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Over population derail from "Humans as non-animals"

It's just an observation a feeling that we appear to be living unsustainably in terms of consumption, pollution, destruction of ecosystems, etc...

FTFY.

It's not an observation unless you can present hard evidence that it's actually (not just apparently) true.

You can refer to any number of sources or agencies;


1. Wasting Food and Water

Nutritious food and clean water make up the cornerstone of human survival. In spite of this, people all around the world waste billions of food and water every year. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that, on average, each American family wastes 9,400 gallons of water each year. When it comes to food waste, the sustainability problem is arguably worse. The EPA estimates that food waste reaches 133 billion pounds per year, which is almost a third of the available food supply.

2. Buying One-Use Plastics

At the start of 2019, Jamaica went from having the highest per capita use of plastic bags to banning plastic bags and plastic straws. Many have wondered when America and other developed nations might take similar steps. From 1960 to the present time, the plastic waste management problem has grown exponentially in America. The vast majority of plastic waste ends up in landfills, and none of it can be composted. To make matters worse, it can take up to 1,000 years to break down plastic.

3. Depending on Fossil Fuels

In recent years, solar power and other alternative forms of energy have grown exponentially. From electric vehicles to windmill farms, sustainability efforts are on the rise. Even people who do not believe in climate change have turned to alternative energy forms to reduce their utility bills. However, modern societies still depend too much on non-renewable sources of energy. Stanford estimates the following based on the current usage rates:

  • No more coal by 2090
  • No more gas by 2060
  • No more oil by 2052
4. Overpopulating Cities

When it comes to America’s landmass, 97% of the entire region is considered rural. This makes it even more surprising to find that 80% of the population lives in the 3% that counts as urban centers. When governments and private organizations focus their investments only on urban centers, this contributes to environmental and infrastructure-based problems. It also threatens economic sustainability in rural areas, causing people to move to the cities. This perpetuates the cycle.

5. Contaminating Resources

Unfortunately, overpopulation, fossil fuel dependency and waste management problems all increase the risks of contaminating natural resources. Urban centers, farming districts and industrial facilities produce a lot of waste that can contaminate the soil and groundwater, if not managed properly. If this continues, soils will yield less nutritious food and smaller harvests. Similarly, the freshwater crisis might only grow worse.

The Bottom Line

Sustainability requires all hands on deck. Unfortunately, environmental protection has become politicized as a “liberal” issue, which can make it difficult to encourage the group effort required. Even so, each person can do his or her part at home. The collective results will be well worth the individual sacrifices made.

Sources:

  1. https://www.epa.gov/watersense/stat...er Stats,gallons of water annually nationwide.
  2. https://www.epa.gov/sciencematters/americas-food-waste-problem
  3. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamese...a-moved-to-save-its-environment/#572514af163d
  4. https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figur...and-recycling/plastics-material-specific-data
  5. https://www.washingtonpost.com/busi...big-city-living-why-do-so-many-us-live-there/
  6. https://mahb.stanford.edu/library-item/fossil-fuels-run/
Tagged fossil fuelsoverpopulationplasticsresource contaminationwasting food
 
Electricity for the poor was an afterthought?
Is. Not was.

Poor people still largely live without reliable electricity.

Let me guess, you didn't think about anybody outside the USA before you posted, did you?
I'm not sure that's still true, though it will depend on how narrowly you define "poor", or "reliable".

As of 2022, per the World Bank's estimate, over 91% of the world's population, including over 51% in sub-Saharan Africa, did have access to electricity. In many countries, that change happened in the last 30 years or so. I witnessed some of it in Morocco: between my two visits in 1998 and 2000, a village where I stayed in the Sous valley got connected to the grid. Now the Sous valley is a densely populated region and I'm sure there were still many people in more remote areas that couldn't dream of electricity in 2000, but as the 2025 most of them too have been connected: since about 2017, the percentage of the country's population with access to electricity has been essentially 100%.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.ELC.ACCS.ZS?locations=MA
I more informative measure probably would have been access to electricity among specifically the rural population. For Morocco, that figure starts out at 10% in 1992 and reaches 100% in 2017.

 
It all cones down to available energy. There are practical limits to food production. It is inescapable reality. Malthus was right. His predictions were put off by scientific agriculture.
Malthus was wrong. Have you ever actually read him? His essay is all brutally well-reasoned and inescapable, except for every word of it depending on the unstated premise that there's no such thing as the Pill. Can hardly blame the man for not seeing that coming, but still looking to him in this day and age is anachronistic. He's past his sell-by date.
 
Yet it remains that there are limits to growth. That perpetual growth is an illusion.
So who's arguing for perpetual growth? Yes, there's a good chance we'll never have the technology to expand our species beyond the Local Group of galaxies, which means we're forever limited to the resources of two or three trillion star systems. But whose theories require us to get more than that?
 
