Once knew an ex-ALF guy who spouted neo-Malthusian bullshit. It's a shame, I feel like he should have been ripe for radicalization, but he absolutely refused to see past an individualist/personal responsibility framing of the issue.
I'm down for addressing population by allowing women to get educated, mass distributing contraception, redistributing wealth and global social security you can live off. All policies proven to reduce population growth.
But whenever someone brings up population, the next thing they say is "stop selling food to the postcolonial world."
What the fuck is wrong with environmentalists
We can probably accommodate 12 billion people on Earth, but only at the cost of just about all our land area of diverse ecosystems.
Already we are taking up pretty much all the usable land on the planet such that to support more population we have to either make a breakthrough in production or displace land used for other things.
For various reasons, it would be good to have a lower population than we have today, but it's important for this degrowth in population to be gradual and equitable.
Already we are taking up pretty much all the usable land on the planet
mostly for animal ag btw, eating plants we'd need about a fifth of the land afaik
What's to guarantee that the population wouldn't just keep expanding until we hit the carrying capacity with only plant-based diets?
Because that's not how population works. Developing countries see their death rates fall with improving infrastructure and the birth rate only falls 1-2 generations later, leading to population growth, but it eventually tapers off. Most developed countries have negative population growth, why would new developed countries be different?
We see this happen when healthcare and education improve, and having more children is no longer a compelling solution to the risk of losing a child.
The tapering effect happens especially in urban areas, as opposed to rural ones, where birth rates tend to stay high.
Maybe the solution is to make urban areas attractive enough that everybody wants to live there for noneconomic reasons, so that whatever crowded-environment effect that takes place is not resolved by simply spreading out.
We like barely take up any of the earth, we're some tiny sliver if you look at it as a 3d globe. Just need sick energy production & the equivelant of skyscrapers except underground, and full of grow lights & food crops. 100 Billion EZ. Shit, I bet we could hit a trillion if we actually socialize & make the societal superstructure to take care of us.
Not that we SHOULD. Better to have pop redux because contraceptives & education & better standard of living in the poorest places. Return a bunch of the land that's currently above ground food crops into natural habitats, go on a sick restoration binge. Trade cattle & livestock for petri dish cell cultures, let the animals live reasonable good lives
