Editor’s Note: Industrial civilization is not a path to lasting peace and prosperity. By undermining the foundations of life on this planet, industrial society is creating unimaginable wealth for a small portion of people while creating a wasteland. This will not last. As Richard Heinberg has said, “The Party is Over.”
If this is indeed a party, it’s a ball on the deck of a slave ship—a hierarchical party in which amusement rides are built with planks from the hull. The party will only end when the whole ship sinks and everyone—slave and master alike—dies. Ecologically, industrial civilization amounts to this: a murder-suicide, bacchanalia purchased with the coin of atrocities.
For this article, we bring you two voices—Lierre Keith and Will Falk—on the ecological costs of war, and the war on the natural world.
The Non-Human Costs of War
- Carbon emissions and fuel consumption (In 2018, the U.S. Defense Department purchased more than 3.5 billion gallons of fossil fuels).
- Use of depleted uranium ammunition, defoliant herbicides, and other toxic substances.
- Weapons testing that destroys habitat directly (for example, bombing ranges) or harms wildlife (for example, military sonar testing that kills marine mammals).
- Pollution associated with military installations (more than 5,440 toxic sites inside the U.S. alone).
- Nuclear weapons production, testing, and waste.
Lierre Keith: The War Against the Planet
In my lifetime, the earth has lost half her wildlife. Every day, two hundred species slip into that longest night of extinction. “Ocean” is synonymous with the words abundance and plenty. Fullness is on the list, as well as infinity. And by 2048, the oceans will be empty of fish. Crustaceans are experiencing “complete reproductive failure.” In plain terms, their babies are dying. Plankton are also disappearing. Maybe plankton are too small and green for anyone to care about, but know this: two out of three animal breaths are made possible by the oxygen plankton produce. If the oceans go down, we go down with them.
How could it be otherwise? See the pattern, not just the facts. There were so many bison on the Great Plains, you could sit and watch for days as a herd thundered by. In the central valley of California, the flocks of waterbirds were so thick they blocked out the sun. One-quarter of Indiana was a wetland, lush with life and the promise of more. Now it’s a desert of corn. Where I live in the pacific northwest, ten million fish have been reduced to ten thousand. People would hear them coming for a whole day. This is not a story: there are people alive who remember it. And I have never once heard the sound that water makes when forty million years of persistence finds it way home. Am I allowed to use the word “apocalypse” yet?
The necrophiliac insists we are mechanical components, that rivers are an engineering project, and genes can be sliced up and arranged at whim. He believes we are all machines, despite the obvious: a machine can be taken apart and put back together. A living being can’t. May I add: neither can a living planet.
Understand where the war against the world began. In seven places around the globe, humans took up the activity called agriculture. In very brute terms, you take a piece of land, you clear every living thing off it, and then you plant it to human use. Instead of sharing that land with the other million creatures who need to live there, you’re only growing humans on it. It’s biotic cleansing. The human population grows to huge numbers; everyone else is driven into extinction.
Agriculture creates a way of life called civilization. Civilization means people living in cities. What that means is: they need more than the land can give. Food, water, energy have to come from someplace else. It doesn’t matter what lovely, peaceful values people hold in their hearts. The society is dependent on imperialism and genocide. Because no one willing gives up their land, their water, their trees. But since the city has used up its own, it has to go out and get those from somewhere else. That’s the last 10,000 years in a few sentences.
The end of every civilization is written into the beginning. Agriculture destroys the world. That’s not agriculture on a bad day. That’s what agriculture is. You pull down the forest, you plow up the prairie, you drain the wetland. Especially, you destroy the soil. Civilizations last between 800 and maybe 2,000 years—they last until the soil gives out.
What could be more sadistic then control of entire continents? He turns mountains into rubble, and rivers must do as they are told. The basic unit of life is violated with genetic engineering. The basic unit of matter as well, to make bombs that kill millions. This is his passion, turning the living into the dead. It’s not just individual deaths and not even the deaths of species. The process of life itself is now under assault and it is losing badly. Vertebrate evolution has long since come to a halt—there isn’t enough habitat left. There are areas in China where there are no flowering plants. Why? Because the pollinators are all dead. That’s five hundred million years of evolution: gone.
He wants it all dead. That’s his biggest thrill and the only way he can control it. According to him it was never alive. There is no self-willed community, no truly wild land. It’s all inanimate components he can arrange to this liking, a garden he can manage. Never mind that every land so managed has been lessened into desert. The essential integrity of life has been breached, and now he claims it never existed. He can do whatever he wants. And no one stops him.
