posted
We need, in this world, to seriously begin to think about population control. It seems clear to me that the world can only bear so much human consumption, and we may be nearing the point where we finally exceed our capacity to feed ourselves.
Posts: 2267 | Registered: May 2005
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posted
Eliminate third world nation status and get everyone on a first world level and you'll see birth rates around the world drop. A lot more people that generally die would survive, but families would have dramatically fewer children.
Studies have shown that as nations become more wealthy, they have smaller families on average.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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quid - I'm planning on starting a container garden on my Lanai this weekend. I'm interested in your rice bag idea. Can you give a link or more information on how that works?
Posts: 2069 | Registered: May 2001
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I don't think population control is the problem. I think that consuming wisely and using resources wisely is the problem.
Posts: 21182 | Registered: Sep 2004
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(As for what I'm doing-- I sometimes volunteer with an organization that makes and distributes meals for the homeless and hungry. I try to consume ethically when I can-- even if it means paying more for a product that was produced by people paid a living wage. I have participated in Great American Bake Sale efforts. I have contributed to Heifer Int'l every year since I turned 18, and ask for gifts to them instead of gifts to me. These are not new things, though. I don't know what else to do that I'm not doing, other than continually make choices toward sustainability and responsibility and taking every opportunity I can to put my money where my mouth is.)
Posts: 21182 | Registered: Sep 2004
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Oh, and I put my couponing to good use-- when I have an opportunity to buy something at a very low price, with coupons and sales, that is something we won't eat or don't like, or I have enough coupons to buy more of it than we'll use, I buy it anyway, and donate it to a food bank. Someone out there likes it, or is hungry enough to eat it if they don't.
Posts: 21182 | Registered: Sep 2004
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posted
I can understand the urge to have a large family, but population control IS a problem. It's simple math - having lots of kids means lots of consumption, and once they have kids the problem only multiplies.
We can all have 5 or 6 kids, and in a few generations everyone will be living elbow to elbow, drinking their fair trade coffee and eating their organic cheese.
Posts: 3950 | Registered: Mar 2006
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quote:Studies have shown that as nations become more wealthy, they have smaller families on average.
I don't know that it's necessarily wealth. As I understand it, the biggest factors are child mortality rates and availability of birth control to women.
There's an article on cnn.com about growing food in your backyard. It amazes me that they didn't even bother comparing it to Victory Gardens. During WWII as much as 40% of vegetables consumed in the U.S. were grown in victory gardens. I also think that kids today definitely need to see where food comes from. Kids are so consumption oriented that they don't really think about where things come from.
quote:We can all have 5 or 6 kids, and in a few generations everyone will be living elbow to elbow, drinking their fair trade coffee and eating their organic cheese.
But MightyCow, not everyone feels the urge to have 5 or 6 kids. It doesn't happen that way. I'm not saying everyone has to have lots of kids-- just that telling them they can't isn't the answer.
There are large families, some I know personally, which consume and pollute at a much lesser rate than families of 2 or 3 people (no kids or onlies.) In fact, I've heard the sentiment expressed many times that people limit the number of children they have in order to be able to consume more. (I am not, of course, saying that all people who have few or no children by choice do it for this reason. Just that it's something that is not uncommonly expressed.) They want their kids to "have the best" or "have what I didn't growing up." They end up consuming at a higher rate than families with more kids but mindful of lowering their consumption. Many of the large families I know grow part of their own food, cloth diaper, some use cloth pads, dry clothes on a line instead of in the dryer, things that many people used to do but most are moving away from in this country, or just returning to. It is very possible to consume less as a large family than as a smaller family, it depends on the way you consume.
Posts: 21182 | Registered: Sep 2004
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"Population Control" is an extrinsic sounding term. It brings on visions of the Chinese one child law, and the rather barbaric means that they've used to enforce it.
