The Overpopulation Myth

Junto Society ^ | Bob Sperlazzo

[mrsmith]

...

Queen Isabella:
"I'm sorry Columbus.
We have an overpopulation problem so I pawned my jewels to pay for welfare and abortions.
It was the intelligent thing to do!"

[snowstorm12]

You are 100% correct.
People who want to deny overpopulation are fooling themselves.

[discostu]

3-5%?! Who came up with that figure? Somebody who think people can only survive in temperature between 60 and 80? I have serious doubts there's 5% of the land that ISN'T habitable. As for the resources, I suppose they'd come from the same place the town at the base of the mountain gets their resources from.

[discostu]

Caliche pits, that's funny. Tucson is one big caliche pit. Vile stuff, you build big muscles trying to put holes in that crap. Problem with it as a road is that it tends to washboard, which makes dentists and car suspension experts rich.

Absolutely, I think the only folks that think there's a shortage of habitable land are those that don't understand human will. Human can build vibrant cities in climates as disperate as Juno Alaska and Yuma Arizona, with a little bit of willingness to "go native" in the culinary and architecture department they can even be fully self sufficient if need be. Two things humans have a lot of are willpower and adaptability, and that's really all you need to build a city.

Stay cool.

[AntiGuv]

Quite often, the term "habitable" is used by ecologists in a manner equivalent with "arable" - which is the actual land that supports habitation. You could go build a city on the Moon and it will still be ultimately dependent on food from that finite arable land. I'm not even getting into such subjects as limited water supplies & nonrenewable sources of energy and so on... Granted, there are means to make some marginal lands more productive - even as other marginal lands are undergoing desertification - but that's mostly playing with the margins (hence the term marginal). I concede that technological advancements may well continue to keep abreast of population expansions, although they're just barely doing so at the present time. In any case, you two are beating a strawman deep into the ground so far as I can see.

[Iwo Jima]

You may be right about caliche roads. What I recall is that they were what the roads were made of -- I don't remember the calibre of the roads. Maybe we just accepted rough roads as part of life. But you are exactly right that human beings can establish living spaces pretty much anywhere they decide that they want to.

Several years ago, I toured the Canadian Rockies in the Lake Louise, Banff area. There were more Europeans (Germans, French, Swiss) there than you could shake a stick at. They were totally amazed that there were no houses on the mountains. They were all adamant that in the Alps these mountains would be covered with chalets, etc. It was totally inconceivable to them that there should be so much land -- even rugged, mountanious land -- that no one would be inhabiting.

My experiences lead me to believe that this continent could comnfortably house at least twice the number of current occupants, from a strictly volume point of view. I have much more strict assessments about who we would want to allow to inhabit our country, but that's another question entirely.

[discostu]

There must be arable land in the vicinity of Everest, there've been people living at the base of that mountain for centuries. Most of the really nasty spots to live have had people living there at very low technology levels for a long time, Aborigines in the Outback, Eskimos near the Arctic Circle, Indians out here in the desert. Now hard living like that tends to keep a society from advancing their technology because they have other things to focus on. But that doesn't mean it's not doable.

Actually technological advancement has FAR outstripped population expansion, you can tell because we manage to keep places like New York functioning but most places aren't like New York (thank God). The only strawman here is the constant insistence there's a population problem when it's painfully obvious that there isn't. There's not one whit of proof, show me one single place that is having problems sustaining it's population for any reason other than politics.

[AntiGuv]

So far as I'm concerned, there are already way too many people on much of the planet. I'm with the guy who thinks one billion people is more than enough. Cramming millions of people like sardines into vertical cities or sprawling shanty towns is not my idea of the good life. We will simply have to agree to disagree, I'm afraid.

[discostu]

But you don't actually have any proof that it's a problem. Sounds like a sacred cow to me. Pretty sad to be accusing others of errecting strawmen when all you've got is a sacred cow. As for verticle cities and shantytown: get yourself anywhere west of the Mississippi river (except for a handful of big obnoxious cities like LA and Dallas), lots of room, not a lot of big buildings (Tucsons has less than a dozen buildings over 10 stories, all office space), perfectly fine standard of living.

