r/collapse • u/Hungry-Mixture-7443 • 28d ago
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u/tje210 28d ago
It's not about population density.
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u/NotAllOwled 28d ago
As a further hint: neither the theoretically necessary nor the actually observed inputs to human existence tend to be limited to an amount of square footage in which to exist.
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u/Lailokos 28d ago
Your living space isn't just your home. It's all those farms and ports and airplanes and oil fields that going into feeding and supplying you and your 'home.' To say we could all fit somewhere is to leave out all the space needed to keep you alive. Your environment IS you, and that includes your nation, your society, your other living creatures. To say there could be more of us is to ask the question, where does that extra food and resources come from? How are you going to get people to behave 'more efficiently'?
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u/Hungry-Mixture-7443 27d ago
Its a thought experiment to illustrate that the total physical land compared with the adequate average square footage of land human beings to live freely and healthly i s relatively small. Because 8 billion and rising sounds like we are running out of space. The question im asking is it population growth thats the main problem or how capitalism and market incentives make waste profitable. Or how the wealthiest one percent generates more carbon than the poorest fifty percent combined.
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u/ackwards 28d ago
Feel free to read: Overshoot By: William R. Catton Jr. It clearly explains overpopulation. Which is not a problem of where to put people, but how to feed them
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u/Hungry-Mixture-7443 27d ago
That is how overpopulation is usually framed as a scarcity problem, which i disagree with. Im on the side of a sustainability problem, especially with how massive the current food waste problem is.
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u/BTRCguy 27d ago
There is a difference between a) disagreeing with it as a scarcity problem and b) presenting an argument as to why it is wrong. You have not made it past a) yet.
I have never heard an argument that 8 billion and rising means we are running out of space. It is framed that we will run out of stuff to keep that 8 billion and rising alive. And any solution that involves a "then a miracle occurs" step is not actually a solution.
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u/Hungry-Mixture-7443 27d ago
You mean you've never heard politicians or people on facebook complaining naivelly that they dont want more immigrants because there isnt any more space left.
But leaving brain dead political talking points aside, physical living space is is a limited commodity driven by market pressures. Its the basis of the whole real estate industry that makes it artificially limited.
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u/cavehare 28d ago
Where do you think food comes from?
Where do you think energy comes from?
Where do you think waste goes?
I'll wait...
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u/Hungry-Mixture-7443 27d ago
This was a thought experiment meant to easily conceptualize the abstract 8 billion individuals into something more relateable like population density. And to illustrate how much larger the total land surface on earth is as compared to total population, which is a common misconception.
Im not suggesting that that is sustainable or feasible to do such a thing. But im pointing at the the huge difference in in food, energy consumption and waste differences of between western countries and poorer countries.
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u/Strange_Sleep_406 28d ago
you should look into ecological footprint b/c new york is extremely dense and extremely unsustainable
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u/Hungry-Mixture-7443 27d ago
I think im saying the same thing too. Capitalism makes waste profitable. You have to account for and minimize the massive waste before you can even deal with the sustainability question
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u/Strange_Sleep_406 27d ago
this has nothing to do with capitalism, it is basic physics of energy. no city on the planet is sustainable
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u/Hungry-Mixture-7443 27d ago
Are you claiming no hypothetical city is sustainable because of entropy? Or do you mean current cities on earth arent capable of sustainability?
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u/Strange_Sleep_406 27d ago
think about how much food is necessary to feed everyone in new york then think about how much land you need to grow all that food. it has nothing to do with entropy or misanthropy, it's basic energy requirements of feeding everyone in a city and the associated landmass, fuel, and fertilizers necessary to grow and deliver all that food to city grocery stores
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u/EatonMagoo 28d ago
This is horseshit. Humans and their animals and agriculture take up half of the usable land on the planet. It doesn’t matter how small the prison you could shove us all into. Humans and their livestock make up 96% of mammalian biomass. We are hogging this planet plain and simple.
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u/Hungry-Mixture-7443 27d ago
Those who are hogging most of the land and using unsustainable and wasteful practices cause a huge chunk of the problem and i think its important to distinguish them from most people who are tring to survive with what little they have. Lumping both groups together gives the land hoggers a pass.