Yet it remains that there are limits to growth. That perpetual growth is an illusion.
arguing for perpetual growth? Yes, there's a good chance we'll never have the technology to expand our species beyond the Local Group of galaxies, which means we're forever limited to the resources of two or three trillion star systems. But whose theories require us to get more than that?

Our politicians and economists tend get quite agitated whenever the economy slows down, yet alone stabilizes. The solution? Boost immigration to stimulate the economy.

So, expanding off earth may not address the problems we have on earth, given an economy that appears to demand perpetual growth.
 
Yet it remains that there are limits to growth. That perpetual growth is an illusion.
So who's arguing for perpetual growth? Yes, there's a good chance we'll never have the technology to expand our species beyond the Local Group of galaxies, which means we're forever limited to the resources of two or three trillion star systems. But whose theories require us to get more than that?
Spaceflight isn't necessary, and likely isn't helpful.

The Earth is big. It can sustain a population in the order of ten billion humans for as long as it can sustain humans at all.

Of course, we could fuck it up. But not by using up all of something vital. It's not like any of it is going anywhere.

Once exponentiql population growth stopped, we ceased to have a population problem.

Humans are remarkable for their disinclination to stop striving, even after they have met their goals. Often to their detriment. One of the first things they have to teach salesmen is to shut up once they have struck a deal, because anything they say after that can at best achieve nothing further.
 
Yet it remains that there are limits to growth. That perpetual growth is an illusion.
arguing for perpetual growth? Yes, there's a good chance we'll never have the technology to expand our species beyond the Local Group of galaxies, which means we're forever limited to the resources of two or three trillion star systems. But whose theories require us to get more than that?

Our politicians and economists tend get quite agitated whenever the economy slows down, yet alone stabilizes. The solution? Boost immigration to stimulate the economy.

So, expanding off earth may not address the problems we have on earth, given an economy that appears to demand perpetual growth.
Economic growth in no way requires population growth.
 
I watched a show on food and civilization. Part of it was on a Pacific island, I forget the name.

It takes a lot of effort to produce a minimum amount of calories. They do not have enough energy to do major building projects. Everyone works at producing food. They do not produce enough calories to do much else.

Building the Egyptian pyramids or a Roman aqueduct takes a lot of calories per person per day. As today ancient armies needed food. That requires water supplies for farming and farm animals and an efficiency of scale that does not take a lot of labor to produce excess calories.

The guy who did the Survivor Man series did a show with South American indigenous people. They were not completely isolated and had contact with the outside world, but they were traditional huner gatherers.

Making and maintaining spears, blow tubes, bows, and arrows was a daily community activity. When they traveleed to another village they were gathering and taking small game when it appeared. They were not starving and had decent nutrition, but they did not have the excess raw calories to do much else.



To maintain body weight when inactive during the day you need arioundd1700- 2000 calories. Doing continuous physical labor takes a lot more.

Simple arithmetic. The total calories produced by ancient farmers had to be greater than the calories consumed by farmers to support a population growth.

Basic thermodynamics applies. Agriculture and economies ancient or modern are thermodynamic systems. Mass and energy moves around and work is done. Energy and work has to add up. If you pick up and move a rock or push a plow the chemical energy consumed in your body equals the energy loss in your rnuscles and the work, force times durance of the rock or plow.

I listened to a a western reporter in North Korea. When she got to Pyongyang at first she thought she was seeing teens. Low nutrition and calories led to stunted growth..

The rise of mechanized farming as in the steam tractor reduced the need for farm workers, and the great migration to industrialized cities began. People were freed up to make cars ins stead of picking food.

If you have travel the Mid West during harvest season you will see the harvesting machines out 24/7. Dtiven through it several times.
 
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Yet it remains that there are limits to growth. That perpetual growth is an illusion.
arguing for perpetual growth? Yes, there's a good chance we'll never have the technology to expand our species beyond the Local Group of galaxies, which means we're forever limited to the resources of two or three trillion star systems. But whose theories require us to get more than that?

Our politicians and economists tend get quite agitated whenever the economy slows down, yet alone stabilizes. The solution? Boost immigration to stimulate the economy.

So, expanding off earth may not address the problems we have on earth, given an economy that appears to demand perpetual growth.
Economic growth in no way requires population growth.

Market saturation and designed obsolescence only go so far in a consumer society, where stability, a steady state economy, is seen as stagnation....never mind recession.
 
I watched a show...
Is that why your post is just a series of almost contentless soundbites, that add up to saying almost nothing at all, and certainly nothing new, interesting or informative?

