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THE Global Population Thread Pt. 4

Re: World population grows through history

Unread postby onlooker » Sat 14 Oct 2017, 10:50:16

Above all other things, I would say availability of sufficient food and modern medicine has allowed our population to bloom and rise so high. Any disagreements?
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Re: World population grows through history

Unread postby Ibon » Sat 14 Oct 2017, 12:57:23

onlooker wrote:Above all other things, I would say availability of sufficient food and modern medicine has allowed our population to bloom and rise so high. Any disagreements?


Add sanitation.

And the energy source fossil fuels of course that has driven industrial agriculture, sanitation infrastructure and industries that discovery, manufacture and distribute medicine.
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Re: World population grows through history

Unread postby onlooker » Sat 14 Oct 2017, 13:34:01

Yes, Ibon, seems many people still live amid and among excrement. Wondering if any of you have seen this with your own eyes this type of scene. I created a thread in the Books forum about a book "Planet of Slums" that talks about this situation among other living conditions of the poor around the world
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Re: World population grows through history

Unread postby dohboi » Sat 14 Oct 2017, 14:55:06

If you want to look at what the future has in store for humanity, you need look no further than Barbuda, or PR, or parts of California, or...Yemen...

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/10/y ... 23236.html

https://www.theguardian.com/global-deve ... nd-of-year
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Re: World population grows through history

Unread postby Tanada » Sat 14 Oct 2017, 23:10:18

Ibon wrote:
onlooker wrote:Above all other things, I would say availability of sufficient food and modern medicine has allowed our population to bloom and rise so high. Any disagreements?


Add sanitation.

And the energy source fossil fuels of course that has driven industrial agriculture, sanitation infrastructure and industries that discovery, manufacture and distribute medicine.


I would go further and point out that sanitary sewers were invented when the mathematical field of statistics was mated to the medical system via the issue of germ theory. Within two decades of this happening it was noticed that the physicians who frequently washed, especially between patients, had much healthier patients as a whole. This was particularly proven to be true in the case of women who went to hospital for birth rather than relying on the traditional midwife. Doctors who washed their hands between patients had the same level of infant mortality an post partum infection rates of new mothers as the midwives had, those who didn't believe in cleanliness spread infection to both delivering mothers and infants at astounding rates. Then the worlds first Epidemiologist Dr. John Snow of London determined that contaminated water wells in London were the main source of the Cholera outbreak devastating the city but that the men working at the brewery in the very midst of the outbreak were immune because the water was boiled to make beer and they had the 'brewers privilege' of drinking free beer whenever they were thirsty. Between his efforts and the creation of the London Sewer System in the 1860's mortality rates plunged compared to all the centuries between the collapse of the Roman system of the first half of the first millennium and 1870.

Also one of the reason the Jewish population of Europe was hated and feared from circa 600 AD to 1850 AD was the fact that the Jewish quarter of every city was cleaned and had sanitation practices as outlined in the Old testament book of Leviticus. As a result while they often caught illnesses from their filthy christian neighbors the diseases rarely gained more than a toehold in the Jewish Quarter of any city. Of course the authorities often used that fact to blame the Jewish population as spreaders of plague or casters of evil spells that struck down God fearing Catholics while leaving their own population unharmed rather than trying to figure out why the Jewish people were not as badly effected by diseases.
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Re: World population grows through history

Unread postby dohboi » Sun 15 Oct 2017, 11:49:17

Nice points, all.

On the food front, the introduction of crops from the new world, especially potato and maize, to the rest of the world was a huge boon.

Even before that, according to a historical demographer who happens to live in my neighborhood, the introduction of the use of turnips and radishes to grow in otherwise non-arable hillsides, mostly as fodder for livestock, allowed for a huge boost in Northern European populations in the 1500s.

But all of these innovations and more were embraced and encouraged to prosper because there was also a new and burgeoning ideology that humans and growth of more humans were good things, an idea that came out of the European Renaissance. This ideology is, of course, still with us and has become a central tenet of world mainstream culture.
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Re: World population grows through history

Unread postby onlooker » Sun 15 Oct 2017, 15:01:39

Truly when one explores this topic in depth ones sees a host of outgrowths from the exploitation of fossil fuels that has allowed for the designing and maintaing of a vast infrastructure to support humans. Remember without roads and constant transportation, food/water/medince would NOT get to all the hungry mouths. So, the sustaining of our vast human population is indeed a comprehensive complex endeavor. Which then raises the specter of the unsustainability of this vast network when fossil fuels finally exist the stage.
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Re: World population grows through history

Unread postby dohboi » Sun 15 Oct 2017, 19:59:06

The explosion of new foods actually predates the full industrial use of fossil-death-fuels by a couple centuries. But yeah, they certainly put our already deadly trajectory into hyper drive.