Can we stop him?
I say yes, but then I have no intention of giving up. The facts as they stand are unbearable, but it’s only in facing them that pattern comes clear. Civilization is based on drawdown. It props itself up with imperialism, conquering its neighbors and stripping their land, but eventually even the colonies wear out. Fossil fuel has been an accelerant, as has capitalism, but the underlying problem is much bigger than either. Civilization requires agriculture, and agriculture is a war against the living world. Whatever good was in the culture before, ten thousand years of that war has turned it necrotic.
Will Falk: An Armistice With the Natural World
The news about war in Ukraine causes me to think about how some human cultures have waged a war on the natural world for millennia. War begins with a willingness to exploit the natural world. And, no actually, war is not as old as humanity. Conflict, yes. Violence, too. Sometimes atrocious violence. But, not large scale mobilizations of a population, with professional killers, to invade and permanently dominate distant lands. When you live in balance with your own land base, you don’t need to steal resources from somewhere else.
The horrifying truth is: Human populations have so thoroughly exceeded the planet’s carrying capacity that the so-called resources humans exploit to support the population overshoot are being depleted. When those resources are no longer available, human populations will collapse and humans will suffer on a scale we’ve never seen. Currently, the dominant culture is just imposing that suffering on the rest of life.
There’s no way out of this mess without extreme suffering. We can voluntarily dismantle the dominant culture that is based in destroying the natural world for the benefit of some humans. This dismantling will be incredibly painful if we are truly going to honor the rest of the natural world’s ability to survive and thrive. If we don’t dismantle the dominant culture, these resource wars are only going to intensify, more places like Ukraine will be plunged into brutal wars, and it just becomes ever-more likely that some humans will choose to use the technologies we now possess to seriously threaten Earth’s ability to support life in the future.
And no, I am not advocating for killing people off. I am, however, insisting that we recognize the suffering the dominant culture causes the countless other beings we share this battered, but still beautiful planet with. I am insisting that we recognize that procrastinating on the very difficult changes we need to make in the name of preserving the dominant culture just pushes the problem on to the natural world and the much more populous, vulnerable, future generations of humans.
If we want to build a world without war, then the first armistice we need to sign is with the natural world.
Image: public domain.
Thank you, Lierre and Will for your Earth first, eco-centric perspectives on the cost of war to all real natural life. Those humans who are still capable of seeing and understanding that we have no life without the natural world, or by trying to live in alienation to the natural world, will also understand that what human wars do to the natural world is also being done to us.
I also need to add a small, gentle reminder here that permaculture and small-scale, natural, Indigenous-style cultivation of bio-diverse, eco-compatible food crops has been used in many places to restore lands and ecosystems that were previously destroyed by agriculture.
@George Price
Unless there is a type of agriculture that doesn’t kill one native plant or animal, nor dig up any land to plant crops, then ALL agriculture is a problem. Also, agriculture creates an unnatural overabundance of food, which in turn causes human overpopulation. Living as hunter-gatherers is the only ecologically friendly and natural way to live. Agriculture is the physical root of all of these problems, and trying to find ways to do it that aren’t harmful is a fool’s errand.
Thanks for your response, Jeff. I have over 35 years of experience and many other examples from other people that I know of that proves otherwise. Basically, it is a matter of scale and respectful interaction, in which the ecosystem itself calls the shots and directs the activity, not the humans. I will be putting together a slide show essay of what we have done with the five acres that we live on, that demonstrates the restorative changes over the years and I will post that on my blog. Regarding the death or removal of “one native plant or animal,” in many traditional Indigenous foraging practices there are certain medicine plants that must be pulled up by the roots (again, very selectively, respectfully, and at a minimal sustainable scale) in order to be used. Also, I know of no types of hunting or fishing for food that do not involve the death of one of our non-human relations.
Thanks for your response, Jeff. I have over 35 years of experience and many other examples from other people that I know of that proves otherwise. You are right about agriculture, but what I am engaged in is not agriculture. Basically, it is a matter of scale and respectful interaction, in which the ecosystem itself calls the shots and directs the activity, not the humans. I will be putting together a slide show essay of what we have done with the five acres that we live on, that demonstrates the restorative changes over the years and I will post that on my blog. Done properly, as a supplement to and not as a replacement for foraging, without any connection to markets, commodification of nature, or currencies, there is no need to overproduce and over-consume, and therefore no connection to over-population.