It's like watching a History Channel "documentary" - a vehicle to keep eyeballs through a series of ad breaks by always offering the tantalizing prospect of some actual information, while in fact never saying anything that might challenge the beliefs of an American with a seventh grade education, nor make demands that exceed his two minute maximum attention span.

Your contribution here tells me only that Americans watch far too much TV, and haven't yet grasped that TV is purely an entertainment medium.
 
The problem isn't population. The problem is we have a bunch of rich fucks exploiting resources and destroying the environment. As well as meddling in politics.
 
Yet it remains that there are limits to growth. That perpetual growth is an illusion.
arguing for perpetual growth? Yes, there's a good chance we'll never have the technology to expand our species beyond the Local Group of galaxies, which means we're forever limited to the resources of two or three trillion star systems. But whose theories require us to get more than that?

Our politicians and economists tend get quite agitated whenever the economy slows down, yet alone stabilizes. The solution? Boost immigration to stimulate the economy.

So, expanding off earth may not address the problems we have on earth, given an economy that appears to demand perpetual growth.
Economic growth in no way requires population growth.

Market saturation and designed obsolescence only go so far in a consumer society, where stability, a steady state economy, is seen as stagnation....never mind recession.
A steady state economy would be a Sisyphean hell for all but the most uninspired dullards. It's never going to happen.

Technological advancement increases productivity. It always has. We can continue to make people's lives better while the number of people remains constant.

I'll preempt your likely objection, that greater productivity uses up our resources more quickly. This isn't necessarily true: the only thing we definitely need more of is energy, and the sun provides that in abundance. Every other resource just needs to be managed.
 
A steady state economy would enable us to address and manage the problem of gross economic inequality. Better use of solar energy would indeed mitigate our energy issues.
 
we appear to be living unsustainably in terms of consumption, pollution, destruction of ecosystems, etc.
Right?
Bilby is encouraged that “solutions”’are coming available, population is leveling out and people’s awareness (such that it is) has been generally on the rise. There is a ready energy solution that will be invoked once people come to realize the dire need for it.
Sustainability is within reach.
My belief is that there’s no turning back the clock or re-setting the ecosystems that have been trashed. The extent to which what remains is “sustainable” is up for debate, but my life experiences do not lend to optimism in that regard. Probably best that the younger humans don’t ever know what they’ve missed.
The problem is whether we take action in time to avert catastrophe. I find that unlikely.
 
Maybe we learned from these. But there are bound to be more.
Hmmm. It would take dozens of them to rival the human cost of fossil fuels. Not to mention the ecological damage.

View attachment 49159
And I wonder about the accuracy of that solar data.

Head northeast from town and there's a point you're driving almost straight towards a solar farm. Under the wrong light that can be an issue. I doubt any traffic deaths from that get counted.
 
A steady state economy would enable us to address and manage the problem of gross economic inequality. Better use of solar energy would indeed mitigate our energy issues.
The growth consumes a pretty small slice of the pie. You don't get to take away all of that corporate money--we've seen it happen again and again when some leftist turd treats a lucrative industry as a piggy bank and fails to fund the upkeep.

I have encountered a very striking example of this: Zimbabwe, 1982. Beautiful airport--but many of the lights didn't work (because they weren't replacing the tubes that burned out) and the carts didn't work (because the wheels needed oil.)

And looking deeper--the tsetse fly barrier hadn't been maintained and patrolled. (A pair of wildlife fences, any animal found within the zone was shot on sight.) Zimbabwe was within the tsetse zone but the trophy hunters of the 19th century had hunted anything that could host the tsetse fly (not that they were intentionally doing so) and ended up extirpating it. I have seen no followup on this but I would presume it's now like the rest of the tsetse zone--no western livestock. (It's not the tsetse fly itself, but the disease it carries.)
 
Yet it remains that there are limits to growth. That perpetual growth is an illusion.
arguing for perpetual growth? Yes, there's a good chance we'll never have the technology to expand our species beyond the Local Group of galaxies, which means we're forever limited to the resources of two or three trillion star systems. But whose theories require us to get more than that?

Our politicians and economists tend get quite agitated whenever the economy slows down, yet alone stabilizes. The solution? Boost immigration to stimulate the economy.
Politicians, meh. They tend to be Ponzi scheme artists with a professional incentive to kick cans down roads. If you heard economists arguing we need immigration in order to expand the economy, were they in the pay of politicians?

So, expanding off earth may not address the problems we have on earth,
True that. Expanding off earth is extinction insurance; it's not a recipe for allowing population growth rates permanently above 0.0%.

given an economy that appears to demand perpetual growth.
Economies don't demand; people demand. It's perfectly rational for us all to want perpetual improvement in standard of living; the way to get it is to perpetually work smarter, not perpetually apply more people to the task.
 
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