If you think the earth is dying because poor people are having too many babies, that's about three logical steps away from ecofascism.
End of thread.
There is no such thing as overpopulation if we can simply utilize renewable resources. There are no hard caps
There are no hard caps
Are the resources of this planet finite, or infinite?
There are a million ways to solve the environmental crisis that aren't ecofascism, but everyone consumes some amount of resources, which means no matter how efficiently everyone lives we will at some point hit environmental limits.
They are finite but renewable resources are not. What is finite is space but that’s effectively infinite
We're so far away from everyone being able to live on 100% renewable resources that it's out of the question in the short term. And while space is effectively infinite, developing that space to be human-habitable uses additional resources and creates additional environmental strains.
We are that far away living under capitalism, yes. You are certainly correct.
But this isn’t necessarily only about the here and now, but about looking forward into what a world which supports a fully socialist society would look like and in that society there can not (and will not) be overpopulation which is why talking about it as a here and now issue is also not helpful, seeing as we aren’t overpopulated but over-consuming
As we learned with climate change, the best time to take action on global issues is decades before they're "here and now" problems. If this is even on the horizon we should be talking about it as if it should be addressed immediately, because waiting until we need drastic action right away (i.e., where we are now with climate change) risks cataclysm.
Say you had a magic wand that could reshape the world's economy, resource distribution, political structure, etc. You eliminate excessive consumption and give everyone on the planet at least a decent standard of living. Say the planet's carrying capacity at this level of per capita consumption is 16 billion -- just over double the current global population. Are we better off talking about how to humanely stay within that environmental limit today, or in 50 years when the population is 15 billion?
We can talk about it all we want now, but we can not do anything about it and capitalist society never will. The question is a great hypothetical but irrelevant in application because no pattern of consumption will remain intact
:geordi-no: poors have too many babies
:geordi-yes: rich have too many monies
Edit: We need to have a site wide Marxist geography study session with the amount of reactionary and outright fash opinions there are in this thread. If you are one of those opinions, I am absolutely not shitting on you AT ALL. There’s a reason Marxist geography isn’t widely taught unless you seek it out. It is an immensely powerful tool to apply dialectical materialism to issues that can easily turn people reactionary. Any other mods reading this we desperately need to figure out a weekend pinned post project for the topic or something. In the meantime please do not hesitate to ask me any questions and I’ll answer to the best of my ability.
Hello chapo dot chatters it is time for me to put on my geologist and climatologist hats to tell you that ANY freaking out about population now or in the foreseeable future needs to stop now, and here’s why:
You are thinking of earth and it’s resources in terms of what we currently produce and consume as a global capitalist society. It is our job as socialists to CHANGE THIS. Your doomposting about population vs consumption is inherently reactionary. There is technically a cap on earth’s carrying capacity for humans, but that cap is in the dozens of billions. A socialist society can not exist without sustainability as one of its main tenets for a plethora of reasons, but most importantly the equity in a universally habitable planet. High qualities of life under capitalism will inherently lead to environmental degradation and scarcity. We already live on a potentially post-scarcity planet in terms of necessities, and likely by a significant amount. When talking about achieving a certain quality of life under socialism, we have no frame of reference for the amount of production and renewable resources it would take because our only understanding of production and consumption in this world is influenced by and for capitalism.
Capitalism’s allocation of these resources and ability to fetishize commodities is what is destroying our planet, NOT growing population. There are immediate short term issues we face in regards to climate change that capitalism simply can not address, but very few demographics are significantly contributing to the climate crisis and all who do have massively disproportional numbers of people vs contribution to the crisis. This is in NO WAY A POPULATION ISSUE.
On a positive note, capitalism is becoming too heavy a burden for capitalism to continue supporting, because as quality of life increases, population growth tends to halt. As capitalism relies on infinite need for extraction and exploitation it will run into a wall as these societies no longer have growing numbers of people to exploit (which very much mirrors what produced the collapse of feudalism) and this will cause massive social and economic upheaval.