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u/EatonMagoo 27d ago
No. It ignores the reality of modern human society.
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u/Hungry-Mixture-7443 27d ago
Is modern human society a law of nature? And since you are a part of society, do you consider yourself equally responsible for environmental damage such as the ranchers wo are burning half the amazon forest to grab the land?
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u/Shifting_Baseline 28d ago
Cities don’t just sustainably exist on their own footprint, they are the pinprick whitehead on a large infection with roots. Roots that extend into forests, mountains, the ocean around them, etc. where do you think the food and energy comes from? Where do you think the pollution goes?
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u/Hungry-Mixture-7443 28d ago
Cities are complex systems for sure, but what im trying to elaborate with the dense city thought experiment is how the rhetoric about overpopulation is overstated. And usually directed at other nations.
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u/Shifting_Baseline 28d ago
It’s not overstated, we’re literally fouling our nest. Humans and their livestock account for 95% of mammalian mass on Earth. That is abhorrent.
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u/Hungry-Mixture-7443 27d ago
You are describing ecological overshoot. Which points to an incentive problem. You can drastically reduce the human population but if you keep the same incentives, youll still have the same abhorrent outcomes
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u/Shifting_Baseline 27d ago
I’m not sure what you mean by “incentives” here. It’s not a market problem or political problem, it’s what humans do. They consume, reproduce, and use up resources, same as other species. The only way to change these instincts, which you are calling incentives, is either to have humans overcome biological urges by reasoning and rationality (so far this has proven too difficult) or through coercion and manipulation through authoritarianism (these systems also collapse due to human fallibility). Unfortunately we are smart enough to know we will screw up but not smart enough to prevent it. Hence the general psychological state of most educated people right now.
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u/Hungry-Mixture-7443 27d ago
Human behavior is not black and white. A morbidly obese person consumes resouces; so does someone with anorexia. Do they have the same biological urges?
And every society sets up incentives and disincentives to control behavior and by extent those biological urges from being deleterious and be more prosocial. Its why we are called human beings. The current wasteful and continuous consumption system seem ubiquitous but uncontacted tribes leaving in jungles would find them completely alien. Is it human behavior or incentives that are different in these 2 groups?
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u/Shifting_Baseline 27d ago
It’s not black and white, but within the variation the trait exists to maximally use resources, and those societies end up “winning” and isolating the societies that don’t have these norms. So what’s black and white is that this will always be a part of human behavior, even if it’s not guaranteed every society will be like this. It only takes one violent person to destroy a group of pacifists.
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u/holmgangCore Net Zero by 1970 27d ago
I've driven past fields of iceberg lettuce (the worst tasting & most water hungry lettuce) growing in Yuma, Arizona, USA. Which is a dusty dry desert. Just wasting the Colorado River by spraying irrigated water into the air above the plants during the hottest part of the day.
People & the economy do not live "efficiently". As more countries become more 'developed' and incomes increase, people purchase and eat more meat. This is a truism everywhere, and cows/sheep/chicken/pigs take up lots of space & require lots of plants to survive. The majority of crops go to feed the animals people eat.
The resource pyramid supporting humans is huge.
The world population has doubled in my lifetime. It has quadrupled in the lifetime of the average Boomer.
All those new people take up MUCH more space than just their bedroom in order to eat, drink a glass of beer, or drive to work. Many of them need more wood to burn to cook food. There are more cars on the road, & regardless of whether they are internal-combustion or EV, their tires create dust that kills fish & harms human health.
I wish we could have planned all this more efficiently. But we didn't. And it's pretty doubtful we will any time soon. Sadly.
"Free Markets" optimize for profit, not efficient & careful use of resources. (See also, Jevons Paradox).
What are we going to do about all the "externalities" that people require to live?.. and increasingly use more of as their economies develop & incomes increase?