Regarding the death or removal of “one native plant or animal,” in many traditional Indigenous foraging practices there are certain medicine plants that must be pulled up by the roots (again, very selectively, respectfully, and at a minimal sustainable scale) in order to be used. Also, I know of no types of hunting or fishing for food that do not involve the death of one of our non-human relations.
Let me clarify my point. There is no problem with killing native plants or animals to eat, or even a very small number for medicines, so long as humans are not overpopulated. But killing plants in order to plant crops is totally immoral and ecologically harmful. Of course there are better and worse ways to practice agriculture, but this is a lesser-of-evils exercise. If you can plant your crops among native plants without digging up the soil and if those crops don’t harm the native plants, then fine, but I highly doubt that there’s any effective agriculture that works that way.
In my view, the ONLY excuse for killing is to eat, and that means eating what you kill. Killing native plants in order to plant crops is evil. (Where people live in naturally small numbers as hunter-gatherers, killing a few plants for medicines isn’t a problem because of the small number killed.)
Also, you don’t address the overpopulation problem, which is the biggest physical problem on Earth, and the biggest root cause of all environmental & ecological problems (though its twin fundamental evil is overconsumption, and both have to be greatly reduced). Humans are the same as any other animal: give them more food and you get more humans, just like the Petri dish experiment that we all did in high school biology. Agriculture provides more food, and is therefore the root cause of human overpopulation on this planet. It’s irrelevant to the overpopulation problem how agriculture is done if it provides more food. Living agriculturally instead of as hunter-gatherers upsets the natural and ecological balance, and overpopulation is one of the bad results of that upset.
Thanks again, Jeff. It seems that one thing which we agree upon is that scale can make a difference. I would imagine that another thing we might agree upon is that it all comes down to the question of did the human activity benefit or harm the ecosystem. If a person begins there permaculture project in a place that has already been harmed by industrial civilization (whether by agriculture, industrial activity, or by urbanization, etc.), the land generally benefits from being restored with wetlands, resurgence of native plants, trees, forests, and habitat for wildlife. That is what we have been doing for 35 years at the place we live within. I would discourage people from going into some already healthy natural habitat or ecosystem and replacing any of that with cultivated crops. For young gardeners who are looking for land to live with, I recommend that they go to one of the many places that have already been harmed by civilization and bring healing and restoration to such places.
Regarding overpopulation, traditional tribal peoples who practiced some combination of foraging and supplemental cultivation seem to have maintained steady-state, sustainable populations for thousands of years, while doing so. Cultures that practice thankfulness and respect for all life generally seem to have a sense of when things are good enough, or sufficient to get through a year of seasonal cycles and not gather or produce beyond that. We have been conditioned and taught by western modern culture to normalize greed and excess, and of course capitalism demands that, as it also demands continual growth. What came to us along with that sense of normalization is the tendency to apply that unhealthy, destructive normality to all other humans and then call it “human nature.” Academic anthropology, sociology and other related fields have played a large role in creating that mass delusional construct. Partly because of that, it then becomes very difficult to imagine human societies that are NOT based in greed, overconsumption, selfish individualism, disrespect for nature, etc., or to imagine cultures in which what small amount of surplus that they had was given away to those in need, including people of neighboring tribes.
Well said, thank you George. Thank you for the reminder.
I basically agree with your last comment George. I totally agree about restoring harmed or destroyed areas, and also agree that agriculture should not be used in naturally healthy areas.
However, the overpopulation problem caused by agriculture is first and foremost a biological problem. In other words, it’s caused by the unnatural overabundance of food that agriculture provides. In nature, humans like all other animals breed as much as possible. For humans, like many if not most terrestrial mammals, most children would not live to breeding age, so it’s fine if some people have a ton of kids, because most people won’t have any. Therefore, if a society is some combination of hunting & gathering and agriculture, they’ll still probably have that unnatural overabundance of food and overpopulate. I’m talking about natural processes here, not conscious human choices. More evolved people, like the traditional people you describe, could choose to limit their populations, but I haven’t seen any group do that. Where people live naturally, their population is determined by natural processes and limits. I’m find with a tiny bit of agriculture that doesn’t harm any other native species so long as people also limit their birthrate to accordingly, but without out that the overpopulation problem caused by agriculture remains.