Notice what Lyrhawn suggests, which has no externally defined mechanism to limit family size, but rather changes the environment in such a way as to give families the opportunity to decide for themselves how large their family should be. The evidence indicates that under certain circumstances, the average family size will be low enough that population will actually drop. In some countries, this is already happening. I'm not sure, but I think I may have heard that if you exclude immigration in the United States (and birth rates of recent immigrants), the reproduction rate of American families is below the replacement rate. In other words if it were not for immigration, our population would be declining. So no one really needs to be "told" how many children they should have in order to reduce population.
Unfortunately, a predominant economic model assumes that a growing population is necessary for economic strength. Vladimir Putin is actively promoting large families in Russia for this reason. But when you think of it, telling people they should have more children is just as much extrinsic control as telling them how many children they are limited to. More directly, the use of rape as a means of ethnic cleansing is a form of population control that is explicitly designed to provide a class of outcasts that will provide labor to the ruling culture with a minimum of cultural integrity, thereby minimizing the threat of an uprising.
The point I'm trying to make is that population control can go either way.
Likewise, when we hear the suggestion that we need to reduce population, we tend to think that we need to increase the death rate. Of course, there is a one to one ratio of births to deaths. Everybody dies. And large scale events that could be thought of as bringing down the population generally work in reverse. WWII gave us the "baby boom" and historically, periods of war, famine and disease are usually followed by a net increase in population. People tend to have more children when they don't feel secure that their genes will be passed down, and vice versa.
So the real solution to the population problem is to provide real security against premature mortality. That combined with the availability of birth control allows individual families the ability to control population based on their own intrinsic motivation.
Posts: 3735 | Registered: Mar 2002
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Yeah maybe wealth is the wrong word, but I think a lot of those things are tied together. As nations become more wealthy, they are better able to afford the healthcare, education etc that allows them to step from third to second to first world status.
I've read numerous studies and seen some pretty impressive presentations that chart the growth of national economies and how that correlates pretty strongly with a drop in family size.
The reasons are much like what Glenn suggests, and all of it has to do with personal choice. When your nation moves closer to what first world nations are like, there are more jobs, both parents might start working and women might choose to have children increasingly later in life, which biologically will give greater odds towards the family being smaller anyways, and they may choose to have smaller families as a result of career driven options, or just because they don't want a bigger family, and education and medical advances allow them to make those choices. Also, first world living is expensive, as is raising kids, providing for them, and educating them. I don't necessarily think that's the best idea, as far as latching on to first world consumerism, but it happens. As a result families tend to shrink as nations become wealthier, even as the live birth rate increases and life spans increase as well.
If everyone in the world had the security of choice that most Americans have, I think the world population growth rate would dramatically decrease. It'll be a long time before that happens though.
However, I think the growth rate is headed for a fall anyway, for a variety of reasons. One is that it's really just about time, historically, for a major epidemic. I know medical science has vastly increased in its potency in the last 100 years, but where's the influenza bug that kills a few million people? We're due for a plague, and it may already be out there in the form of MRSA or something similar. But it's bound to happen. And if it isn't that, it'll be a collapse in the way the global food network works. Petroleum is the reason we have as much food as we have, by and large. That and refrigeration. As costs for electricity and especially for oil skyrocket, these things will become increasingly hard to move around the world effectively. Combine that with the drought that is persistant and ever spreading and you get a decrease in farmland that'll be farmable, and less fertilizers from less oil as well, until we can create alternates through responsible farming practices. This stuff is going to come to a head in the next couple decades, and outside of the US you're going to see rampant starvation in the third world, and water wars. Frankly I still think the US would be fine. We export prodigious sums of food, and even if we had to curtail all exports, I still think we'd find a way to feed ourselves. With very few exceptions, Americans have always been impressively adept (sometimes too much) at feeding ourselves.
