Observation: Overpopulation Is The Root Cause Of Most Of Our Problems On Planet Earth

[Old Trapper]

Life for humans could be so much better if only we could get truly organized.

This planet is so awesome.

We spoil it by crowding so many of us into this one sphere of existence.

It doesn't have to be that way.

It was that way during the time of the Roman Empire>

The major causes for the problems you listed are poverty, income inequality, and mismanagement of resources.

[ThatOwlWoman]

racists just try to make people think its ONLY certain types of people who take drugs

Drug abuse is across all demographics.

[evince]

we have a certain population already


we stabilize that world wide population by providing access to basic needs and provide all sorts of birth control ( NOT FORCE IT )


every study of populations shows people end up producing fewer progeny when they are stabilized and in control of their reproduction

[evince]

Drug abuse is across all demographics.

exactly

racists just keep claiming they are drug users because they are not white


even though all the studies point to poverty

[Jack]

why should people only be alive to feed corporations employment needs?

If a Pasture can feed 10 horses, why stick a 100 horses in the Pasture?

[Adolf_Twitler]

I'm betting that the NRA's answer to all this is more guns! More Guns! And More Guns!

[Jack]

Oh and BTW every sane economist will tell you

you bring more people in when the job numbers are that low

Really?

[Into the Night]

Life for humans could be so much better if only we could get truly organized.

This planet is so awesome.

We spoil it by crowding so many of us into this one sphere of existence.

It doesn't have to be that way.

I disagree. There are vast stretches of the planet where people don't even go. I find that most people that figure there is a population control problem have simply not gotten out into the country enough.

The total surface area of the urban areas is quite small, compared to the total land area. To assume the planet is being spoiled is leaping to a conclusion and taking a pessimistic view. The very reason people travel is to see the beauty of Earth and it's different cultures and people.

As a prime example in the U.S., all one has to do is drive out across the plains of Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, etc.

Shortages are not a function of how much food and resources there are, it is the distribution of that food and other resources. It is not uniform. It is often blocked by local wars. War itself has been part of Man for millennia. It's not fought over shortages, but over conquest of territory or religion.

The nuclear bomb itself was created to hasten victory in a war that was fought over Marxism and conquest. Since then, the Bomb has kept the peace between major powers. The cost of using it in an all out war is understood not just by us, but by every major nuclear power.

The answer to world peace is a simple one...profit. You don't go around shooting your customers. It is theft and attempted theft that causes wars.

[evince]

Oh and BTW every sane economist will tell you

you bring more people in when the Unemployment number is low

I fixed this post

I accidently typed job numbers instead if unemployment numbers


so I fixed my mistake


My apologies for my now corrected error

[evince]

Really?

you were right to question that post of mine

my apologies

I have corrected the post to reflect my true intent instead of my mistake

[Frank Apisa]

If a Pasture can feed 10 horses, why stick a 100 horses in the Pasture?

If all the work that has to be done can be done by 1,000,000 people...why try to find jobs for 350,000,000 people.

The notion that each person must "work for a living" is the thing that has to go.

The reason for the technological revolution is to make life easier for humans...to have machines, computers, and robots do the majority of the work so that humans can relax more.

What the hell are we doing with this?

Do you people want "digging holes and filling them in" to be the norm...just so everyone can work for a living?

We have to grow the hell up.

And we have to do it by yesterday!

[evince]

Other countries have a working week below our own


how about paying enough to live on at a 20 hour week?


all healthcare paid


and easy access to all birth control


yes that means the corporations pay more


the only way to fix anything from now on is to MAKE the corporations pay


if they want customers


they have to pay people enough to afford their products

[PoliTalker]

Has anybody else here read this book?

I did, shortly after it came out. That was 12 years ago. All of the statistics quoted in the book are now out of date, but they are still rather shocking when you think about it.