All we have to do to see what the natural level of human population is is to look at how many people were on the planet 10-12,000 years ago when humans began using agriculture. That’s the way humans have lived for 95% of our existence, and that population was 5-10 million on the entire planet. Anything artificial and/or unnatural that humans do to increase that population is harmful, because more humans means fewer of others. Agriculture is unnatural, so there you go.
(This is a brief reply to Jeff’s last comment from March 24, but since there was no reply button down there I hit the last reply button above from March 22nd.)
Before the industrial revolution and trans-oceanic colonialism, there were circumstances of tremendous abundance in many different places and times (sometimes for periods of thousands of years and often for spans of hundreds of years) in the ecosystems inhabited by hunter-gatherer or forager peoples, including some who practiced small-scale supplemental cultivation (aka permaculture). In such cases, people could easily have become obese, gorging themselves with excess food, and could have also over-populated their local carrying capacities, but did not do so due to cultural beliefs and human choice-making. Humans have always had the ability to make choices about reproduction, over-consumption, respect, generosity, love, and many other things. We are not simply machines who automatically overconsume and over-populate whenever presented with the opportunity to do so.
right about focusing on defending a defenseless environment, but even more first to rectify is that evil in our (or the dominant cultures’) mind, around sins like greed, imbalanced ego, and ignorance, “easier said” but ya’ll know
It is not only a matter of how much people eat, but it makes a big difference WHAT they eat. In a hunter-gatherer tribe, the most common diet is what is sometimes called “the Paleolithic Diet”, high protien, low carbohydrate, along with plenty of exercise running after your lunch when it runs away from you.
In an agricultural culture, the reverse is true: A low protien, high carbohydrate diet, with mostly sedentary labor grinding grain, at least for the women. So they gain weight. For the men that means they will have their heart attack a few years sooner, but by then they will have already reproduced. For the women it means more frequent prgnancies since a woman cannot get pregnant if she is too lean, even if in good health. Pregnancy requires at least 12% of her body weight is fat. A lean female atrhlete with a lot of muscle mass can be as little as 6% fat, in prefect health, but she will not conceive. So population growth depends not only on how much food there is, but what kind of food.
Agricultural societies are living on a grain-based diet, so they will overshoot the carrying capacity of their range. Foraging cultures do not overshoot no matter how abundant food is because natural foods do not result in too many births.
@George Tzindaro
Interesting comments about body weight & pregnancy, I’ve never heard that. Can you provide some references or authority for this?
As to natural human diet: Humans are naturally omnivores, not carnivores. Most hunts in nature are unsuccessful, so a natural human diet is plant-based, not animal-based. Humans in nature eat meat only when they catch it.
Also, agriculture provides an unnatural overabundance of food, and thereby causes overpopulation. Same with any animal, just like the Petri dish experiment we all did in high school biology: you give animals more food and you get more animals, simple as that. Your theory about body weight and pregnancy might be true, but why do you assume that hunter-gatherer women are underweight?
I did not say they were “underweight”, but their weight was more due to muscle mass and less percentage of fatty tissue because of a diet with less carbohydrates anhd more protein. A diet containing a large percentage of vegetable matter is not the issue. The primal diet was less carbohydrates even if not all meat, which I did not say it was. Humans are indeed omnivores, not exclusive carnoivores, but the vegatation part of the early diet was not very much like the farmed diets that are based on grain.
I suspect ancient hunters were much more successful than modern hunter-gatherers. For one thing, their environment was far more rich in game than exists today in any part of this depleted planet, from which most large mammals have been removed. With hardly any competition from other humans food animals must have been more abundant and hunting easier than it is now. In fact, the most studied hunter-gatherer groups, such as the !Kung¡ in the Kalahri, live in the worst places to make a living from hunting because they have been driven into these marginal lands by more aggressive and better-armed farmers who outnumbered them.
For all of human existence as a species on this planet, until as recently as a bit over 5,000 years ago, most humans were hunters and gatherers, foraging for food that nature produced, just as all other animals do. In the latter Neolithic, small-scale gardening was practiced as a suplement to natural sources of food, but most food still came from nature.
Neolithic gardening was not done for a main food suply; it was ritualistic in nature and intent. It was female fertility magic, special foods for ceremonial uses, medical / psycedelic herbs, etc. Since metal was not used, only small garden plots could be tilled. A wooden plough will not last more than a few furrows before it wears out. With a metal-shod plough, you can plough all day.