I grow leery of population laws. I think responsible living and planning can make it possible for anyone to have as many kids as they want. We certainly have the space, it's more about the space that it takes to keep us fed and happy than it is about wondering where to put all the people. Just look at home much land is taken up by cities and how much is taken up by farms. If we ever truly run out of room, then we head into space. I think that's just in our blood.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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KQ: That's a nice thought, but I simply don't believe that 16 grandchildren can consume less than 4 grandchildren. If those 4 grandchildren are trying to conserve as much as the 16 grand children, it's no contest.
Don't even get me started on the 16 vs. 64 great grandchildren.
Lyrhawn: Again, space is a nice idea, but I don't see it being a viable alternative to any meaningful portion of the world's population for a minimum of 200 years. If everyone has as many children as they want, we'll be in big trouble much sooner than that.
Posts: 3950 | Registered: Mar 2006
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quote:Originally posted by maui babe: quid - I'm planning on starting a container garden on my Lanai this weekend. I'm interested in your rice bag idea. Can you give a link or more information on how that works?
What link? I got my information from my mother in law and from looking over the wall at our next door neighbor's yard where she's got a couple of dozen rice bags filled with dirt and plants lined up against her house, two deep.
Fill rice bag with dirt, insert plant, water. Okay, seriously. The rice bag material is porous enough that it gets enough drainage. Plus here, because of the heat, we have to water more frequently, so we use sandier soil so it drains faster so we don't get root rot. I've read online that because of the weave of the rice bag, the roots get more oxygen, so that promotes root growth, but I have no idea how valid that is.
A typical family of four here will go through a 10kg bag of rice in about a week and a half, so can plant a new bag about that often.
Really, I don't know that much about it other than it's just a different type of container for container gardening. The appeal here is that it's using materials that most people would have access to anyway, so there's no additional expenditure - it's a practical solution for this kind of cultural.
Posts: 8355 | Registered: Apr 2003
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quote:Originally posted by MightyCow: If everyone has as many children as they want, we'll be in big trouble much sooner than that.
I don't know about this. In my field, 2 children get the response "wow, you have a huge family!" I don't think any of my colleagues is having only one child out of concerns for limiting their consumption. I am not sure how many kids I want, but I can see the appeal in just having one. A lot of people want one or zero kids.
Posts: 2223 | Registered: Mar 2008
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scholarette: As has been suggested before, it's not necessarily the people who work within a "field" who are averaging a lot of kids. Nonetheless, the world population keeps going up at a fantastic pace. So when I say "everyone" having as many children as they want, clearly it's the people who are having 3+ kids who are the ones causing the trouble.
Again, I'm not saying anyone's a bad person for having 3 or more kids, but it's an inescapable fact that increased population leads to increased consumption.
Posts: 3950 | Registered: Mar 2006
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But what percent of the population actually want a large number of kids? A lot of people end up with x kids, when they only really would want one or two. If people had reliable birth control, the population would probably self limit itself without any problems.
Posts: 2223 | Registered: Mar 2008
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scholarette and Lyrhawn: I agree on both points - neither of which really go against what I've been saying. We need global population control, whatever form that comes in, including available birth control and education and institutions stopping telling people that they should keep having children until their body gives out.
Posts: 3950 | Registered: Mar 2006
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"When you change a resource in the environment...you are going to...favor the weed over the crop. There is always going to be a weed poised genetically to benefit from almost any change."
Editing in for my own future googling: Lewis Ziska with the Agriculture Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture Andrew MacDougall of the University of Guelph
posted
What a crock. In the '60s, the US government spent billions to screw up the Everglades to give growers plantations upon which to grow sugarcane. Then made American consumers pay ~5times the world price for sugar; essentially using import taxes as a form of welfare payment to sugar producers. Now it's paying those same parasites ~$94hundred dollars per acre to return that gift of land while spending billions more to try to restore the Everglades to its previous condition.
posted
It needed to be done. You might not like the price or the history of the thing, but, it needed to be done.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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Oh the Everglades needs restoration. But this "Once some malicious politicians give something away, the government can't take it back." tilts everything in favor of those who choose to be crooked.