This is, in my opinion, the fruition of Marx’s prediction on capitalism outgrowing itself and collapsing. The pieces have been in place for a long time. Bourgeois democracies and corporations are already trying to fight this by desperately filling the holes in their modes of production with cheap labor from the global south or by directly importing literal human beings from the global south to fill the holes in their society and economic system.
Holy fuck thank you for this. Thought I was gonna go bald tearing my hair out from all the absolute dumpster fire takes in this thread. I'm just gonna expand on it a bit from a STEM angle (yes I know, how awful) to show just how ridiculous the overpopulation arguments.
There is technically a cap on earth’s carrying capacity for humans, but that cap is in the dozens of billions.
Technically, the only real fundamental limit is waste heat. These caps are in the trillions (if not higher), yes just with the resources of the Earth, no asteroid mining or whatnot. Doesn't even require super magic tech, it can be done with things we know for sure that we will be able to do in the very near future--assuming we don't kill each other of course. Every limit you can think of can be circumvented with enough energy, which if you have fusion (no, the jokes of it being always 20 years away aren't funny--funding was cut when they realized it was actually possible and would decimate the fossil fuel market) is only a problem of scale not some fundamental limit except waste heat of course.
Capitalism’s allocation of these resources and ability to fetishize commodities is what is destroying our planet
The tragic thing is that most of the technology/solutions for climate change and environmental degradation already exist or just need to be developed to scale. But because they aren't 'profitable' they aren't utilized. Hell even most fossil fuel emissions could be drastically reduced (on the order of 90%) if we mandated refineries and power plants actually deal with their waste exhaust instead of just dumping it into the atmosphere but again this isn't maximally profitable so its not done to any real meaningful extent in the grand scheme of things.
You sound like me as a kid lol
But here’s a good video in relation to this discussion right now, and I’ll be writing a more in depth post some time this week for a bigger discussion about it. Marxist Geography really is the coolest field of study so many have never heard of
Yes but all consumption we currently understand is based on a society which has no major renewable resource use and development.
In an equitable socialist society not only will this be all renewable, but consumption in general will be completely overhauled since capitalism currently has vested interest in shaping our (over)consumption.
Which is why eco-fascism is so dangerous. It does address the problems but without the Marxist analysis of the problem and synthesis of the solution it will simply never be capable of fixing the actual underlying issue. Talking in terms of “if everybody lived with an American quality of life...” is a useful thought experiment to gauge our current overconsumption, but irrelevant when gauging quality of life under a socialist system in which modes of production, labor, distribution, etc are completely different despite maybe having a similar quality of life
You are thinking of earth and it’s resources in terms of what we currently produce and consume as a global capitalist society. It is our job as socialists to CHANGE THIS. Your doomposting about population vs consumption is inherently reactionary.
I'm sorry, this is a very condescending way to speak to leftists. Why do you think that people who post here of all places are unable to imagine a world, or think about a problem, outside of capitalism? It's just a disrespectful way to treat people you disagree with instead of just accepting they disagree with you about the severity of the problem and debating the details.
Under any system including luxury space communism there is going to be a level of carbon emission related to providing people with a particular standard of living. We all agree here that no person anywhere on Earth is more entitled to that standard of living than anyone else. So in our drive to reach that global standard, there must be discussion about how that standard produces waste and feeds on extraction.
Obviously there is waste under a capitalist framework where my pants are made from cotton grown in Madagascar, shipped to the Philippines for processing then to Vietnam for assembly then shipped to me, but you cannot just hand-wave away the idea that a) there are going to be significant emissions unrelated to waste and b) socialism itself doesn't guarantee the elimination of waste.
So accepting that none of these values will be fixed (as new technologies increase efficiencies, deserts can be reclaimed, rates of consumption may increase or decrease) there still needs to be a frank discussion about the population rate that can be sustained at a certain level of standard of living, and those two values will need to be in negotiation with each other.
