Seraph wrote:Crumple wrote:Now all options are on the table here and give free range to your imagination and creative thinking, don't be afraid to be laughed at because we are approaching a terrible global catastrophe now at a fair rate of knots.
FBM's downplaying of apocalyptic predictions remind me of the oft-cited
Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894. In the late 1800s all urban non-pedestrian traffic was horse-powered and their shit kept piling up. In New York in 1900, the population of 100,000 horses produced 2.5 million pounds of horse manure per day. In the "Times of London" in 1894, one writer estimated that in 50 years every street in London would be buried under nine feet of manure. Then in 1898 the first international urban planning conference convened in New York. It was abandoned after three days, instead of the scheduled ten, because none of the delegates could see any solution to the growing crisis posed by urban horses and their output. Our conservative capitalists love using this as a lesson, from which we are supposed to learn that, given sufficient individual freedom, human ingenuity will always find a (sometimes unanticipated) solution to even the apparently most hopeless and desperate situations. They conveniently ignore examples where whole societies literally died out because of their unsustainable life styles. The Easter Islanders and the Pueblo Indians come to mind.
I don't know how near or far we are to a terrible global catastrophe, but one thing is clear to me: We cannot indefinitely maintain an exponential growth rate in consumption on a planet the resources of which steadfastly refuse to grow at all. The biggest change we need to effect in order to survive is to consume goods in a sustainable manner. Just because we successfully muddled through crises in the past does not mean we will continue to do so. The necessary adjustments won't be easy, and they will definitely not be just economic. They will be social and political as well. Some of them will be horrendous, but humanity, or at least
some humans, will survive and get used to the radically different way of life with the usual speed.
The horse manure crisis probably wasn't as bad as people assumed either. Most of that shit was picked up and recycled to fertilise crops grown just outside the cities.
But more generally on overpopulation and unsustainability. There are two opposite things going on simultaneously.
On the one hand, I don't think we're close to hitting the world's population capacity. Technology has always come to the rescue, and not in the sense of big fixes, but gradually tweaking and changing on demand. It's conceivable that huge cities of many millions of people could exist all over the world and be fed by food grown in the city itself... kind of like a scaled up version of how Cuba coped with being shut off from the world. Everything would be recycled, because it would presumably be economically feasible to do so.
On the other hand... we hit our limit hundreds of years ago and are continuously at our limit all the time. People are dying of starvation all over the world every year. Any fix that alleviated that would just allow the population to increase to a level where even more people were dying. It would be easy to trot out the solution of educating everyone as a way to cut population growth, but I can't really see that ever happening on a global scale because the world and the human species doesn't work that way. We're a bunch of stupid, infighting apes with very little thought past our immediate surroundings and futures... whether that be when the next food relief parcel is arriving or whether we should buy a black or white iPod to look cool in our group.
I'd love to see a sustainable world, but I don't think the "necessary adjustments" are even possible due to the stupidity and blindness of human nature.