We are indeed the poster-child solution to Fermi's Paradox!
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Re: World population grows through history

Unread postby Ibon » Mon 16 Oct 2017, 07:42:40

Think a moment about bondage. Nature bound us to population limits historically through famine and disease. We were limited and held in bondage to stay within carrying capacity

When we were able to break those shackles that held us in bondage through agriculture, technology, germ theory, energy sources etc. we bloomed.

For a short while.

Bondage is returning. Through the consequences of overshoot.

That ability that we had to master disease and food production, exploiting energy and managing our wastes, this ability freed us but enslaved us at the same time because we could not manage our numbers.

It is not the technology that now enslaves us once again but simply the inability to manage our numbers

500 million or a billion of us exploiting fossil fuels does not cause climate change
Agriculture to feed 500 million or a billion does not reduce biodiversity

This inability to find equilibrium with our numbers is what made this freedom from bondage only a temporary respite.

The Freedom to Breed is an oxymoron. This Freedom destined us to bondage once again.

The cultural impediments to ever enable us to manage our numbers are truly formidable and we choose instead by default the bondage of living through the consequences of human overshoot.

We could have found a stable place and carried on for millennium this mastery we achieved over famine and disease if only we could have found a way to manage our numbers.

These comments have been hashed over for decades and many times here on this site. This morning I just reflect on them once again and am left with bewilderment at how easy it could have been had we had the knowledge of hind site say 100 years ago of the exponential dilemma of managing today 7 billion heading toward 9 billion.

Which then begs the question if on the other side of human overshoot when we eventually plateau at some sustainable number, will we incorporate the collective experience of overshoot with all the harrowing consequences and apply this to self regulating our numbers?

Or are we held hostage for ever to the oxymoron concept of The Freedom to Breed which by its definition only leads to bondage?
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Re: World population grows through history

Unread postby Cog » Mon 16 Oct 2017, 08:15:37

Nature is the final arbiter of what mankind can or can not do. When I say nature, I include our ability as humans to manipulate nature to serve our ends. We don't need a people's council or some green committee to start limiting population by imposing their own set of controls. Doomers are a death cult.
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Re: World population grows through history

Unread postby onlooker » Mon 16 Oct 2017, 08:55:58

It is ironic also that of all our dysfunctions as a Species it is the most basic and natural that is posing the most difficult problem ie. our Population size. In the context of the planet we live in, nothing can be more desirable now then for us to have our population size reduced substantially. Not just to be within carrying capacity but to be perhaps able to be more socially altruistic and united. I link this article which details what is termed superfluous humans. People by virtue of our numbers have become excessive, unnecessary and redundant. Sad, but it is part the way we treat each other and part our simple excess in numbers.
https://www.kyivpost.com/article/opinio ... eople.html
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Re: World population grows through history

Unread postby Cog » Mon 16 Oct 2017, 09:23:52

So onlooker are you going to be on the death panel to decide who lives and who dies?
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Re: World population grows through history

Unread postby onlooker » Mon 16 Oct 2017, 09:31:31

Cog wrote:So onlooker are you going to be on the death panel to decide who lives and who dies?

It will not be necessary for anyone to be on that panel. Nature will be the final arbriter, Judge and Executioner. You certaiinly are familiar with the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse
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Re: World population grows through history

Unread postby dohboi » Mon 16 Oct 2017, 10:27:36

Nicely put, Ibon. But another take/metaphor is simply connection.

We were connected to the earth and it's limits and cycles.

Access to more food and then ff-driven industrialization allowed us to live in a fantasy of dis-connection (a fantasy some here seem to continue to revel in).

Now we will 'rediscover,' often forcibly, our connection to those earthly limits.

We have been a reckless teenager with dads fancy car. But we are now in the ditch, and it's a very, very long, muddy walk home, indeed!
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Re: World population grows through history

Unread postby Ibon » Mon 16 Oct 2017, 10:29:07

There is an interesting intersection of apposing ideologies when it comes to acknowledging nature as the ultimate and final arbiter. You can find your most ardent environmentalist embracing this seeing nature one day taking the "taker" culture Kudzu Ape and bringing us back to our idyllic and tribal roots of pastoral agrarian life or even back to tribal hunter gatherers. Nature bats last as Montequest frequently reminded us years ago. That nature will finally manifest as the Overshoot Predator and restore balance.

