ForestBoard

Preamble: Any given ecosystem can support a given number of a given species at varying levels of demand and consumption, in the broadest sense. For some things, like plants, the “limiting factors” are very low in areas with enough warm and moisture, all things considered, so there are forests. This is why plants make up like 80-90% of all of the total biomass on Earth, or something like that. Walk through the woods or a field or even a desert, and chances are, the vast majority of visible living things are plants. Animals require sourcing energy from plants or other animals or their products, so they have an inherently higher amount of "stuff" that they need to survive, whether its a panda's bamboo, a lion's meat, or a human's food and other essential materials.

It's pretty safe to say that we humans, when lifestyle is factored in, use by far the largest amount of resources per capita, outside of some gigantic species like whales and such. Even prior to the industrial revolution and agriculture, we still required very nutrient-rich food, fuel, clothing, shelter, etc. etc. Today, it's off the charts. We have SUVs, highways, electronics, shipping, electricity, and nearly eight billion people to multiply everything out for.

There is absolutely no question, when looking at other organisms, such as the rabbits in Australia, raccoons in Europe, or gypsy moths in North America that invasive, non-native species have a way of overwhelming native ecosystems and causing tremendous imbalance, until something corrects for the excess. If anything, the number of individuals matters far more as you move to higher and higher consuming organisms. A square mile of land can support many more squirrels than people, because we require so much more to maintain. And so, for every non-East African place, we are an invasive species, like other plants or animals are. As a place’s biogeography differs more from that of East Africa, there has been a revealing corresponding rise in the rate of species loss and extinction in the time since we have arrived in that area, with the most damage being done on remote islands, usually, which are essentially miniature continents.

All of this is to say that we, the most consumptive and resource-demanding species to exist thus far, have also decided that it would be fine to also multiply the number of individuals that have to be provided for and sustained many times over in just the past few centuries. Our total impact is over one hundred times greater as a collective species than it was 200 years ago, and this is a direct product of two factors: the actual developments in technology and standards of living in themselves, and also that in virtually every place in the world, with few exceptions, there are now many times the number of people who have to provided for. Every additional person is an additional granular addition to our total “weight” as a species, and we are morbidly, desperately obese, in that sense.

What we now are, and what we are doing to the rest of biosphere by making way for "development" and "growth" and "progress" is actually just what every bacteria does when it rapidly fills the Petri dish: it's converting the resources (space, food, soil, water, air, energy, etc.) from other things to itself, until it comes to fill up the dish and stops expanding. And then, it often collapses, since the materials, space, and resources that were dedicated to the expansion and sustaining of each individual member of the population cannot indefinitely tax the system in such a way, not to mention the idea of constant growth or increases in numbers or in the total amount of energy and material resources used. It simply doesn’t work.

We have gotten to the point to collectively overrunning our collective island (i.e. Earth), and part of what has gotten us here is a long- and short-term development and tendency in human society to, as it becomes more numerous and prosperous, forget the very land and natural settings from which our societies are enabled to emerge in the first place. Over history, there has been a movement away from polytheism and nature-worship, and towards anthropocentric religions focused more explicitly and entirely on artifacts of a ever-more advanced society: writing, books, laws, systems, relationships between social classes of people in complex societies, etc. This has gone on and on through to today, and our societal, economic, and political systems have increasingly become more and more explicitly driven by and focused on the materials acquisition of more wealth, more people, more stuff, more cities, more development, more money, more growth, paving over the world, ignoring what's actually happening, etc.

And now, as the waves are cresting and we are rapidly coming to the limits of exponential growth, everything is starting to seriously strain and ruin and pass different points of no return, as ecosystems that have evolved for millions of years are destroyed wholesale, entire lineages of species are being lost before they are discovered, soil that has sustained the ecosystem for millennia and an advancing civilization for centuries is now rapidly being lost, salted up, and poisoned by pollution, if not directly paved over. The earth itself is responding in good time to what we are doing, and even if we all dropped dead tonight, the Earth would continue to warm, adjust, and jostle around for many hundreds of years to come before anything like a new climatic or ecological equilibrium is reached.

