Earth Provides

With 7 billion it doesn't really satisfy the need anymore either.

I'm a sustainability geographer, what you're saying is only what the media wants you to believe so that you will continue consuming at your current rate. There's plenty on the Earth for everyone, people just need to consume less excessively.

There is enough for everyone to get the bare minimum, but we all know nobody is happy with that.

there's plenty enough for everyone to live comfortably, beyond the bare minimum, but not gorge themselves with excess

This world is overpopulated.

Mmm... maybe. We're operating like a heavily fragmented hard drive right now. If we were better at allocation, we'd be doing much better. Around the time we hit 6 billion, the world produced enough for each person to take in 3000 calories daily. Somehow that didn't distribute so well.

3000 Calories isn't a lot, I mean it's enough for people who sit around and do nothing but if you are active at all, that won't cut it. The only reason we are sustaining this population is because of oil, if we lose that resource without finding a replacement the population will crash exponentially.

no disrespect to you, but this IS my field, i know what I'm talking about. Some of your points are valid like man kinds over dependancy on fossil fuels but with the right adjustments to our resource dependancies this planet could support up to around 12 billion people

very interested in what you have to say

basic way of explaining it is that societies around the world have to move away from mainstream ideas on sustainability such as market environmentalism (the belief that a free economy will lead to technological fixes and effective resource substitution) and attempt more of a deep ecology approach. That means that basically resources and services should be nationalised in order to help localise consumption. And if everything is produced at a more local level it decreases dependancy on things from abroad and allows us to be more self sufficient. There are alot of other factors and concepts to take into account but basically becoming self sufficient as communities is key.

Oh, well that famous scientist Ghandi said it, huh?

And of course it's a white guy in a business suit, that's not prejudiced at all. I can't believe there are still hangers-on to this "overpopulation" rubbish. Human ingenuity has always figured out solutions to logistical problems. So now we just declare "there won't be a technological fix" in advance to poison the well.

Since technology advances at an exponential rate, this claim runs counter to the historical trend. You might as well say "i'm a pop culture scientist and I tell you, k$sha is going to become a nun".

I'm not exactly shocked that a dubious profession such as "sustainability geographer" advocates handing everything over to politicians. It sounds like a phony job title invented by a politician (oh, I'm sure some liberal college invented a course for it alongside the porn course) to tell him what he wants to hear and to convince others he should have it -- after all, we gave this dude a lab coat, you better listen to him.

Could the Earth sustain every man indulging his wildest hedonistic desires? Maybe not, but Ghandi surely didn't know. But whether he was just as wrong as everyone else who bought into the overpopulation trend at the time and got proven wrong by technology is not very relevant.

I see no indication that he was proposing that human desires be kept in check by iron-fisted paternalistic governments. Wouldn't Ghandi, as a man of faith, rather say that the solution was to change our hearts? People aren't really doing the right thing if the only reason they don't do something is because a gun is pointed at their head with the tension on the trigger increasing with every bite they take.

Dystopia is not the answer.

What's your solution to overpopulation and overuse of resources? you know, seeing as you know so much more about this than me... and tell me about how your college degree is so much better then mine while you're at it

I'm not interested in a pissing contest. I realise that my degrees are nothing more than pieces of paper showing that I paid an obscene amount of money to listen some pompous twits in tweed jackets in the hopes that I could land a more desirable job. It would be shallow to hold that over someone.

What I'm interested in is the fact that you're wrong and you have taken it upon yourself to use your 'authority' to push for blatantly tyrannical levels of authority for corrupt politicians and unelected bureaucrats.

Ever since Tertullian said in the second century when there were only two hundred million people on Earth (or less than three to four percent of what it is today) that "Our numbers are burdensome to the world, which can hardly support us...", doomsayers from Thomas Malthus in 1798 to Paul Ehrlich to Donella and Dennis Meadows and Al Gore Jr. in the last century have engaged in the perennial exercise of perpetuating this false problem.

Perhaps the single most amazing thing about this perennial exercise is that the catastrophists seem never to have stopped quite long enough to notice that their predictions have never materialized -- or they don't care. This probably says more about the catastrophists themselves than anything else. Catastrophism is characterized by intellectual arrogance. It’s been said of Thomas Malthus, for example, that he underestimated everyone’s intelligence but his own.

WCase in point, whenever catastrophists confront a problem for which they cannot imagine a solution, the catastrophists conclude that no one else in the world will be able to think of one either -- thank you for demonstrating this so conveniently. For example, in 'Beyond the Limits' (1972) the Meadows tell us that crop yields, at least in the Western world, have reached their peak. Since the history of agriculture is largely a history of increasing yields per acre, one would be interested in knowing how they arrived at such a significant and counter-historical conclusion. Unfortunately, such information is not forthcoming, mirroring your own baseless claim that technology will not avert the potential problem yet again.