I’m not trying to be condescending which is why I even added the part about asking any questions, etc.
You’re absolutely correct that socialism does not guarantee the elimination of waste and I 100% agree, but what socialism DOES that capitalism does not is incentivize the collective care of our environment as degradation of the environment is inherently the degradation of our collective. Under capitalism, addressing the climate crisis is not profitable and therefore not even a facet of where labor is directed. Under socialism this would be vastly different as the maintenance of our planet is intrinsically tied to the maintenance of an equitable society and thus socialism itself.
but what socialism DOES that capitalism does not is incentivize the collective care of our environment as degradation of the environment is inherently the degradation of our collective. Under capitalism, addressing the climate crisis is not profitable and therefore not even a facet of where labor is directed. Under socialism this would be vastly different as the maintenance of our planet is intrinsically tied to the maintenance of an equitable society and thus socialism itself.
My point is this is obvious to everybody who posts here, it's not some amazing revelation of privileged knowledge only you have. Nobody here supports capitalism, everybody here is aware that its fundamental construction leads to waste and eventual catastrophe.
So gee maybe if people here think overpopulation is a problem they're already factored in the waste inherent in capitalism. Maybe calling us reactionaries instead of listening and discussing where we disagree isn't the most productive approach.
I openly said I’m not shitting on people for having these opinions and it’s not their fault, meaning they aren’t reactionaries. It is, however, a reactionary opinion to have sadly which is why I addressed it and wrote a big long post about it
Sorry, you don't get to decide if my thoughts are reactionary or not I'm afraid no matter what community you mod lol.
Honestly you sound like a lib who accuses leftists of being right wing because they criticize Biden. Like they literally can't conceive of the possibility that there could be a legitimate reason to criticize him because there are bad people who do that for dumb reasons, so whoever does it is bad.
I’m not saying it because I mod a community, I’m saying it because Marx and Engels both said Malthusian theory was wrong and based in reaction
Anything by David Harvey is solid and not too dense of material that you need to sit down with a highlighter and whiskey to understand. Anywhere is a great jumping off point, but here is my personal favorite.
He also looks a bit like Marx in this video
Liberals are starting to get pretty awful about it. European countries especially have quite a growing interest in making sure sub-Saharan African people have fewer babies through "access to contraception." People can't deny that contraceptive access is important for women's rights and financial autonomy, but the justifications European countries come up for having such a policy is based on the projected environmental costs of developing Africa for propping up a growing African population. The unstated motive is how frightened much of the West is of having an Africa that isn't specifically developed for extraction.
The left really needs to leave this knee-jerk reaction to this topic behind. Malthus is a strawman, and overpopulation is a real thing that we need to talk about coherently.
There is no number that is the maximum number of people the Earth can hold, but there is if you want a minimum level of consumption for all people to enjoy. Population and consumption levels are two sides of the same coin, and talking about one without both is like saying your car is fast because it can go from 0 to 60mph without talking about how long it needs to do that.
Talking about this issue honestly has nothing to do with poor-shaming or white-washing the role capitalism plays in sustaining poverty.
So yeah if we want on earth to live with a similar consumption level to Bangladesh, fine the Earth can probably sustain life 20 billion people (I haven't looked at recent numbers so this is ballpark). However, if you, like me, want to raise everyone in the world not just out of poverty but to a stage where everyone can have a dignified existence and live a full and complicated life that is necessarily going to result in a major strain on the Earth. For context (and again, it's been a few years since I looked at the numbers in detail) if you want people to all consume like the US I think the estimate is around 1 billion people, like France I think it's around 4 billion, etc.
And saying this doesn't mean apologizing for the inefficiencies inherent in a capitalist system either, but we need to be able to talk about what level of consumption we want people to be able to enjoy, what goal populations are that are commensurate with that goal and what policies can be embraced to encourage that.