And what’s more, we’ve reached the point where our very weight itself is beginning to ruin the systems that have hitherto made our growth possible. For one example, consider the issue of depleting aquifers, where we have built up populations in regions by using fossil water that now can only be kept alive by continuing to use the ever-depleting fossil water. For another example, about one-third of the world’s growing population relies on the water that originates in the Tibetan Plateau, an effect of Asia being the most seriously overpopulated part of our overpopulated world. It has only not seemed so up until this point, perhaps, because of how poor the region was. As China, the Indian Subcontinent, and Southeastern Asia are all developing and growing, (i.e. so the overall weight in growing both from gains in wealth and technology, and also from the rising numbers which multiply the total amount of “stuff” required, as we already said), so too is the climate change that our industrialized world created coming to rob them all of their water sources. As glaciers melt and snowfall decreases, and as usage increases, many places in Asia and around the world will face serious water shortages. In this way, we are hitting the ceiling from two dimensions, so to speak. Not only are standards of living (and therefore of consumption) increasing, and not only is population growth also an ever-growing multiplier of total demand, but the strain itself is causing the systems to unravel, which may result in a LOWERING of the overall capacity of the Earth to sustain humanity, at a time when there are more people who each need more.

We have ruined this planet as it existed, and we are right now, in this era of a couple centuries, seeing the culmination of what began when we left Africa, then developed agriculture, and finally just moments ago, industry, and like a gasoline-fueled inferno, we are raging across the world and burning it all down. We will destroy ourselves and much of everything else, simply because there were TOO MANY of us at the SAME TIME consuming TOO MUCH energy and stuff to the detriment and devaluing of EVERYONE else that will EVER exist and to the detriment of everyTHING else in the natural world, which has been changed on the order of a massive extinction in the span of a brief thunderclap.

If you think anyone alive today is going to have things rough, I can't imagine what abundance of misery and development of chaos the planet turns into, with a massive growth in human death and suffering in the future. What will the 22nd century look like, based on what we understand now to the best of our ability? What will the world of 2500 look like, when the carbon that I used in 2016 to drive to McDonalds X-number is still fractionally contributing to further warming (along with everything else I’ve ever done in my average American life!), centuries after everyone on Earth forgets that I ever existed?

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More practically, to answer the questions, which are all very pertinent:

Kinectia wrote:

If you wanted to reduce the population that would mean a reduction in the number of individuals. Which individuals would you prevent, turn away or terminate?

For the three possibilities, I would only do the "prevent" option, and much less of the "turn away" and absolutely none of the "terminate." To clarify, I would say that the only thing that will work (without some dystopian police-state scenario) is if a large proportion of the population realizes what is going on, and voluntarily chooses to either limit the number of children that they have—if they choose to have any—and that people who have already had their children would try to encourage young people to limit the number of children that they are going to have. Times have changed. When my great grandmother was born in 1928, the world had like 1/3 of its current population, and they are lived at much lower standards of living, so there was so much more land and resources for all of the other millions of kinds of living things on the planet that aren't us. Just because having bigger families generations ago was okay, and obviously there’s nothing “wrong” with you if you happen to be Child No. 3+, that nonetheless doesn’t preclude the fact that circumstances change and that now, as of the 20th and especially 21st century, we have suddenly ballooned in numbers at precisely the same time that there was an unprecedented rise in living standards. If one had happened without the other, we’d either have a populous planet of poor people or a sparsely-populated planet by today’s standards with high standards of living, but in either case, we’d have a smaller TOTAL impact than BOTH increasing per capita consumption of energy & resources AND increasing the number of people to increase it for.

Back to the questions: If you already exist, on the other hand, you get to keep existing. Life has a solution for that in time, too (lol). With significant reductions in births, the population and therefore also the total human impact would start to fall and would continue to do so for decades to come, because of the lags involved with a species that lives to 80 or 90 under good circumstances. And, the remaining people would have good—nay, improving—circumstances, because we wouldn't be “shutting things down,” we would be “scaling things back” to reflect the new reality of less total demand on account of fewer people with each passing year, and more ultimately "left over" for the other millions of things on the Earth that would seem to deserve the right to exist, as well as for the far future humans whom we hope to exist and to be prospering thousands of years hence.