So the introduction of large-scale field agriculture on the Old World model had to wait until metal came into common use. When it did, the start of the Agricultural Age was not inevitable; Agriculture would still never have gotten started except for one other condition: a long-lasting and global famine that drove starving men to raid the womens sacred gardens for food. The memory of this event is preserved in the myths of the Rape of the Earth Godess in all ancient cultures.
But once a tribe had gotten started in farming, a single generation would be all it would take to get them trapped into it because they would then have raised a generation without hunting skills.
Another factor was important also: Hunter-gatherer women get a high-protein, low carbohydrate diet and plenty of healthy exercise getting it. Farmer women get the exact reverse: a low-protein, high carbohydrate diet and a lot of sedentary labor grinding grain. So they gain weight. The men do too, of course, but for them it only means they have their heart attack a few years sooner. For the women it means a child every year instead of only every 6 or 7 years as hunter-gatherer women do because a woman cannot get pregnant if her body is less than 12% fat.
https://www.healthfertility.com.sg/media/are-you-too-skinny-for-pregnancy/
So when a tribe switched over to farming, the population boomed. And even though farmers are poorly fed and poorly exercised compared to hunters, 100 overweight out-of-shape farmers can still beat the crap out of one healthy hunter. So the farmers have taken over the planet.
And destroyed it. In a mere 5,000 years, farmers have ruined most of the earth and are now in a position to destory what is left. While before that, humans lived a sustainable life-style for at least a few million years.
But farming had another bad effect as well. In Neolithic societies, women were respected equals in a community. But in farming cultures that replaced them, women were property. The culture of farming and livestock herding was not a good change from a womans point of view. Children became an asset to the farmers and so women became assets as well.
Farming is a labor-intensive activity compared to hunting and foraging, and children were conscripted into servitude as field hands at an early age. And after a lifetime of conditioning to obeying orders, they grew up to become conditioned into that role, becoming good citizens, taxpayers, conscripts, soldiers, employees, and if catured in battle, slaves, because that was a familiar role they had grown up in.
In fact, that was why the first Europeans in the New World found the American Indians made poor slaves who either kept trying to escape or if that proved impossible, lay down ande died, so the Europeans turned to importing African slaves who had been brought up in a more advanced, agriculter-based culture which conditioned them to being slaves.
As a result, the authoritarian family became the model for the authoritarian State. Kings and gods are a direct result of bringing up children to be field hands and follow orders. All the inequalities and tyranies the world has suffered from ever since trace back to that one fact: that the only way to get a child to work in the fields instead of go off doing whatever pleases him is to force him to work. So the end result of a farmer culture is to introduce child slavery in one form or another. And with it comes the decline in the status of women from equals to semi-slaves in all ancient farming cultures, and from that, a hierachial society.
Since population will continue to grow until the limit of avalable food suply is reached, as with all other species, no farming culture is sustainable. The only sustainable life-style is hunting and gathering. A return to hunting and gathering is the only realistic way to save this planet from being destroyed by the farmer-cultures that have caused all this mess.
Of course, that will require a reduction in population to what the world can suport. Most of the huge surplus human population will have to be recycled back into the food chain where they belong. Denial and wishful thinking will not change this fact.
Ending the Agriculture Age will not be easy. But it must be done or we will not survive.
@George Tzindaro
We fully agree that agriculture is unnatural and is the physical root cause of all ecological and environmental problems. We also agree that living as hunter-gatherers is the only natural way to live, and the only way to live in balance with your ecosystem and the Earth in general. So our basic analyses are the same, and that we must return to living that way.
Changing back to living as hunter-gatherers is a very long-term goal that would take thousands of years to accomplish, but we should get started immediately. We first need to reduce human population to one billion in order to eliminate industrial society, which could be accomplished in 150-200 years. That would be the first step toward returning to living as hunter-gatherers.
However:
1. The term “sustainable” is anti-Earth and anti-life. It basically describes how much can be killed and destroyed before an ecosystem, habitat, or species collapses. This is an immoral attitude and nothing to be sought. The moral and life-friendly standard is living in balance with the Earth and your ecosystem, and this is what we should strive for.
