Newfie wrote:I don’t know, I think some things are perfectly clear but are muddled in the minutia of argument. Once you draw back to the larger perspective things clarify.
Consider this, roughly speaking:
1.There are about 2 acres of habitable land per person on earth.
2. Humans require about 5 acres of land per person all in; agriculture, habitation, sewage, water capture.
3. #2, according to the guy who made the model, is very optimistic because it does not take into account soil depletion and other resource depletion impacts.
These are pretty stable numbers that are defensible. Forget climate change (for the moment) these numbers are much more frightening, less debatable, harder to deal with. But we ignore them and dither about cc and oil extraction rates.
It’s essentially the Limits to Growth argument. I’ve seen no credible rebuttal to LTG, just denial that “it hasn’t happened yet.” Well it was not supposed to. By that same logic I could argue I am immortal, because I haven’t died yet. And that’s perfectly logical, 100% of folks alive today have not yet died.
The fundamentals are perfectly clear to anyone sufficiently open minded. Both of us.
I think you had let yourself be trapped into a rut with this line of thinking. What I mean is, you state that it is a fact that there are only 2 habitable acres per person and ecological demand per person is 5 acre each. From this you conclude there is a 60% surplus in population that needs to be reduced ASAP or catastrophic calamity will result.
However in a real ecosystem overshoot the condition only lasts about 12-18 months maximum, and can resolve in as little as minutes at minimum. The classic example of this certain people around here liked to throw out a decade ago were the reindeer of St. Mathew island. The Coast Guard/Navy built a weather station and they wanted a meat supply for the people who would be manning it. They dropped of 10-20 breeding pair of reindeer on St. Mathew island which had abundant vegetation but no large mammals and no large predators. The reindeer ate and bred and ate and bred without any effective culling of the population by predator species until the new generation born in the last year put their population into extreme overshoot conditions somewhere around that 60% mark you named above. As a consequence they ate the vegetation faster than it could grow back and stripped the island of almost all of the vegetation which they could consume, which was followed by mass starvation and mass die off because once famine set in the dead animals hosted myriad diseases that further devastated the weakened survivors. Then some humans came along, discovered that only a few reindeer were still alive and shot seven of them to study the carcasses for research on the causes. The few reindeer that remained after the harvesting expedition were not able to breed so even though the vegetation recovered after the die off they eventually died out from lack of offspring.
Of course on St. Mathew island if anyone with a lick of common sense had been involved they would have waited until year three, four at the latest, and introduced a few breeding pairs of predators to balance the ecosystem equation. Be that as it may, my point is in a real overshoot you do not maintain a 60% overhang for year after year after year like humanity has been doing since the 1970's according to the models that use that 2 acre/5 acre metric you mentioned above.
Why? Because humans use technology, starting with herding, then progressing to crop agriculture and so on down the line. The 2/5 acre metric might be 100% true if you were talking about peasant farmers from 1018 AD with todays population to support, but I would argue even that is a stretch. Look at it historically for a minute. China in 1018 AD already had a population over 100 Million people and at that time the nation state was about half the size it is today because it did not include Tibet or a lot of the territory on the northern edge of the country. India had about 75 million at the same time. The agricultural practices were not remarkably better than those practices in Europe though they were a bit more diligent in the use of fertilizer.
This is what China looked like with 100,000,000 people living full productive lives.
100 Million people in that small brown swatch of the surface of the entire planet. About 25-30% of the modern surface area of China with water buffalo pulled plows being the main farm implement other than stoop labor.
It is not like the climate is vastly different in that China than other regions so crops go extremely well in those conditions, or they had super technology we lost and no longer have access to today. They were just people who went out and worked on growing food, they raised livestock and fish in ponds and sure, they ate a lot of rice, but they lived well enough none the less. In Roman Empire times around 200 AD the Europeans within the Empire did nearly as well on a population density basis. Large scale farming comes down to knowledge more than any other factor. If your farmers understand what they need to do to get a crop to grow then they will do so. Unlike the USA that went all mega agriculture subsidized farming starting in the 1970's most of Western Europe still has moderate size farms with diversified inter dependent systems living there. The theorists in Washington D.C. will tell you that a thousand acre farm with a mono-crop of X will be more efficient because they can have just the specialized machinery to grow and harvest crop X without all the distractions of growing Y and Z plus poultry and livestock. Of course here in real world it is known that simply growing X year in and year out requires tons of artificial fertilizer and tons more of pesticides plus tons of herbicides and lest we forget more tons of fungicides on top of those.
The only way your 2 Acre/5 Acre model is true is to admit we use technology to supply more than 3 Acres of services to the system and if you take away technology THEN you have a 60% overshoot. But technology is not going to go away from one day to the next, so the 'overshoot' is consistently a model result but not a real physical world result.
There is another factor as well. A lot of those model makers (if not all of them) are academics who think you can only farm in a very narrow set of circumstances of climate. They either do not know, or do not count, all the myriad ways that people have grown livestock and crops in climates outside of the narrow range they classify as ideal.
One of the ones I like to point out but people fail to grasp. Crop farming has been taking place in central Russia for 1200-1500 years now at a minimum and possibly longer. Climate conditions in central Russia are what Californians consider incredibly harsh. Barley is the second largest grain crop in Russia and just like the Vikings they grow it as far north as 65 degrees latitude North. Just like a few farmers in Alaska did when our government encouraged crop farming in our farthest north state.
Point being, there is a heck of a lot of surface are on this planet which CAN crop crops which currently do not grow crops because we do not need to do so to feed our population with our super cheap transportation. When it was expensive to haul grain long distances there were a great many farms in Massachusetts. Today there are some farms in MA but not very many compared to a century ago because today we subsidize Iowa corn and North Dakota wheat which is then shipped cheaply to MA for the residents to eat as tortilla chips and bread. That does NOT mean we can no longer grow crops in Massachusetts, it simply means we no longer choose to do so because the small farms that used to be there could not compete with the massively subsidized mega farms of the great plains states. Heck from your own experience you should know Newfoundland in 1946 was nearly food independent, they fished and grew enough food to feed their entire population well. After the absorption into Canada the Newfoundlander's were flooded with cheap grains from Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta and their previously successful farmers went out of business because they could not compete with the cheap subsidized prairie grown grains. like MA there is no physical reason the Newfies can not farm and produce their own food, but they buy cheap imported crops instead.
IOW if we need to grow more food because our technology declines we can return to growing food in Newfoundland, in Massachusetts and yes even in Alaska. This puts the 2/5acre model in severe doubt, to say the least.