The bottom line is that we are doing great, unprecedented damage that cannot be undone, and so causing significant damage to our “society” or “economy” in the process of preventing this catastrophe is not only a necessary means to an end, but is fact probably getting to the heart of the issue itself, if we’re being honest.

Disputing whether or not our numbers have something very, very critical and foundational to the trouble we’re in is like trying to say that your life didn’t do downhill over the past year because you started taking meth over the past year, it’s because of the “way” that you’re taking meth. Once you develop a “sustainable” meth use that involves some kind of new method or system, the basic problem will resolve itself because technology is magic and it’s just a bug in the system, not an inherent flaw on the most fundamental level about the notion of regularly using meth or other drugs as a matter of course.

And it is meth, or some other horrid thing. Make no mistake: moving out of Africa was caffeine. Agriculture was alcohol. Writing and complex society was weed. The industrial revolution is hard drugs, and 21st century is the skit of Peter and Quagmire trying to sort the prescriptions into the correct bottles at Goldman’s pharmacy, for those who enjoy low culture like I do.

Kinectia wrote:

What if some of those turned out to be people who would have contributed to some technological innovation that benefited all? What if they would have led social movements that improved the lives of many, by reducing oppression and poverty, increasing social justice and equality, developing real democracy and economic systems that value meaningful work for everyone?

Despite the fact that many people who would be born would be good people, do good things, and undoubtably contribute to society, there is nevertheless such a thing as "too much of a good thing," even when it comes to human numbers. We're not just good, we're the best (in my selfish view), but that doesn't mean that other things are somehow less worthy or less integral to the whole. In fact, as the most consumptive and demanding species per capita, we need to have very LOW densities of people overall, and those few people should be concentrated (but not overly so) into the areas of different continents and regions that are most suitable and conducive for resilient, regionally-independent pockets of human settlement with vast swaths of wilderness across much of the landmasses.

With fewer people, we can leave the worst flood plains, leave the most desiccated land, leave the forests alone, return agricultural land and areas used for development back to nature, make our agriculture less intensive and harmful, since we don't need as much anymore, move away from terrible volcanos, actually have the space to accommodate the million whom we know simply MUST inevitably retreat from the ocean sooner or later. We know that we are rising quickly to meet a lowering ceiling, and yet we’re trying to convince ourselves that the situation is anything other than this.

It's basically the species-wide version of waking up as a massive, awkward teenager (speaking personally, here) who lived on frozen waffles and gallons of fake maple syrup, and then deciding to make some tough changes and to be happy with a bowl of plain oatmeal and a pinch of salt, because the trade off was losing fifty pounds and getting into much better health, even though there is less of me overall than when I was that obese, unhealthy teenager. Less really is more sometimes. More and better.

The Earth is a pizza. A plain pizza, with extra cheese. Good, wholesome, amazing, salty, filling, warm, but also good cold, and amazing with a cold beer. If there are two of us, we can eat two pieces each, get a little chubby, give the crusts to the dogs, and have leftovers for tomorrow. If we have four people, everyone is okay, but there is nothing left over for anyone or anything else. If there are eight people, we can all eat, provided there is no inequality in consumption (which incidentally would not matter as much with only two people; you can have two, I can have three, and we still have half three pieces left over). If there are ten people, things get dicey. They might be wonderful people, but if there are thirty of them, somebody is going to die, someone will get killed, many will be hungry, and a few will probably make out like bandits at the tragic expense of everyone else. What started out as lunch with happy, napping dogs and leftover snacks turned into hell, because there were too many people for what the system could sustain. It's as simple as that, in its ultimate form.

Kinectia wrote:

How would you decide where to place the population controls, and how to enforce them?

Ah, yes, we come to the "we're doomed" part of the presentation. This is the sticking point, once you get past the fact that almost nobody is willing to listen to the notion that there might possibly, perhaps, in fact be far too many people. How do you actually do it?