2. You mentioned the more food = more humans biological fact, but you still insist that the main factor in human overpopulation from agriculture is the fat to muscle ratio for women. The first factor is a long-established biological fact. Everything I’ve read about this issue states that as hunter-gatherers, humans had a lot of kids, but the vast majority didn’t live to breeding age, which is the same for the vast majority if not all other mammals. THAT’s how human population remained stable until agriculture, again just like other mammals. You offered a different theory that contradicts this one, but provided no authority nor references for your it. Is this just your own theory? If not, please provide some authority and references. If so, please provide your evidence.
3. Humans have not lived sustainably or any other way for millions of years. Humans have only existed for 200,000 years. They lived as hunter gatherers for 95% of that time, until 10-12,000 years ago when they began using agriculture. Hominids, like Neanderthals, have existed for millions of years and lived in balance with the Earth and their ecosystems for their entire existence. Additionally, humans began moving out of Africa 60-90,000 years ago, and they caused extinctions wherever they went. It could thus be said that even well before they started using agriculture, humans did not live even sustainably, much less in balance with other life, once they moved out of Africa.
We agree on the ultimate conclusions here, but I see some major flaws in some of the facts that you allege.
You are certainly correct in saying that humans were destroying nature before they had agriculture, especially by setting fires, as was done in Australia starting when the Aborigines arrived there some 40,000 years ago, which is what killed off the marsupial megafauna and desertified most of that continent. PaleoIndians did the same in America some 12,000 years ago.
But the idea that pre-farming societies had lots of kids who then died before reaching adulthood is based on observations made today of tribes living in un-natural conditions, for example, near missions or other stationary locations due to European influence or, if still migratory, in lands which are nowhere near as rich in food opportunities as was true in prehistoric times. Also, in earier times, diseases were far less of a problem because populations were so small and such long distances between groups that contagion was not important as a risk factor.
As for high infact mortality among other species, I suspect that is also an artifact of human influence on their environment and food supply. Most large predators must have had a far easier time hunting food when there was a flourishing ecosystem full of species that are now extinct thanks to humans.
When I said “humans” had been here for millions of years, I was including pre-human ancestors, all those who used weapons and / or fire, not only modern-type humans. There is evidence of fire being used as long ago as 2.5,000,000 years ago. It is that, not the morphology, that makes a creature “human” in terms of ecologfical impact.
Your time scale for reducing population is way too long. It simply MUST be done sooner than that or there will be nothing left alive. Fortunately, it is about to happen without anyone intending it. The ongoing klimasturtz is even now reducing food availability and the process is accelerating. The generation that will live through the collapse is not only alive now, it is already adults. Most of the excess humans in the cities will recycle each other back into the food chain by fighting over scraps as soon as the deliveries to the supermarkets stop. This is not something that is GOING to happen; it is happening NOW. I will not put a time-frame on it, but it could be as soon as next year and I will be very surprised if the curent civilization lasts another 20 years.
The optimum population for the planet as a whole is, based on what it was before agriculture, is around 100,000.000, not the 1,000,000,000 you mention. In fact, to enable the remaining species and wildernesses to recover from the Human Age, 100,000,000 is still too many. It should be reduced to around 10% of that, say, about 10,000,000 humans total for the entire planet. And we need to get to that point as soon as possible, preferably within the next 10 to 20 years or so. And if we are lucky, the immanent global collapse of agriculture due to rapidly changing weather conditions will make that happen.
I plead guilty to use of the word, “sustainable” in this context. I should have used a better term for an ecosystem without destructive human impacts. Thank you for calling that to my attention. I will try to watch my language in the future.
@George Tzindaro
I didn’t say that it would take thousands of years to reach a human population that’s in balance with the Earth and its ecosystems, I said that it would take thousands of years to return to living as hunter-gatherers. Modern humans have no idea how to live even as farmers, let alone like hunter-gatherers. Additionally, humans have killed off most of the edible animals on Earth, and those animals need to repopulate before humans could resume hunting them without harming the species. I fully agree that human population should be lowered as fast as possible. A global one-child-family policy combined with educating and empowering women and girls would be the best we could do, but it would take many generations before human population was lowered to a level where humans could live in proper balance with their ecosystems. It is irrelevant how long you or anyone else thinks we have to fix this, it will take as long as it takes. Of course if nature does it for us, as in your scenario, then it could happen a lot faster.