Posts: 8501 | Registered: Jul 2001
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Even assuming your account is accurate - which I doubt, given your history in these things - the property belonged to the growers. The government can't take it without just compensation.
It's called the fifth amendment.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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I'm just wondering if something similar happened to my garden this year. The plants were straggly and the yields were low. Plus the average sizes&shapes of the fruits&vegetables appeared to be more like the outliers of previous seasons.
Posts: 8501 | Registered: Jul 2001
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"People in low-income countries...directly consume nearly 200 kilograms of grain per year. In affluent countries...annual grain consumption per person is close to 800 kilograms, but about 90 percent of that* is consumed indirectly as meat, milk, and eggs."
"After nearly tripling from 94 million hectares in 1950 to 276 million hectares in 2000, the world's irrigated area abruptly stopped growing. For the world's farmers, peak water apparently has arrived."
"Worldwide, the average grainland per person shrank from 2.4 hectares in 1950 to well below 1.2 hectares in 2007."
"...the shrinking backlog of unused agricultural**technology is slowing the rise in land productivity. Between 1950 and 1990, the world's farmers raised grain yield per hectare by more than two percent a year, exceeding the growth of population. But since then yield growth has slowed to just over one percent a year, scarcely half the earlier rate." "...new harvest-expanding technologies are ever more difficult to come by as crop yields move closer to the inherent limits of photosynthetic efficiency."
"After declining for several decades, the number of chronically hungry and malnourished people in developing countries bottomed out in 1996 at 800 million and has been climbing since. In 2006 it exceeded 850 million and in 2007 it climbed to over 980 million. The US Department of Agriculture projects the number will reach 1.2 billion by 2017."
"...China...now holds well over one trillion US dollars. Like it or not, US consumers will share their grain with Chinese consumers regardless of how high food prices rise."
* I'd assume that the writer and/or the (re)translator meant 90% of the difference in average grain consumption per person between 200kilogram for low-income nations and 800kilogram for high-income nations is used for production of the extra meat, milk, and eggs consumed by FirstWorlders. Feed conversion of grain into meat has an extremely low efficiency ranging from ~2to1 for fish to ~10to1 for beef (if I remember correctly).
** Most improvements in agricultural technology are due to mechanization, man-made fertilizers, and irrigation: all currently HIGHly dependent on fossil fuels.
posted
Punjab is considered to be [India]’s breadbasket, producing about 1 percent of the world’s rice and 2 percent of its wheat...But... ...Haryana, Punjab, and Rajasthan lost about 109 cubic kilometers of groundwater between 2002 and 2008, or about three times the capacity of Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the United States.
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http://www.sciencealert.com.au/opinions/20092809-19879.html "If you added together all the world’s cities and town you’d cover an area of soil half the size of China or the USA with concrete and asphalt. At current rates of growth, the footprint of the ‘world city’ will be larger than either the US or China by 2040. Since cities are, for the most part, located (for historical reasons) in fertile river valleys, it follows they permanently eliminate some of the world’s richest soils."
"...we needn’t even bother to try to settle Mars. For all intents and purposes, Mars will come to us."
Posts: 8501 | Registered: Jul 2001
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I wondered why if the economy was so lousy everything seemed to cost as much as it always had. About the only thing I'm picking up cheap is clothes. I hope Goldman Sacs doesn't find out about that. It'll be the new frontier. Posts: 2283 | Registered: Dec 2003
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I got my information from my mother in law and from looking over the wall at our next door neighbor's yard where she's got a couple of dozen rice bags filled with dirt and plants lined up against her house, two deep.![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif)
Okay, seriously. ![[Smile]](smile.gif)
The rice bag material is porous enough that it gets enough drainage. Plus here, because of the heat, we have to water more frequently, so we use sandier soil so it drains faster so we don't get root rot. I've read online that because of the weave of the rice bag, the roots get more oxygen, so that promotes root growth, but I have no idea how valid that is.![[Roll Eyes]](rolleyes.gif)