As I mentioned briefly above, the only viable way to 1. come down off the peak of the mountain without crashing, and 2. to maintain "low" numbers indefinitely is, respectively, if large numbers of young people and eventually all people come to the idea and realization that while we are all individually good and wonderful, we are also so numerous and have come to operate at such a higher level of existence that we simply cannot continue to add to everything and everyone. The only thing we can do is turn down the heat, scale things back, come down to Earth, allow everything else to survive and regain some viability as we recede. If we don't, we will overdevelop everything, like someone who eats two dozen donuts and washes it down with a milkshake and whiskey every day, and we will ruin EVERYTHING for EVERYONE, FOREVER (at least as far as humans are concerned).

And, it would be the largest, single greatest, most heroic and seismic shift ever, if we decided to collectively make ourselves leaner and quieter on the planet by both making changes to our lifestyles and also by reducing our numbers. Choosing to not have children has ripple effects into the future, which means that your one choice can ensure a future “cone of effect” that you will have had by choosing to say “it ends here. Life will go on, people will go on, people that I love and know and see will go on, but I personally am not adding to this. Enough is enough, and lately, too much is too much.”

It sounds counterintuitive, but our world today is counterintuitive. Normally yes, the urge to procreate and continue oneself is the thing that has allowed life to continue. However, doing that now means continuing to expand our numbers, which are clearly unsustainable in the long run (and maybe even in the mid-run). So we have to see this as an odd, extraordinary, and ultimately singular event. This isn’t something we’d do indefinitely. Earth is better with us here, I believe. Just not so many of us all at once. Once there are fewer people, of course we would go back to replacement rates, but only to maintain, not to grow. A “slow burn” humanity is going to last a lot longer and become much more advanced and sophisticated than a massive inferno that uses everything up and then burns itself out.

Not to keep returning to the analogy, but from personal experience, it’s so much like weight loss. Your body naturally rebels when you try to limit your food intake, and until running a small, gradual caloric deficit becomes part of your lifestyle, the struggle is real because it is contrary to the “actually, I think I could go for two ___s today!” which incidentally is what would have kept you alive under normal circumstances, i.e. in a natural state of hunting and gathering. You eat when you can, so that you survive when you can’t. Now, you don’t eat so that you can continue to eat small amounts for many years to come, instead of a tremendous amount now and suddenly nothing at all forever.

So too now, our long-term survival and the integrity of many natural ecosystems around the world depends now on our ability to see that we are on the precipice of disaster and to try to avert it by voluntarily powering down and limiting ourselves here and now so that there might be a decent tomorrow and day after.

Kinectia wrote:

When you feel appalled by the rate of world population increase, you reduce people to interchangeable cogs in a machine. Every individual is unique and limiting population is therefore risky when you value diversity.

Regardless of how you might conceptualize an individual, the fact remains that they require energy and resources, and so each person contributes to the scaling of how large everything must be and how much total energy and resources we collectively require.

My response to that is that yes, I do care about diversity: the diversity of everything that is alive on earth. It doesn't make sense to me to say that because individual people are good and valuable in and of themselves, we must therefore have no problem with ever-increasing numbers of them. This would be obvious with anything else. Do you like dogs? Do you want literally sixty or seventy dogs in your house? Wouldn't that actually be criminal, both to the dogs' wellbeing as well as to the people there? Or the donuts and french fries: in small doses, they are great; in large doses, you get diabetes, maybe.

We really are too much of a good thing all at once, and we are only just beginning to grasp the severity and extent to which we have overshot the ability of the Earth to sustain us. Forget about fueling our progress and growth, the Earth clearly cannot even continues to keep things where they are, in which billions live in poverty despite our gross total overconsumption. Inequality within the population certainly plays a large role, but the answer to that is NOT to make tens or hundreds of millions of new rich consumers, it's to BOTH reduce overconsumption AND to also reduce the magnitude by which all of the systems must operate, namely by having fewer people to have to provide for. If making one or two billion people wealthy with several billion poorer people has brought the planet to the brink, how could it possibly, possibly, ever work to somehow raise everyone up AND have more people AND also not drive everything rapidly into the ground?