There were 5-10 million people on Earth when humans started using agriculture, so that’s probably what a proper number of humans would be. However, I question whether humans should live outside the tropics, because we have to do things like build shelters and get clothing there, whereas in the tropics we need only minimal shelter at most, and we don’t need clothing. I suppose humans can get clothing from the skins of animals they eat, but building adequate shelters for life outside the tropics requires consumption, the excess of which is one of the root causes of all environmental problems. We also don’t need fires for heat in the tropics (though we would still use them to cook food), so that would be another environmental and ecological benefit to limiting humans to the tropics. If humans were limited to the tropics, perhaps one or two million people on Earth would be the proper number, maybe not even that many. This is an even longer-term goal than returning to living as hunter-gatherers.
As to natural population controls, I don’t think it’s debatable that they are food availability and how many offspring survive. I’ve never seen any evidence that most mammalian youth die before they breed because of human harms to their environment. In fact, that would make no sense. If most nonhuman animals didn’t die before they reached breeding age, nonhumans would have overpopulated the Earth long before humans came along, so your theory about this makes no sense.
It makes no difference if most humans know how to hunt or not. The ones who do not know will learn soon or die. The rest will do all right. That number will be small enough that there will be plenty of edible animals for them to eat. If not, more will die and that process will continue until there are few enough for the land to support and the ones still alive know how to get food.
I did not mean to imply that “nature” will do it; the current klimasturtz is not a natural event. It is due to humans and their technology. It is due to nuclear reactors, electromangnetic technologies of all kinds, deforestation, livestock grazing, paving of land, monocropping, damming of large rivers, and other human actions. Combined, these and other human actions are making the global climate unreliable, unpredictable, random, chaotic, and soon lage-scale farming will be impossible.
A global one-child policy would require a global police state to enforce, so it is not going to happen. Even China gave up on that idea and relented. And in any case it is now too late. Even a total global moratorium on all birhs would not do anything to stop the klimasturtz which is already well underway. The humans who are going to be alive after the end of the Human Age are now adults.
As for “educating and empowering women”, that is another unenforceable fantasy. Do you expect that to happen in India or the Muslim countries, for example, or in most of Africa, before the whole earth becomes uninhabitable? The only way that there will be fewer children born is if it is forced on them by a police state.
If the collapse does not happen in the next few decades at the most, it will be too late and there will be no animals left and even if there were there would be so much other damage to the life-support systems of the earth that nobody could survive to hunt them.
I agree that humans are a tropical species and need excess technology in colder climates. But in prehistoric times the most important use of fire was not for cooking, but to drive game. That holds regardless of climate, so tropical humans with fire would still be able to do a lot of damage. As they did. And in many places in the tropics are still doing.
If most animals who were born lived to grow up they would still not over-populate because the predators would soon catch up to the increased numbers of prey species and keep them in check. In turn, the numbers of the predators would be kept in check by the availability of food and would not be able to exceed that. No hunting species wipes out it’s own food supply. When food starts to become scarce they usually do not reproduce until it is plentiful again or else they kill each other off in competition for food.
China did not “relent.” It decided that its one-child-family policy had accomplished what it wanted — it didn’t implement this policy for environmental reasons — and it changed the policy to a two-child-family policy, which is still in effect. But the vast majority of young Chinese people still don’t plan on having more than one child, because they say that 1) that’s what they’re used to; and 2) they realize that their lives will be better if they limit their families to one child.
Kerala, India went from having the highest birthrate in India to having the lowest by educating and empowering girls and women. This is not at all a fantasy, it’s reality. I suggest reading Countdown by Alan Weisman regarding overpopulation issues and what countries around the world have and have not done to deal with them. while Weisman is anthropocentric, there is some excellent information in that book.
Again, how much time we have is irrelevant to what we can do. All we can do is to do what we can as fast as we can, and it will take however long it takes. At that point, we just let the chips fall where they may, there’s nothing else we could do.
As to there being enough animals on Earth for people to hunt and fish without harming their populations, consider that there are 90-99% fewer of these animals now than there were when humans were hunter-gatherers and there were only 5-10 million people on the planet. So maybe if humans were limited to a half million or a million people globally, the nonhuman animal populations could sustain humans hunting and fishing them. But it will take some time for these populations to recover to a level where humans can hunt them without doing harm.
China caved to popular pressure. They gave up because there was too much resistence and what they say is their reason is not the true one. And most young Chinese will tell a poll-taker what they think they are supposed to say, not what they are thinking.
Instead of “empowering women”, you might suggest a death penalty for getting pregnant. A 100% global ban on births for at least 10 years might do the trick. I doubt you would like that solution, but it is much more probable than “empowering women” in most parts of the world.