If you can't listen to anyone talk about this issue and your start foaming at the mouth and calling them a fascist, that is seriously counter-productive to a major issue that will potentially destroy the Earth.
if you're talking about overpopulation without talking about the inefficiencies and epic waste of capitalism and statism, it's just genocide snuff. full stop. and i never hear capitalist waste as a factor when libs bring this up, so its just their genocide porn. which is sick. because libs are sick.
and honestly, you need to talk about efficiency before you talk about genocide. because it's a bigger factor and can't be fixed with mass murder. at least not with JUST mass murder.
Lol nobody is talking about genocide, you just put that on people who act like overpopulation is a serious issue worth discussing.
I'm sure you can find a few weirdos on Twitter but basically ecofascism doesn't really exist, it's a fiction that anarchists like to obsess over instead of the actual problem of an impending climate apocalypse.
basically ecofascism doesn’t really exist
Yes and no. It doesn't have any major following now, but it's easily foreseeable. Talking about it is as realistic as talking about the possibility of getting a competent post-Trump fascist in 2024 or 2028.
If you look in this thread can you point to one person who is referring to ecofascism in a way that refers to some theoretical future movement?
I see people talking about it with the same certainty they talk about getting a competent fascist in the near future, and I think both discussions are reasonable. The dangerous nature of fascism means you can't wait until it's kicking down your door to take it seriously.
This is always what Libs do. It’s not fascism until the fascists win. Every. Single. Time.
How does ecofascism even work? Like would wealthy nations bomb poor nations or use structural adjustments so they stop developing? Because that is already happening.
This is why I said Malthus is a Strawman. Maybe there are some 17-year-olds on Twitter who just learned about Malthus but today basically nobody concerned about overpopulation is concerned because of starvation. It's a concern because if we are to raise the standard of living of billions of people (which we should) we are going to necessarily increase their carbon emissions.
To answer your question the numbers come from average climate emissions relative to the ability of the Earth to act as a carbon sink.
We have NO RIGHT to kill any of these people already alive
What in the world? See this is the problem. Basically nobody except for some weird freaks think the overpopulation issue should be solved by killing people. How you got there from what I typed says a lot about your ability to discuss this rationally.
Cool, nbd. I will say though, if it really is disturbingly common to think overpopulation should be solved by killing people on the global south why have I literally never heard a single person say it, in person or in media?
Like I'm sure if I went looking on the internet for communities with heinous views I could dig up an example, but literally the only time I hear that idea is when some anarchist is going on about how ecofascism is some sort of serious problem.
Again, literally never heard anybody say that ever. Are you sure you're not projecting that onto them in the same way you did me, since this topic is triggering to you?
Basically all the libs I see talking about this do so with the lens of empowering and educating women, increasing access to contraceptives, and raising the standard of living (which is correlated with a reduction in birth rates) etc. I've never seen a single person seriously advocate solving this with murder.
My understanding has always been that we overproduce a ridiculous amount of food
We manage to do that only thanks to fossil fuels and mass fertilizer production - both of which we need to stop. Without fossil fuels, without huge factories filled with Haber–Bosch reaction chambers, right now we can't produce enough food. Perhaps alternative approaches such as labour intensive, decentralized mass permaculture could work though (but definitely not on a planet where warming exceeds, say, 3C and possibly less - and that's a level of warming we will reach).
Plus, fossil fuel use is probably going to continue for a while “after socialism” anyway
It cannot. All fossil fuel use should have been stopped years ago.
But moreover, nowhere in my comment did I suggest killing anyone, and I even suggested possible avenues for solution.
My own mindset though is that based on climate publications these past few years we're completely fucked anyway; have kids, don't, do what makes you happy at this point. Maybe they'll even survive to live in the apocalyptic hell-hole that will precede human extinction, and find a measure of happiness there. Enjoy the time you have left in any case.
