BoPL

7 Comments

1. Colonel Nikolai
   Posted August 22, 2006 at 3:43 am | Permalink

   I hate to burst you bubble, mate (and I’m really asking for Bob Geldorf to kick me in the balls with this one:) Solving world hunger, the popular definition, means that everyone is getting fed (on average). Right? Bad news: That ain’t solving world hunger. This is garanteeing that world hunger will get worse. People are made of food. If you give them more food, you will get more people. It’s a positive feedback loop, mate. Sorry.

2. Paul
   Posted August 22, 2006 at 6:25 am | Permalink

   You’re not bursting a bubble, though I don’t entirely agree with your feedback loop idea. Yes that happens in the short term, but in the long term people who don’t have to worry about having enough food reduce the number of children we have. That’s particularly true when they start to get all the other ‘benefits’ of a higher standard of living, and if we’re going to pretend that we could reach a stage where few are hungry, then we can pretend it’s been done by raising everyone’s standard of living.

3. Colonel Nikolai
   Posted August 27, 2006 at 9:36 pm | Permalink

   The idea of a raised standard of living creating a sustainable culture simply doesn’t match the facts. And 50 years of 20th century history showing population leveling off in developed countries is an awfully thin sampling to hang an analysis on. The overall trend of history is solidly against this thesis.

   A lot of people are talking about demographics in this issue, too. So lowering the dependency ratio (number of non-working people versus working people: a leading indicator of national economic viability) in developed countries, while may be the root cause of strong economic growth, has only lead to a shortfall in labor spurring immigration. There goes your population control.

   And our economic yardsticks are only amplifying the problem: China, which has by far had the most successful population control program in human history, has seen the ecological impact per person go up exponentially by trying to “raise the standard of living”, because the number of people per household has dropped several times faster than the population has dropped. It _is_ a positive feedback loop.

   I think the answer is that we have to look at what values we should let go of, and what values we need to change and what values we need to keep. Nothing short of a basic reevaluation of the basis of our culture is in order.

4. Paul
   Posted August 27, 2006 at 9:48 pm | Permalink

   The bulk of history doesn’t argue against what I said for the simple reason that for most of history we haven’t had the situation I described. I wasn’t talking about rising standards of living, I specifically talked about having enough to eat. It’s easy to forget that for most people in history there wasn’t enough to eat, and what there was had to be worked for. If you needed to work for it, better to have more people to do the work now, and in particular when you couldn’t. When people had enough to eat, and more importantly they knew that it would last, they could afford to relax their breeding programs. That’s happened pretty rarely in history (modern times, select groups within many of the ‘golden’ civilizations), but when it did birth rates tended to drop. And in the most recent incarnation we have the extra factor that we can be fairly sure that the children we do have will survive.

   So yes, 50 years is a pretty small sample, but it’s pretty much 100% of the history we have for such good conditions. Whether those conditions persist is where your argument about demographics comes in – I think we could easily sustain our current levels of food intake, and something like the current levels of medical care, but unfortunately we seem to think such things are inseparable from plasma TVs, MegaMalls and Hummers.

5. Colonel Nikolai
   Posted August 28, 2006 at 2:42 am | Permalink

   Once again, some mythology is at play here: I think when you speak of “the bulk of history” you’re instinctively (the myth instructs you to) talking about a mere 10,000 years at the most, roughly the horizon of the advent of mass food production. If we are to assume that 10,000 years is “the bulk of history”, then you’d be right. Because having more children in a mass food production society does (temporarily) ensure greater survival.

   But before mass food production, humankind lived in far closer harmony with the biosphere for literally millions of years because we did not violate the principle of limited competition that the rest of creation obeys and therby established ecological homeostatis. This is the “bulk of history”. And we are defying it. Figuring out how to feed everyone will gaurantee more starving people because the starving people are living beyond the ecological carrying capacity of the biosphere they are living in.

   Taking surplus food from one part of the world and sending it to where there is a famine is a false compassion. We are merly salving our egos while delaying (and intensifying) the inevitable. It is better that they have a few starve ocassionally than the garantee eventual mass starvation, wars and further destruction of the planet: Rwanda had one of the higest population densities per hectare in history when the mass killings began. I know this sounds very horrible and fatalistic, but it is in fact more rational and ultimately more humane than trying to feed everyone forever which has never worked, not since it was first tried in ancient Sumeria: Babylon was once a green “eden”. It was turned into a sandbox from this kind of thinking.

   And I think Bob Geldorf is a nice guy, but he’s simply wrong. You cannot save the world that way. You will only amplify the eventual disaster.

6. Colonel Nikolai
   Posted August 28, 2006 at 4:07 am | Permalink

   I found an entry on Wikipedia about the law of limited competition:

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Limited_Competition

7. Colonel Nikolai
   Posted August 28, 2006 at 4:09 am | Permalink

   Sorry, the entire science argument is under this entry:

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totalitarian_Agriculture