The fact is high density population pockets date all the way back to Rome (and possibly before), and those pockets have never reflected the whole of the world. The most densely populated country in the world is Burma, it's population density is slightly lower than San Jose California a nice place with expensive real estate. The planet simply is not over crowded, it's no where near capacity either for comfortable roomy living or for consumption of resources. You might not be happy with how many people are on the rock, but your happiness isn't the final judging factor.

[Poohbah]

So far as I'm concerned, there are already way too many people on much of the planet. I'm with the guy who thinks one billion people is more than enough.

You mind explaining how you're going to convince five billion people to die off so you can have your perfect vision?

Look, if you REALLY think we're overpopulated...set the example and kill yourself.

[SauronOfMordor]

Theoretically the US alone can be able to feed the entire world and we can be able to 'melt certain polar areas and use the water to irrigate arid areas.' Itis also theoretical to set up de-salination plants all over the globe and turn the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans into massive sources of fresh water by using huge de-salination vats that churn out large amounts of water!

The original promise of nuclear power was the ability to deliver unlimited amounts of cheap electricity. With cheap electricity, and the new semi-permeable polymer films, you can get fresh water out of salt (the old way of boiling salt water and distilling fresh is very inefficient).

The big problem is that nobody really wants to live close to a nuke plant, and with current technology you can't efficiently transmit electricity over very large distances. If we had good high-temperature, high-current superconductors, that problem would go away: put the nuke plants in areas that people have no interest in living in (like way up north), and away you go.

[MissAmericanPie]

I am not willing for the price of water to go up to cover the use of illegal/legal immigrants. They stand at 80,000,000 in this country in just the last 20 years.

If not for them there would be no water problem to control.

[MissAmericanPie]

Go to goole.com search "fresh water U.N. Agenda 21"

[matthew_the_brain]

Actually, yes, my house is filling up with these flowers. But I suppose a misanthrope like yourself has a house filled with weeds.

[Age of Reason]

my house is filling up

Filling up? I thought you can never have enough?

[Age of Reason]

Look, if you REALLY think we're overpopulated...set the example and kill yourself.

I have observed that one symptom of overcrowding is an increased tendency to intolerance and violent thinking.

[Age of Reason]

If not for them [immigrants] there would be no water problem to control.

Bravo, MissAmericanPie.

[Age of Reason]

The planet simply is not over crowded, it's no where near capacity either for comfortable roomy living or for consumption of resources.

The minute someone had to bother erecting the first fence, the world became overpopulated.

It's only gotten worse.

Now in addition to enduring a shortage of good real estate, we are starting to pay for air (via pollution control regulation) and increasingly for water.

Plenty of room means I can go live on a few miles of shorefront property in a wonderful climate without having negotiate with other people for the right to be there.

That kind of thing ended a long time ago.

Now there's no good real estate left that isn't "owned" by someone else.

Which means you have to buy your land.

Having to buy land means that there is a shortage of it, because if desireable land were abundant, it would not cost anything--it would be free, like the oceans.

When you have to pay for land, it means land is sort of being rationed: think of your dollars as rationing coupons.

What has happened to land, will and is happening to other resources.

It is even happening to freedom.

Increase population enough, and even the oceans will have fences.

[Six Bells]

Yep and if we were to divy up the combined parkland in the US each of us would get ten acres.

A whole campaign might be based on a plan like that!

[pepsionice]

The idea of over-populating was a fairly decent idea. What helped stimulate population, especially after the 1700s, were medical advances and food science. We found cures for various ailments, eliminated death at 30 (a common age for UK death in the 1350s), improved the nutritution of the common people, and found ways to house people (thus preventing respertory type problems). As populations grew in the 1700-1800s...we eventually got to the 1900s....where science was so wonderful. And jobs became a major item with not just men, but also women...and education became a stability item. As women became more educated, they began to use birth control and start looking for careers...its true in the west and beginning to look true in Africa and the east. As the factors occur...strangely enough, the population starts to lessen. And along the way, is this thing called AIDS, which is simply not curable. Populations in Europe and the US are generally peaking out and lessening (with the exception of the Latinos in America and the immigrants, we would be on the decline right now). Africa is lessening purely because of AIDS. AIDS is spreading both into Asia and China. Both of their populations will begin to lessen by 2020.

The outcome....there is likely a point where AIDS is finally halted, and education of women peaks out...and we simply stablize. Where? Who knows?