No worries, I understand completely - like 90% of the time when someone talks about overpopulation in that context they're a fucking ecofascist, so it's easy enough to jump on that conclusion.
Not having children is equivalent to killing people?
this is like the one topic where people here are okay with completely misrepresenting what the other side says. Like of course overpopulation is in many cases a supposedly empirical justification for ecofascism. And yes overconsumption and waste are def larger problems in terms of priority. But it's wild how he thought he had to state "But killing huge swathes of people for the sake of the planet should be off the table pretty much no matter what." Like holy shit what?? No duh sherlock. P sure not promoting indiscriminate killings is like the bare minimum of being a leftist. Idk very uncharitable to say the least
you are inevitably, and invariably talking about not just how many people, but what kinds of people even have a right to exist, and to reproduce themselves in the first place.
This isn't true at all. That's an idea you're irrationally smuggling into what could be a serious discussion. What you're describing is eugenics, which is a completely different topic that is basically universally reviled.
how you would practically implement a top-down population control program that isn’t ultimately gonna try to sort people into who is & isn’t allowed to reproduce, or select for “the best/most fit/most healthy children” to be born?
Of course, that is very simple, (ignoring that you also smuggled in a top-down method which nobody mentioned). Proven positive interventions to reduce birth rates include:
•raising standard of living
•increasing access to birth control
•education of girls and women
•increasing wealth
•empowerment of women
There are other potential interventions that haven't really been tried because people insist on not talking about population - like honestly even a public education campaign about how maybe reducing the number of children could help the environment would probably shift some numbers as well. Honestly because we've made this such a hotbutton issue the actual environmental cost of a new human is basically never talked about and a lot of people have no idea that it could be an issue.
And look, the idea of genetically testing fetuses for genetic traits that might make a new human less happy is a touchy, controversial and complex topic that is obviously something close to your heart and I don't haven't thought much about and don't have much to contribute. I will, however, posit that it is completely unrelated to the topic of overpopulation.
Can you actually give me a real explanation as to how you would practically implement a top-down population control program that isn’t ultimately gonna try to sort people into who is & isn’t allowed to reproduce, or select for “the best/most fit/most healthy children” to be born?
India, Thailand, Vietnam, Sri Lanka etc etc. Population control can be as simple as giving women contraception, education etc. That's what these countries did.
Covering every acre of the earth with soy farms to own the libs
I do believe in over population, but not in the Malthusian sense
it's not something that can be blamed on the poor, because it's a geometric problem of consumption*population, and the poor consume relatively very little
a subsistence farmer having eight kids in Benin is doing far less damage than a middle class suburbanite having a single child in the US, environmentally speaking
a subsistence farmer having eight kids in Benin is doing far less damage than a middle class suburbanite having a single child in the US, environmentally speaking
The delta is even more mind boggling than that; did a quick calculation once and based on per-capita emissions, for example, an Ethiopian woman could have 150 kids and still not reach the same emissions induced by one US kid.
no, it's consumptionXpopulationXwaste.
there are three factors there, not two. and one of them is very very very large in the present system.
the fact that it's never mentioned tells me this isn't what these "people" chanting "overpopulation" are concerned about, and if they want to lower the population, they can put their mouth where they say it is and eat a gun. I might even believe they believed what they said if they did. but they won't. because it's all about the exploitation. the core of waste.
they're not afraid of overpopulation; they're afraid of equality. they're afraid of fairness. they're afraid of treating the global south like human fucking beings.
fuck them. and fuck their bullshit arguments. you wanna save the literal world? destroy capitalism. destroy states. destroy inequality that makes us squander our labor and resources on not being one of the "have nots" and crab bucketing humanity just so we can be on top of the pile. if that isn't your first step, you might consider that you're a genocidal classist racist piece of shit. if that isn't your first step and you reproduced, consider that you're a genocidal racist classist piece of shit who should fucking kill yourself; both to compensate for the stress your kid puts on the system, and to avoid making your kid racist classist genocidal piece of shit like you.
