Why is overpopulation such a taboo topic? Pt. 2
Postby MonteQuest » Mon Nov 17, 2014 2:36 am
The main reason overshoot deniers avoid defining overshoot--beyond a few glib remarks--is that a critical analysis of the human population explosion precisely mirrors that of any species in the world that has received an energy subsidy, apart from the natural back ground carrying capacity of their environment.
One cannot deny that the human population went into explosive exponential growth, following the energy subsidy of fossil fuels, and has been doing so, for over 200 years.
Ecologists have long sought ways to measure the risk of population collapses, in order to help wildlife managers take steps to protect endangered populations. Studies have shown that populations of yeast that are subjected to increasingly stressful conditions (degraded environment) become less and less resilient to new disturbances until they reach a tipping point at which any small disruption could wipe out a population.
So, what are some early warning signs of a human population collapse? For me, the biggest factors which may help determine the risk of collapse are: Population, Climate, Water, Agriculture, and Energy. All factors in Liebig's Law of the Minimum that sets the carrying capacity for any given environment. In other words, carrying capacity is determined by the scarcest resource, not by the total amount of resources.
These five horsemen can lead to collapse when they converge and lead to the stretching of resources and to a growing inequality gap between the rich and the poor. These phenomena have played a major role in the process of collapse over the last five thousand years, from the fall of the Roman Empire to the advanced Mesopotamian Empires.
A new study partly-sponsored by Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center explores the prospect that civilization could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution.
Study:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/ar ... 0914000615
“Noting that warnings of 'collapse' are often seen to be fringe or controversial, the study attempts to make sense of compelling historical data showing that "the process of rise-and-collapse is actually a recurrent cycle found throughout history." Cases of severe civilization disruption due to "precipitous collapse - often lasting centuries - have been quite common."
One modeled scenario found that “although civilization may appear to be on a sustainable path for quite a long time, even using an optimal depletion rate and starting with a very small number of Elites, the Elites eventually consume too much, resulting in a famine among Commoners that eventually causes the collapse of society. It is important to note that this Type-L collapse is due to an inequality-induced famine that causes a loss of workers, rather than a collapse of Nature."
This speaks to what Kublikhan focuses on.
Another scenario focuses on the role of continued resource exploitation, finding that "with a larger depletion rate, the decline of the Commoners occurs faster, while the Elites are still thriving, but eventually the Commoners collapse completely, followed by the Elites."
In both scenarios, the rich are buffered from the most "detrimental effects of the environmental collapse until much later than the Commoners", allowing them to continue BAU despite the impending catastrophe.
This is what vtsnowedin sees happening.
This, they argue, explains how historical collapses, like the Roman and Mayan Empires were allowed to occur by elites who appeared to be oblivious to the catastrophic trajectory that were clearly apparent.
Applying this lesson to our current predicament, the study warns that:
"While some members of society might raise the alarm that the system is moving towards an impending collapse and therefore advocate structural changes to society in order to avoid it, Elites and their supporters, who opposed making these changes, could point to the long sustainable trajectory 'so far' in support of doing nothing."
Now, Kublikhan is going to like this.
The study also found that "Collapse can be avoided and population can reach equilibrium if the per capita rate of depletion of nature is reduced to a sustainable level, and if resources are distributed in a reasonably equitable fashion."
What this fails to address is: what is a sustainable level? Or what is the carrying capacity that we need to reduce to? They do not address peakoil or declining energy, per se, just resource decline.
They even go so far as to say:
“We can think of the human population as the “predator”, while nature (the natural resources of the surrounding environment) can be taken as the “prey”, depleted by humans. In animal models, carrying capacity is an upper ceiling on long-term population. When the population surpasses the carrying capacity, mechanisms such as starvation or migration bring the population back down. However, in the context of human societies, the population does not necessarily begin to decline upon passing the threshold of carrying capacity, because, unlike animals, humans can accumulate large surpluses (i.e., wealth) and then draw down those resources when production can no longer meet the needs of consumption. This introduces a different kind of delay that allows for much more complex dynamics, fundamentally altering the behavior and output of the model. Thus, our model adds the element of accumulated surplus not required in animal models, but which we feel is necessary for human models. We call this accumulated surplus “wealth”.”
Wealth is a resource that can be drawn down like fossil fuels? That's just ridiculous. Wealth has never created any energy. Energy cannot be created or destroyed; Law of the conservation of energy. This is the biggest shortcoming of this study and a major flaw. It’s a big read with lots of math and ammo for both sides..
But the bottom line here is that a collapse is coming, whether at the hands of the five horsemen or the grips of the Overshoot Predator.
A Saudi saying, "My father rode a camel. I drive a car. My son flies a jet-plane. His so