You can equally find this idea of nature as the final and ultimate arbiter in your most ardent conservative libertarian who holds the standard of individual freedom beyond any man made governance of self regulation preferring to allow nature and the overshoot predator etc. to one day restore balance. If you are of a religious persuasion then replace the overshoot predator with surrendering the correction over to god's hand but in no way allow government or any other man made institution to impose its will on this question of our freedom to breed.

As an ecologist it is very easy for me as well to simply defer to nature to bat last here and embrace the natural consequences of overshoot as the vehicle of correction.

The irony though which I can never completely resolve in my head is that we humans embrace our dominance and control over nature as sacrosanct and yet we so easily default to allowing nature to correct what we ourselves are unable to manage and regulate.

Regardless of where you are ideologically isn't this really at the end of the day the paradox, The conundrum. No one can deny the cognitive dissonance over this split between demanding dominance over nature and yet being submissive to nature in batting last.
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Re: World population grows through history

Unread postby Ibon » Mon 16 Oct 2017, 10:31:16

dohboi wrote:
We have been a reckless teenager with dads fancy car. But we are now in the ditch, and it's a very, very long, muddy walk home, indeed!


And the back hoe and tow truck has run out of gas to pull you out. Adolescence indeed.
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Re: World population grows through history

Unread postby dohboi » Mon 16 Oct 2017, 10:38:46

"embrace our dominance and control over nature as sacrosanct and yet we so easily default to allowing nature to correct what we ourselves are unable to manage and regulate"

Nicely put.

Yes, this is the paradox or maybe even the hypocrisy of living nearly all of our lives deep inside of and enormously benefiting from the dominant narrative that we call all the shots, but then when anyone suggests there is any smidgen of responsibility that might go along with all that power, then some people suddenly throw up their hands and say, "Oh, no, it's nature that is completely in control, and I have no agency over anything."

I just find that to be a bit too convenient of a 'revelation' it many cases.

It is as if a well off white man had been thriving off of slave labor of blacks for decades and doing everything he could to justify his position by saying he was superior in this or that way to his workers. Then on the day of liberation, he suddenly says that race is a construct and an illusion, so the workers he has oppressed for decades should be given no compensation for their labor...
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Re: World population grows through history

Unread postby Ibon » Mon 16 Oct 2017, 11:01:45

dohboi wrote:
Yes, this is the paradox or maybe even the hypocrisy of living nearly all of our lives deep inside of and enormously benefiting from the dominant narrative that we call all the shots, but then when anyone suggests there is any smidgen of responsibility that might go along with all that power, then some people suddenly throw up their hands and say, "Oh, no, it's nature that is completely in control, and I have no agency over anything."

I just find that to be a bit too convenient of a 'revelation' it many cases.


Yes. And to your analogy that we are at an adolescent stage here with industrial civilization you have to conclude that this unyielding position lacks a bit of maturing.

Which then leads to the question I have also been pondering here for over a decade. If the catalyst of external consequences has the power to change our cultural trajectory and transition to a more ecologically sustainable set of laws, governance, economy, even spirituality in reference to our place on our planet.

There were long threads where we debated this and I took the contrary position being somewhat optimistic that we are not a flawed species and that we one day might be capable. I still hold that possibility.

But geez, in the span of our species existence how very very brief we freed ourselves from bondage and how quickly we are pushing the pedal to the medal in returning to that default position. To those who hold individual freedom as so sacrosanct you have to see that we are speeding toward once again being subjugated by nature's limits.... this was simply not necessary.
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Re: World population grows through history

Unread postby onlooker » Mon 16 Oct 2017, 11:10:21

How well what you Ibon and Dohboi are discussing fits in with the theory of the "Tragedy of the Commons" which is defined as: The tragedy of the commons is an economic theory of a situation within a shared-resource system where individual users acting independently according to their own self-interest behave contrary to the common good of all users by depleting or spoiling that resource through their collective action." So, the question still lingers can we ever act in the best interests of all together and particularly for the sake of the future and its generations? Only time will tell.
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Re: World population grows through history

Unread postby Cog » Mon 16 Oct 2017, 11:16:14

I would argue that the first time a human picked up a tool or lit the first fire that we were freed from the bondage of nature's constraints. Humans aren't going to forget how to use tools no matter what eventually happens with resource constraints. Whether its 500 million or 7.5 billion, humans are what they are. Problem-solvers and tool users.
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