You are fighting against imaginary enemies. Ecofascists exist, but their views are not being represented here. What people are saying is that improving standards of living help to reduce population growth, and that is a good thing. That is a universally accepted fact.
i don't think the people im ranting about are here. but im aware they exist. I hate them so very much.
Anti-natalism is dumb. You I can understand being the opposite of whatever the fuck is going on with Matt Yglesias, but stripping away the right to reproduction is not a solution to anything. Material conditions improving tend to lead to a stability in population growth (~2 kids/couple). Caring about population at all is baby brained nonsense.
If you don't want to have kids, whatever. That's your choice I guess, no one can force you to fuck. Just stop trying to say it's a solution to anything and pretending that it's not just a fetish.
no one can force you to fuck
stop pretending it's not just a fetish
Literally stop obsessing over other peoples' parenthood choices. I don't want to have kids. Not as some solution to anything, not as some weird fetish, but just because I do not want kids, and I cannot afford them anyway.
Not everyone has to want to reproduce, weirdo.
That's literally what I was saying. If you're doing it as a personal choice whatever, but I see plenty of anti-natalists out there saying banning children is some sort of solution to the world's problems. It's not and never will be.
I'd agree with anti-natalists if their entire argument was "sometimes procreation creates Matt Yglesias, therefore, no one should procreate" lol
There's more robust philosophical arguments against having children than economic/population considerations, and those arguments don't come down to mere matters of taste/personal decisions. Having children is inherintly a decision that effects other people one way or another, with the children themselves being the most obvious example.
I don't think you should generalize so much in this regard, it mostly just comes off as uninformed.
Edit: I mean, seriously, you can start with something as simple as the Wikipedia article and see that environmental arguments constitute a very small minority of the various positions.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antinatalism
So is the robust philosophical consideration that the kid has to exist and existence is inherently bad?
That's one approach. Consent (or the impossibility thereof) is another. Some argue that existence is pretty nice actually, but boy howdy does death and existential angst suck, and seeing as we can't get around that it sure seems wrong to force someone to experience it.
There's all kinds of angles, and it's a very nuanced and intricate argument. Your reductive summation is, at best, offensive to people who have put a lot of thought into the matter and come out on the other side. At worst, it will actively impede yours and other people's ability to make sense of the things. I'm actually agnostic on the matter, seeing as there ARE really good arguments on both sides.
I don't know, when I read those arguments, I just see the inverse of the anti-abortion arguments that Catholics make. I think focusing on the fact that existence sucks is wrong when you should be focusing on making existence better. When you take the anti-natalist arguments to their logical conclusion, it's just mass extermination of sentient life to prevent procreation. Which they literally mention in the wiki.
I just see the whole endeavor as pointless. It needs to be coupled with massive systemic change and a transition to a communist mode of production, but doing that would inherently change the nature of existence and alleviate much of the suffering that currently goes hand in hand with existence under exploitative hierarchies/capitalist modes of production.
So your disagree with where they place their emphasis. Fine. But I bet they'd have reasons for their emphasis, too. Reasons that they likely make the case for in one of the many books they've written. I doubt they expect you to accept it at face value, especially such a radically heterodox attitude to the norm.
As for your suggestion, communism would certainly eliminate much of the suffering, but whether or not that can tip the scales of utilitarian calculus is a question worth asking. Even if it did, that does not mitigate the reality of death. Realistically can't change that one in time for it to be relevant to our decisions now. Procreation brings another sentient, conscious, and autonomous being into the world (without their consent!) and subjects them to unavoidable existential terror. You're absolutely right, those of us who are here SHOULD do everything we can to lighten that burden and make life better - but we didn't get here via magic. The decision to procreate precedes a decision as to what to do about existence. Glossing over the first one would be a grave mistake if our aim is to behave ethically.