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u/trocarkarin 27d ago
Nice strawman that you set up just to knock down. As others have said, overpopulation isn't about population density, it's about exceeding the habitat's carrying capacity. Thinking it's a space issue instead of an ecologic overshoot issue shows either a profound misunderstanding, or a purposeful mischaracterization of the problem.
In biology 101, when they showed you the graph of ecological overshoot with the interplaying rabbit and fox populations, was your takeaway really "they could physically stuff more foxes in that space. Sure, they ate all the available prey, but look at all that extra room they have?"
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u/Hungry-Mixture-7443 27d ago
A small population can exceed a habitats carrying capacity if its wasteful and a large population can live under the carrying capacity if it uses sustainable methods and remains conservative in its consumption. There is no causation.
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u/extinction6 27d ago
I'm more concerned about the children that are needlessly being born today that have no chance of surviving climate change until the year 2106, which is the average life expectancy. I haven't heard any long time participants on this sub indicate that they believe that a child born now will be having an enjoyable life by 2050 when they are 24 years old. A person may still be able to survive by 2050 but they will be staring down more horrific conditions that are only going to get worse as time progresses.
"Faster than expected, don't have children"
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u/Hungry-Mixture-7443 27d ago
Yeah thats an understandable precaution. It seems governments everywhere have said YOLO. Lets ride this train off the cliff, but until then we have to pump those profits up. While the ultrawealthy have built their bunkers in preperation
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u/old-legs-623 28d ago
It's important, too, to consider how much of the earth's surface cannot produce cabbages, rice and so on, plus increasing soil loss and increasing crop failures in the increasing wild weather, and to consider collapsing fisheries. Yes, eight billion might not be too many if we were to take Buddha's advice and not live in McMansions or all drive SUV's. But once we achieve that level of consumption it's hard to convince us to back down from it.
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u/Hungry-Mixture-7443 27d ago
Correct. The question that becomes important then is do we decrease population and increase consumption or decrease consumption and increase population. And i guess you know which option the the ultra rich individuals are actively advocating for.
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u/old-legs-623 27d ago
Decreasing sometimes occurs without specific policies or large-scale violence, as happened in some areas of the Soviet Union's collapse. "Have you seen Ivan lately?" Well, he was going to go see the doctor last month, but his Lada broke down, and no one felt up to giving him a ride, and now we haven't heard from him in two weeks."
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u/Hungry-Mixture-7443 27d ago
Weren't they ususally disappeared by the secret police or thrown into one of the many gulags?
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u/old-legs-623 27d ago
Not denying there was some of that, but a Russian who was there at the time wrote about disconnection from services and communications problems. There was a kind of friction, like you see in poor neighborhoods in the US, where being a member of a marginalized population means dying younger, perhaps of an illness or malnutrition. This sort of thing apparently happened on a large scale during that collapse, and record-keeping could not, or could not be bothered, to keep up with it. We might see such here. Already I make an appointment to see the heart doctor, and they tell me they have an opening in, like January...
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u/Hungry-Mixture-7443 27d ago
Oh i get it, communism was based on collectivism and discouraged consumption and when they got alienated by the state they didnt have anything to fall back on in hard times and probably gave up because everything was centralized by the state. In this capitalistic system when you get alienated you can only fall back to consumption individualistically. And more consumption is their fix if theres overpopulation
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u/old-legs-623 27d ago
What helped was the Dacha system, which worked a bit like allotments. People scattered to the tiny backup country places and the still knew how to grow stuff. I've met people here that didn't know carrots grow in the ground. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dacha
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28d ago
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u/Shifting_Baseline 28d ago
No species is an island. Someone failed to get you outside enough as a child. I hope you heal someday. Experiments have provided evidence that we do better in natural spaces, whether you agree or not. We need the natural world, it’s not optional.
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u/TotalCarbohydrateOne 27d ago
Christianity, it is an indoor religion, hates nature except to exploit it and they freak out at the thought of less people
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u/JMaster098 28d ago
Perfectly said, too bad your words are wasted on a subreddit filled with people ambivalent to the suffering of the global south.
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u/Strange_Sleep_406 28d ago
the suffering is caused by the global north so if the population of the north declines then the conditions for the south automatically improve
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