The belief that empowering women would result in fewer births is a common Left-wing trope, but it runs counter to the reality. In India, in recent years, there has been a lot of industrialization, movment from rural areas to big cities, and exposure to pesticides in farming areas. It is pollution and poisoning that accounts for the drop in fertility, not “empowering women”. There are many cultures on earth where a woman would simply be beaten if she even suggested using birth control. Do you really expect that to change in the short time we have left?
There will be plenty of animals to hunt after all the city folks who do not know how to hunt them are dead from starvation. Or have been killed, and perhaps themselves eaten, by other humans. So there is no need for concern about how much game there will be. If there are too many successful hunters for the local wildlife to support the least successful ones will die, leaving those who know how to hunt with enough food available.
Sometime in the early to mid 2000s, I attended a seminar on the Chinese one-child-family policy that was presented by an old Earth First! friend who had just returned from China. She said that the majority of Chinese people supported the program, and confirmed that it had been a huge success (it is estimated that the policy prevented approximately 500,000 MILLION births). The Chinese people to whom I referred were not polled, they were interviewed. These people were NOT repeating the government line of having two kids, so your claim that they were just saying what they thought they were supposed to doesn’t make sense.
Kerala had the highest birthrate in India in 1947, and the lowest birthrate in India by sometime in the 1970s. This is not “in recent times,” nor does it have anything to do with pollution causing a lower birthrate. I don’t know the reason for your resistance to the FACT that empowering and educating girls and women is key to lowering human population, but I’ve provided clear evidence for it and all you do is continue to deny it, this time with a baseless, unsupported claim that it was pollution in Kerala that lowered its birthrate.
If you’re going to kill all women who get pregnant, will you also kill all the men who impregnated them? If not, that’s a disgustingly sexist idea. (Not saying that I support this in any way nor that it would be a good idea if you killed the men too, just pointing our your extreme sexism.)
You seem so blinded by your own ideas that you won’t recognize a contrary reality when it’s presented to you. I’ve provided you evidence to support what I wrote, but you just make baseless claims in response. As to overpopulation, I seriously suggest that you read Countdown, it has a lot of really good information in it even if you disagree with Weisman’s ideologies or attitudes toward the natural world.
I was not ADVOCATING a death penalty for pregnancy. I was saying a police sate using force to reduce population is a more probable way for the government to solve the problem of overpopulation than a cultural shift that runs up against major traditions and biological instincts.
India did try male sterilization in the 70s. Indira Ghandi had the police surround whole villages and forceably sterilize all males over the age of 14.
It is common on the Left to think “empowering women” would lead to fewer births, but most leftists would like to see women have more power anyway, so their using the population issue to bring other people on board is not unlikely. Unpleasant ways to solve the population problem are more likely to actually happen.
Sperm counts have fallen drastically over the past 50 years. That is almost certainly due to pollution. In fact, the trend is so serious that there may soon be a time when governments offer serious financial incentives for having more children. Some parties in Europe are already making that a campaign issue.
In any case, I do not expect the current civilization to last long enough to need to find a solution. In a few years the excess humans will die off, either directly from starvation or indirectly from fighting over food when the climate collapse leads to global crop failures. The end result will be few enough humans that the ones left will find plenty of food available, including other humans. It will not take thousands of years to reach an equilibrium with the environment. I give it about 20 years at the most and almost all humans will be hunter-gatherers.
I find nothing with which to argue in your last post, but I don’t attempt to make predictions, especially when it comes to things like this that are very complicated because they involve a lot of systems (both natural and human), constant change, and many variables that we don’t even know about. Paul Ehrilich, is still castigated for his predictions about population causing collapse, even though the only thing he got wrong about human overpopulation was his predictions. I think it’s far more valuable and effective to advocate for what you think is right than to make predictions.
My final note on this is that Kerala, India provides proof that educating and empowering women and girls substantially lowers birthrates. I’m not a leftist (though I agree with the left on most issues, not all), and the situation in Kerala has nothing to do with left or right. You haven’t shown any evidence that contradicts the fact that educating and empowering girls and women was the reason for the steep decline in the birthrate in Kerala aside from an unsupported statement about pollution. This is not a theory, leftist or otherwise, it’s a fact. How hard it will be to educate and empower women and girls in cultures where they have been and still are treated as, at best, second class citizens is a different issue.