Whether the population is 2 million or 20 billion, these claims persist with but the thinnest of evidence to support them in the face of a flawless track record of being wrong. For Tertullian, plagues and wars were good enough to "solve" the "problem", but the doomsayers of today have a far more insidious solution: totalitarianism.

i haven't backed corrupt positions in any of these posts, i talked about people need to fully perceive the need to move to a deep ecological approach to sustainability. From the the way you're quoting Meadows i doubt you've ever read any of his publications as it all supports the kind of things i mentioned such as self sufficiency. You're an idiot if you disagree with these reports laid out by the club of rome as none of it is refuted by any modern day scientist

But at the rate we're going, we'll be reaching 12 billion probably within our lifetimes. http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/longrange2/WorldPop2300final.pdf Page 5 has a prediction of 10.6 billion around 2050 if we keep up our current rate.

You could fit everyone in the world quite comfortably in a big apartment in Texas. Increase the population to 12 billion, you would have to have a little more land than that to do the trick. Assume that we need a slightly larger area to grow food for all of those people. That means the rest of the world, the vast majority can be left in a pristine and primal state.

Then think about how many cities we have where people are stacked on top of eachother 50 stories high. And think of how technology is going to make food production more efficient.

When you visualise it like that, the "problem" is really put into perspective. We are small, the world is huge.

3,000 calories is a tremendous amount. I work out strenuously for an hour and a half every other day with weights and cardio, on top of being pretty active throughout the rest of the day. I aim for an intake of just under 2,000 calories a day.

Only athletes such as yourself engaging in frenetic activity for hours a day could take in 3,000 calories and not become a blob of blubber in short order.

3000 ain't shit, I am eating upwards of 8000.

You are straight up starving yourself then. Unless you're a midget, your BMR is probably around 2K, if not more.

If your exercising as much as you say your are then 3000 calories is the least you should be consuming.

You do realize that America's agriculture alone can feed everyone in the globe. We are THAT efficient.

Mmmm everyone on the globe eating wheat and potatoes and corn, I don't see malnutrition being a problem there. If you produced those three crops yah you could feed everyone like 2k calories. You wouldn't be able to get meat, most fruit or the more micronutrient rich veggies. Bottom line the world is pretty messed up.

We have plenty of beef. Pilgrim's pride is the second producer of chicken worldwide. Your arguments are invalid. The protein that we actually need is only about 50 grams. Plus legumes, nuts, and seeds are equal ways of achieving this. Plus, we are the second highest producer of lentils (which trumps beef with folic acid). We grow more apples, cranberries, avocados (it costs 20 dollars per avocado in Japan). There will be no malnutrition for anyone around the world.

You could not produce enough meat for everyone worldwide, you have no idea what you are talking about, 50grams of protein is a joke the bare minimum is 1 gram per kg bodyweight. The raising of livestock is not effecient. And no you could not produce enough of the more exotic crops. I'm tired of arguing you have what you think, and we clearly don't agree, good day.

I am an agriculture business major. I know what I am talking about. The amount of protein that is needed to survive is not nearly as great as we consume. Plus, I think people would rather have food in their bellies than starve. You don't know how much grain and how much meat we over produce just so the price of our commodities stay low. The funny thing is no one agrees with you. Maybe you should do research of your own before you start arguing.

Nutrition Major. I eat over 5000 calories a day just to keep my weight where it is, sorry I'm an athlete. Eating a whole bunch of grain isn't exactly great for people.

And also if you had read the entire post you would see that I did acknowledge that we could feed everyone 2000calories a day but that isn't enough for a lot of people. I agree that American Agriculture is efficient, I also doubt they are going to start giving food away to the starving people who can't afford it. Also with 7 billion of us there are a lot more things to be concerned with other than just feeding people the bare minimum. Such as not destroying the planet in the process, that is more what my argument was about.

Yep, erosion; fresh, clean water allocation; clean air; runoff; leeching of chemicals; etc. These are things that make me what to be a part of the NRCS. I totally agree with you on the giving food away. We can't afford it. . . Nice chatting with you. Sorry if I made you upset. I love agriculture and want it to be known how proud the U.S. should be on how efficient we are.

Thank you!

