Posted on 11/01/2023 9:58:22 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
For 99.9% of Homo sapiens‘ 250,000 years on planet Earth, our population has remained below one billion individuals, and for much of that time, our species’ growth curve was relatively flat.
Since 1800, however, the human population has exponentially ballooned to 8.1 billion from just under one billion.
We now occupy almost all parts of the globe and ravenously consume resources beyond what Earth can sustainably provide for the long term.
As eminent ecologist William E. Rees argues in an ominous new paper, this is a recipe for impending disaster.
For 40 years, Rees taught at the University of British Columbia, focusing on planning related to global environmental trends and sustainable socioeconomic development. His most notable academic contribution is the concept of the “ecological footprint,” the “amount of environmental resources needed to produce the goods and services that support an individual’s lifestyle.”
As an ecologist, Rees is well aware that all sorts of species frequently go through boom and bust cycles. When resources are plentiful and threats are low, they reproduce and multiply. But when resources dry up, perhaps from over-consumption or environmental change, species’ populations will precipitously fall.
Rees’ painfully simple proposition in his new paper is that humans are no different from any other species. Thus, we are just as vulnerable to population busts as we are prone to booms. “Homo sapiens is an evolving species, a product of natural selection and still subject to the same natural laws and forces affecting the evolution of all living organisms,” he wrote.
And make no mistake, we are at the peak of a boom on the precipice of a bust, he says. Human population’s 700% rise, along with a 100-fold expansion of real world product, over the last two centuries are anomalies unlocked by rampant use of fossil fuels, deforestation, mining, and arable land destruction. This has propelled us into an ecological state of “overshoot,” where we are consuming more resources than can be replenished and producing more waste than can be handled by ecosystems. The only question is when humanity’s bubble will collapse. Rees portends it will happen in our lifetimes.
“The global economy will inevitably contract and humanity will suffer a major population ‘correction’ in this century,” he wrote.
How bad will it be? Rees cites estimates suggesting that the number of humans that Earth can support for the long term is between 100 million and 3 billion people. So, the population and civilization collapse he forecasts will be quite bad, indeed. He even briefly painted a bleak picture of how it might happen.
“As parts of the planet become uninhabitable, we should expect faltering agriculture, food shortages, and possibly extended famines. Rising sea levels over the next century will flood many coastal cities; with the breakdown of national highway and marine transportation networks other cities are likely to be cut off from food-lands, energy, and other essential resources. Some large metropolitan areas will become unsupportable and not survive the century.”
After the population correction, Rees portends a more primitive future.
“It may well be that the best-case future will, in fact, be powered by renewable energy, but in the form of human muscle, draft horses, mules, and oxen supplemented by mechanical water-wheels and wind-mills.”
Rees’ opinion is not destiny, of course. If it sounds familiar, it’s because much of it is simply a rehashed version of what Paul Ehrlich wrote in 1968 in his book The Population Bomb. Thomas Malthus made the same argument in 1798. For the past 225 years, reality has proven them wrong. There is no convincing evidence to suggest that conditions on Earth have changed so much that a human population collapse is inevitable or even likely. Indeed, as productivity has increased and technology has advanced, we are creating more things but using fewer resources.
Besides, demographers at the United Nations forecast that the human population will peak in the mid-2080s at around 10.4 billion people, after which it will level off and decline. Rather than due to a catastrophic collapse, this natural slow-down will be the result of higher standards of living, birth control, and shifting perspectives on sustainability, among other reasons. In short, the UN, along with most other scientists, predict that humans will effectively choose to dwindle in number rather than have the choice made for us in dramatic and deadly fashion.
In places, Rees’ paper reads like the rantings of a dour old ecologist, understandably angered by the damage humanity has done to the natural world. Sprinkled throughout the article are opinionated barbs aimed at various targets: short-sighted politicians, naive techno-optimists, and overly hopeful scientists. He also reserves a fair amount of irritation for those who insist that climate change is the greatest problem that humanity faces, when the real problem is us — or rather too many of us.
Still, Rees’ arguments should not be ignored entirely. The accomplished ecologist has distinguished himself through decades of scholarship. He also draws on history to correctly note that many major civilizations throughout human history have collapsed and suffered die-offs, often stemming from ecological overshoot within their respective habitats. He believes that, if we aren’t careful, the same will happen again. Let’s be sure to prove him wrong.
This article was first published at Big Think.