I reiterate here - I'm not actually an anti-natalist myself. I just think they've made valuable contributions to the discussion and you're being incredibly uncharitable to the people you disagree with.
Well, yeah. Their problem is where they place the emphasis because they assume that the current mode of production is some natural unchangeable thing. If they didn't, they'd be communists. Anti-natalism is the ultimate form of doomerism.
Hmm, gonna hard disagree with you here and say you're continuing to be overly reductive. Many of these arguments have nothing to do with what means of production we're using and would stand even under communism. Might serve you well to actually engage with some of the literature instead of assuming so much or trying to import a framework from something you understand better. I'm gonna disengage for now, I feel the goal posts sliding away, and I've said my piece.
It's a thorny issue. Unfortunately, many people approach overpopulation via fascist ideology. There is such a thing as carry-capacity that will limit population growth in the future. We don't every want to get close to this limit because it will inevitable result in really really bad resource and land conflicts that will balance out overpopulation. However, a capitalist system will always try to approach this limit as it requires constant growth. Anyway, regardless of who you are, you shouldn't have more than 2 kids.
Reactionary and shitty fucking take, holy shit. This thread is a disaster.
Carry-capacity is a fascist talking point, not a real issue we are facing right now. Telling other people the right amount of kids to have or not have is extremely fucking reactionary and is the exact same shit people say when blaming the global south for their poverty because they have too many kids.
Is not a debate. Nor is it about carrying capacity.
Most of the places I've been to are just trashed. Strip mined, rivers poisoned, trash Deep into forests with garbage everywhere, reefs stripped bare of fish. It's like that in the USA everywhere and every other country I've been to. Humans do this everywhere.
The idea that the planet can handle more people or that people can have as many kids as they want is not living in any type of reality. And with the way the world works right now it's a pro capitalist argument.
Look at that you were able to make an (fascist) argument without knowing where I visited. Good job.
Blaming the humans instead of the society is pro capitalist. It’s just a human problem sounds exactly like what evolutionary psychologists would say.
Telling other people the right amount of kids to have or not have is extremely fucking reactionary
Who made you the chairman of leftist thought?
Nothing about the concept of carrying capacity is inherently fascist. Carrying capacity is just putting a number on the concept of "infinite growth cannot occur in a finite system." If an ecologist is trying to calculate the number of horses that can live on an island long-term, for instance, nothing about that project is fascist.
At least on this matter, the fascism crops up in the proposed solutions. "We should cull people in the global south and keep the remainder in perpetual poverty" is a fascist solution. "We should improve the material conditions of the global south and guarantee women economic and political rights" is a socialist one.
Carrying capacity is a scientific concept. It is not a hard limit, but it actually exists. And it's not reactionary to tell people to have less kids. China's one child policy was massively beneficial for them, their population would have benn 500 million higher without it. Do you think it's reactionary when South Asian and African countries encourage family planning on their accord? Rapid population growth, in absense of sufficient economic growth, is abolutely a cause of poverty. That's the main fucking reason why countries practice family planning. The solution is good governance, family planning, women's rights etc. Just because fascists say poor people should be killed doesnt mean overpopulation isnt a problem. Fascists always do this shit where they take legitimate problems and prescribe psychotic solutions. The correct response is to respond with the correct solutions, not to deny the problem altogether.
There are no countries which will have high population growth with adequate equality and access. Like literally all countries on the planet have experienced decline in population growth with like at most 5 or 6 exceptions.
This is a shitty and unproductive response to a thoughtful comment. As someone else said in this thread, leftists for some reason think it's OK to totally misrepresent what someone's saying on this topic if it isn't "infinite population growth is possible on a finite planet."
Is this the part where you stick your fingers in your ears and go "nanananana"
Malthusianism is a basic scientific reality and is why evolution by natural selection happens in the first place
No it's not. In literally no field is malthusianism remotely taken seriously.