O wow agriculture studies done by agriculture companies, no biased there, please refer to my last comment. Funny how u say nobody agrees with me but all my comments are up voted and all yours are downvoted. I really don't care anymore. The minimum amount of protein depends on a number of factors such as bodyweight and physical activity level, if I only ate 50 grams of protein as a 6"5 225 rower training 8-9 times per week my body would fall apart. This arguement is getting boring, I will state again, sure you can feed everyone the bare minimum but I don't see the US giving food away to billions of people, I think there are other problems with there being 7 billion of us other than just feeding everyone. Such as pollution destroying wilderness cutting down entire forests, that sort of thing. I took Ghandis quote to mean more than just food, maybe that's all he meant, I took it to be more broad.

You'll find that Jasonsheppard is right in the retrospect of food. 1st world countries have ridiculous amounts of food resources, more than they need, and a lot of it goes to waste. On top of that, citizens in the UK and US (there are others but I'm lazy) actually consume a lot more food than they should do.

If we spread the amount of food resources evenly across the world then there wouldn't be an issue of starvation in poor countries.

However, your point about fossil fuels are valid. But there are other resources now being explored; nuclear, wind, solar etc make excellent power sources without the nasty side effects (unless the nuclear reactor has a meltdown, then there is a big issue)

Totally, I just think that once we went from Hunting and Gathering and moved into a sedentary society with farming we started going downhill. Yes we can produce enough food, but look what we are doing to the oceans, and the environment.

I wouldn't call farming sedentary. I live in a agricultural county, and I have yet to meet a fat farmer. Different farming perhaps (we're crops).

Unfortunately, all human intervention effects the environment in quite negative ways. Sticking with farming, crops are good. But it seriously damages the soil, especially if they're not rotated. On top of that, the county I live in was originally fenland (similar to marshland) which was drained so that we had very fertile soils which were brilliant for farming on.

I wasn't saying the act of farming is Sedentary I was saying the difference, between being a nomadic hunting and gathering society which is what all animals are before we switched to staying in one place building houses and living in one place forever domesticating crops and animals. Farmers do work hard. Back when there were like 5-10million of us and we actually lived off the land and didn't just wipe out entire species like we do now, we weren't harming things too much especially when compared to modern society as it is now.

Yeah, I get ya, sorry. It's not so much the farming thing though, it's more the fact that we can now get things at a click of a button.

But we didn't start wiping out species until exploring was added to the mix. Then The British Empire occurred and it was "a jolly good show!" to go destroy some species (hell, The British Empire also tried to wipe out the Aborigines in Australia). Back then though, we were rather ignorant and we've kind of learn I say 'we', I'm a heavy believer that it would have generally been fine had it not been for the white population (I'm white myself) insisting on killing things to store them, unlike Native Americans, Aborigines etc who just took what they needed.

I just feel like they had it right before farming came around and the population started sky rocketing.

I'd say before we insisted on storing things, except for the winter. I wouldn't say it was farming, per say, just from when life got too comfortable and we got bored so decided that we should complicate everything.

It was also storing and distributing things that lead to complex class systems, beyond having a chief of the village. A lot of anthropologists also think that once we started building houses and working farms and started staying in one place for an entire lifetime that gender inequality really took off, because women were expected to stay home and and raise the young and nothing more, just a theory though. When you live in a nomadic culture you have to raise a child for longer before you can have another, and everyone in the tribe helps out to keep the tribe thriving. Again just theories.

.... How many people are reading this? Cause I'm finding the upvoting on comments odd lol.

I know that it ended up leading to complex class systems, but the Native Americans and other tribal cultures didn't have that and they were happy. Sexism and inequality is actually a pretty modern thing - it was complete bull that woman weren't allowed into battle, we were in wars during the Middle Ages (although we weren't allowed to vote). But still, it was when we started to try to expand our horizons across large expanses of water that discrimination and large culling of species really hit it off.

Native Americans and other tribal cultures didn't have that and they were happy. I totally agree. I hope that if modern civilization crashes because we are unable to break our dependency on fossil fuels, that society goes back to something like that eventually. Chances are we will blow ourselves up first but...

I think something really drastic has to occur for us to revert back to tribal like culture. Speaking out generally, I think we've advanced way too much for people to be happy with that. I say advanced, cause it technically is, even though it's caused a lot of unhappiness as a result.

Yah, truthfully the avg person wouldn't even be able to survive living off the land, whether it be from being out of shape or just having no knowledge of living outdoors. But yes, I meant if something extremely drastic does happen and we are sent back to square one, I hope we don't go past that point again.

lolbrary: serious business

Soooo.. That's a fucking awesome picture.

That picture of the Earth cracked open on the plate is badass.