that's an easy problem for you to solve. You could just start paying attention, instead of regurgitating problems that were solved decades ago (such as population growth).

If you have paid attention in the last three decades, you will know that the population bomb has been defused.
 
I think we are a long way from achieving long term sustainability, which doesn't appear to be a part of the political or economic agenda.
We have not had a long term sustainable system since the development of worked stone tools. Nor is there any technological level we could retreat to that would be sustainable. We either develop the tech for long term sustainability or we die. There is no other path. The greens like to propose a path that pushes the collapse out beyond the end of their chart but all the remotely scientific stuff shows humanity going down, not up.

There are things we can do to help like switching from coal/oil/gas to nuclear, but that will not address the fundamental issue.
We can extended the existence of our species, but nothing we can do can change the fact that all of our resources are finite. That some, if not almost all of us, think the universe has never seen our like before and that we are so specially talented to escape that fate is an unfortunate conceit, and hurries up our extinction, but only makes it a bit sooner rather than a bit later. The universe can and will probably make more species just as capable as us, and they too, will suffer the same fate.
Yeah, we have to develop ways to minimize unrecoverable loss of resources.
 
That we constantly worry that it's all going to collapse, and cherry pick our news to focus only on the places where it's not going so well, may be a significant contributor to that success. Certainly it's not objective evidence that things are bad, or are getting worse, or are about to collapse.

You know that the term "Mother Nature" is just a metaphor for how ecosystems work, where 'corrections' and extinctions do in fact happen, and that we are not exempt.
It's not a very good metaphor. Ecosystems don't function like a mother correcting her children, and if you're using mothers correcting their children as your model for understanding ecosystemic interactions, you'll make poor predictions. Who is the "mother" and who is the "child"?
I see it more as when something is way in excess in an ecosystem that there probably will be some event that knocks it back. We see this all the time with the predator-prey cycle. More prey -> more predators -> prey gets eaten -> less prey -> predators starve -> more prey. Once something is dominant in it's system there's little it can do to expand.
 
In a sense the ecosystem is a natural feedback control system.
And in reality, it isn't.
If a part of the ecosystem doesn't have a feedback control it's prone to getting too far out of balance and crashing and thus not being around to observe. Thus just about everything we do observe has a feedback control system.

Rabbit population groows and a predator population grow. At some point predator grows and prey population begins to decline, predator population declines.
"Just so stories" are simple but misleading. You can boil a complex web of interactions down to two variables and tell tales about the interactions of those variables, but that's not the same as actually understanding the original web of interactions, it's just a way for lazy people to kid themselves that they understand, without having to do all the hard work of actually understanding.

You have hereby persuaded yourself that ecology is simple, and that you understand it. Neither is true.
It's not simple. But the predator-prey cycle exists in pretty much every system with a predator. And where it doesn't it's because there's some other force that's dominant. (I have Death Valley in mind. "Prey" (plants) are far more limited by the rains than by predation (plant-eaters.) The predator part of the cycle still reacts to the supply of prey but the prey doesn't really react to the predators other than in an evolutionary sense. You have plants that make themselves unappetizing and you have plants that just try to get through life as fast as possible to get seeds out there before they are eaten.)


"Mother Earth trying to restore natural balance" is just as effective as an understanding of the problem as "God's righteous wrath".

Indeed, those two "explanations" are equally effective as obstacles to knowledge or understanding. Both provide their faithful with a pseudo conclusion, empowering them to dust off their hands and move on, falsely declaring the problem to be fully understood, and excusing themselves from any further effort to learn anything.
I agree that "trying" is not the right word as it implies agency. But systems will tend to return to equilibrium without having agency.
 
The issue is not the metaphor, but long term sustainability. Which includes population numbers, consumption rate and waste management. As it stands, we have not achieved long term sustainability, and the political will to address the problem appears weak.

So, if the problem of long term sustainability is not addressed, it won't be business as usual indefinitely. At some point the shit is going to hit the fan (a metaphor) and we are going to experience an ecological correction.
We are planning to solve the problem of long term sustainability the same way we always have - by worrying about it when and if it becomes a problem.

Which is an excellent strategy, given our abject and woeful ignorance of what the biggest issues will be in the long term, and our even greater ignorance of what solutions will be available to address those problems.

Throughout history, we have seen that people worry about the wrong things, and fail to predict just how effective technology will be at resolving those problems that do arise (most of which are unanticipated).
Survivorship bias. Only the archeologists know about the ones that failed.

The California fires were entirely predictable--not in a matter of happening now, but that the conditions were such that it would happen at some point.
 
You'd probably get better results by funding better access to contraceptives and education,
Not happening in the next 4 years, or more.
The US is not the world.

It's entirely possible that education and access to contraceptives will keep improving in Africa and Asia, regardless of the incompetence of the US government.
 
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