The most basic realities of evolution by natural selection are malthusian in the sense that leftists are referring to it here:
No they are not. You have no fucking clue what malthusian is or means. You are literally not grasping the conversation actually being had.
That there is a carrying capacity and an exponential rate of population increase and that these eventually butt heads. Both of these are dynamic, but their fundamental properties of increase (if carrying capacity even does increase at a given time) makes their meeting inevitable.
Skipping over the very important part there of the social system by which we produce and then distribute that produce and the means by which the products are made both of which are significant factors in the carrying capacity of a given system as they relate to the efficiency by which parts of the system are transformed into means for others to live.
This also applies to the entire field of ecology. When humans clear-cut a forest, they have reduced its marginal carrying capacity massively and the ecosystem is massively disrupted - through death. We could point out that rewilding will restore the carrying capacity, but it doesn’t change the fact that a given amount of the previous population, already at or near carrying capacity, will now die.
That's not what malthusian or mathulsianism is. You are substituting a specific discussion on the means by which we produce how we live and the how the results are distributed for a much more general topic about total abstract carrying capacity (which is also variable according to both those factors I just mentioned).
The real battle is with context and marginal action. The fact that these concepts validly undergird entire fields of biology does not mean you can draw simplistic, dehumanizing conclusions about current circumstances.
The real battle is a specific social system which arranges society in such a fashion that it obscures our relationship to nature, encourages means of producing and distributing goods that are inefficient and whose benefits are most significantly accrued to a small group who burn and waste significantly more than most of the population.
Yes, they are, and I explained why here and elsewhere.
No, you reduced malthusianism to a banal statement about total carrying capacity. That's not malthusianism.
Overall, you’re missing opportunities to provide displacing knowledge. If these basic underpinnings of biology aren’t malthusian and I’ve stated why they are, what’s wrong with my narrative? If I’m not discussing “malthusian” like leftists are, then in what sense are leftists (unlike all of the ones I see here) talking about? What is “the conversation” that I’m missing?
Jerkoff motion
Yes, it is. It’s how malthusian thought entered and remained in biological sciences and it’s how leftists here keep referring to it in incredibly simplistic ways
No.
Yes, it is. It’s how malthusian thought entered and remained in biological sciences and it’s how leftists here keep referring to it in incredibly simplistic ways. I see no teardowns of eco-fascists in this thread, just dismissals of the concept that population growth matters and focusing exclusively on the fact that we can increase carrying capacity through changes in consumption and the organization of production - what amounts to a statement that carrying capacity could be higher so we don’t need to worry about it re: population.
Because it's the correct take. Malthus was wrong on population growth. Fundamentally wrong. Populations stabilise as their material conditions improve. A number of countries now have declining populations. Even as populations declined, poverty rates stayed the same or got worse. Malthus' claim was that poverty as it already existed was an outcome of population growth, which was and remains wrong. He displaced understanding the social system and how it produces poverty by claiming it as a natural outcome of factors not related to how society was organised. You're attempting to do the same in fixating the discussion on population growth. Even worse when population growth i.e. having large numbers of children is in fact an outcome of poverty. Reducing poverty reduces the tendency for population growth.
I don’t understand how I can be substituting that discussion when I’m making a top-level comment responding to several narratives being used in this thread. Maybe that “specific discussion” is just the one that you’d rather be having?
You didn't respond to anything. You did a "well ackshually" and reduced malthusianism to something it isn't. And are now denying you did that.
You are substituting a specific discussion on the means by which we produce how we live and the how the results are distributed for a much more general topic about total abstract carrying capacity (which is also variable according to both those factors I just mentioned).
Yeah I feel like this convo is people agreeing phlogiston isn't real then one person saying it's kinda real because combustion is essentially phlogiston if you squint just right because they both involve fuel.
rejected by every person that’s taken intro biology
Oh hell yeah, let's fuckin goooooooo