True, of course. That’s what enabled going from 1 billion to 8 billion in a short amount of time. But you need inputs — arable land, water, nutrients, ores, air, etc. Do you think these are infinite?
Can the globe support 25 billion souls? 50 billion? 100 billion?
No matter how clever you are, with no inputs you have no life. Maybe the ore inputs will come from asteroid mining. But water and air?
The issue is exponential unbounded growth vs the “logistic curve” which is asymptotic to some limit. It’s also whether, as you approach that limit, the systems will turn chaotic and possibly suffer some massive collapse.
Yes.See #21.
Luddites and Freeptards.
Even so, and to answer your questions, yes, up to perhaps 100 billion.
But the population will never get that large, because people (women) just don’t want to have more than couple of kids. Kids are very expensive. As even the third world is better fed and cared for medically, the number of births per women crashes to less than 2.
If you love data and analysis, watch Doctor Hans Rosling’s Ted Talk, where he explains it all: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FACK2knC08E
And outer space is full of ice. Which is frozen H2O. Which = water, fuel and air to breathe.
-Crop rotation
-Dried preserves
-Irrigation
-Storage
-Canning
-Vacuum Sealing
-Refrigeration
-Fertilizer delivery systems
-Mechanical harvesting
-Food Preservatives
-Irradiation
-Transportation technology and infrastructure to move food from growing regions to regions in winter dormancy
-etc.
This is the basic premise. It is a false premise.
Humans have the unique ability to increase the carrying capacity of the earth.
Humans also have the unique ability to expand their population and life to other places outside of the earth, and to access resources outside of the earth.
It is highly likely the human ability to unlock carbon from where it has been sequestered in the earth's crust,and to increase the amount of fixed nitrogen in the earth's ecosystem, have already increased the carrying capacity of the earth significantly.
The "carrying capacity" of the earth is not a constant.
Human population collapse. It’s been tried before. It’s called genocide. Done on a local level. People get in the way. Start with Jooz. Then there’s the city slickers(Pol Pot). Tutsies/Armenians.
There’s religion, economics, politics. Whatever comes up.
The world’s population will get older. That’s when the next ‘correction’ comes into play. Too many old folks out there. Think death panels and assisted. suicide.
The population will plunge, but because of anti-family economic policies, not ecological collapse. Every society outside of Africa is already facing massive population loss. Yes, even India. Even Bangladesh.
Neurotic gloom and doom is a common trait among left wing so-called “scientists.” They embrace a high level of guilt, worry, fear, and depression.
Religion can fix that.
Too bad they don’t come that way. I would not care for a planet that crowded no matter how smart they were.
In engineering, you use an operating envelope to understand systems. You understand where the limits are for a system and do not operate the system above those limits. Aircraft are a good example.
Can the earth support one trillion people? What is the earth’s operating envelope?
In the end, it doesn’t matter how ingenious humans are if they keep reproducing exponentially. The exponential growth from 1800 to today was made possible by human ingenuity. But where will you get the resources to support a trillion people?
The Hydrologic and Oxygen Cycles: Lean it. Live it.
Non-sequitur.
Of course there are limits to how many people the earth can support. So what?
As others have noted, no one expecting the earth's human population to keep expanding exponentially. In fact, most estimates are the earth's population will stabilize and decrease over the next hundred years.
Fly from DFW to El Paso—and then tell me how crowded we are...
;-)
Seriously? I’ve lived out there. No thanks. Nothing grows there worth mentioning. It does not sustain life. There is no water not even underground. That is why it is good air drilling country. If there is water it is usually brackish at best. There are lots of places like that. They are uncrowded for a reason and should remain that way.
It would be easy to pare the US down to about 250 million, send home the illegals and their babies. Easily there are 100 million here, if you count the babies they made since being here. There were 25 million illegals when GW was RINO in Chief.
We never should have sent food to starving countries. The law of nature and God says, if you don’t work, you don’t eat. Countries that couldn’t even dig a well, make mosquito nets, or grow and harvest food, deserve to go extinct.
I was reading some theory about six months ago that said feeding starving African babies was the worst thing we could have done. It caused the African population to explode and now they have FAR MORE people to feed — and cannot do it.
It would have been a brutal thing to do, but the argument was that it would have been a far more humanitarian thing to do long-term than causing the African population to explode.
“Nothing grows there worth mentioning. It does not sustain life. There is no water not even underground.”
They used to say that about Phoenix...lol.
Metro Phoenix population today: 4.8 million
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.