"For the first time the urban population of the earth will outnumber the rural. Indeed, given the imprecisions of Third World censuses, this epochal transition has probably already occurred. The earth has urbanized even faster than originally predicted by the Club of Rome in its notoriously Malthusian 1972 report Limits of Growth. In 1950 there were 86 cities in the world with a population of more than one million; today there are 400, and by 2015 there will be at least 550. Cities, indeed, have absorbed nearly two-thirds of the global population explosion since 1950, and are currently growing by a million babies and migrants each week. The world's urban labor force has more than doubled since 1980, and the present urban popu*lation - 3.2 billion - is larger than the total population of the world when John F. Kennedy was inaugurated. The global countryside, meanwhile, has reached its maximum population and will begin to shrink after 2020. As a result, cities will account for virtually all future world population growth, which is expected to peak at about 10 billion in 2050.

Ninety-five percent of this final buildout of humanity will occur in the urban areas of developing countries, whose populations will double to nearly 4 billion over the next generation.

...

If megacities are the brightest stars in the urban firmament, three *quarters of the burden of future world population growth will be borne by faintly visible second-tier cities and smaller urbanareas: places where, as UN researchers emphasize: "there is little or no planning to accommodate these people or provide them with services.

...

in many cases, rural people no longer have to migrate to the city: it migrates to them. This is also true in Malaysia, where journalist Jeremy Seabrook describes the fate of Penang fishermen "engulfed
by urbanization without migrating, their lives overturned, even while remaining on the spot where they were born." After the fishermen's homes were cut off from the sea by a new highway, their fishing grounds polluted by urban waste, and neighboring hillsides deforested to build apartment blocks, they had little choice but to send their daughters into nearby Japanese* owned sweatshop factories. "

The major problem for population expansion is that pretty much all the good rural agricultural lands have been taken. When farming families have more children, there are not enough farming lands for them to take up the work their parents did. They are forced to leave the places they were born and raised, and set out for life in the city. They are not alone. With opportunity in the cities unable to keep up with the demand for jobs, these people often end up living in squalor. Indeed, as Davis points out in the book, the largest portion of population growth on Earth is urban poor.

As capitalism brings us increasingly extreme wealth inequality, downsizing and minimizing labor, well-paying jobs are not keeping up with population growth.

The big picture: The world is becoming increasingly a place of a small number of pampered and luxurious well-off, and the rest of the population surviving on very little. We see this in the USA, and it is happening on a greater scale world wide.

If capitalism produces the highest standards of living, the slowly accumulating evidence of human expansion is not supporting that belief.

We are gradually becoming a Planet Of Slums.

We are slowly reverting to a hierarchy which resembles the serfs and the lords.

I contend that proper planning could reverse this trend.

We humans would have to get really organized and plan our future instead of letting it come at us in the haphazard fashion we are witnessing.

That would require coordination between the nations, or possibly, indicate the need for a world government.

Perhaps it is time to stop identifying as subjects of individual nations, and to instead recognize that the planet has become relatively much smaller, and humans would be wise to unite all across the globe, get organized, and carefully plan our future.

Maybe John Lennon was at least partially right:



Now, you may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one.
I hope one day you will join us.

[PoliTalker]

Hello Into The Night,

I disagree. There are vast stretches of the planet where people don't even go. I find that most people that figure there is a population control problem have simply not gotten out into the country enough.

The total surface area of the urban areas is quite small, compared to the total land area. To assume the planet is being spoiled is leaping to a conclusion and taking a pessimistic view. The very reason people travel is to see the beauty of Earth and it's different cultures and people.

As a prime example in the U.S., all one has to do is drive out across the plains of Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, etc.

Shortages are not a function of how much food and resources there are, it is the distribution of that food and other resources. It is not uniform. It is often blocked by local wars. War itself has been part of Man for millennia. It's not fought over shortages, but over conquest of territory or religion.

The nuclear bomb itself was created to hasten victory in a war that was fought over Marxism and conquest. Since then, the Bomb has kept the peace between major powers. The cost of using it in an all out war is understood not just by us, but by every major nuclear power.

The answer to world peace is a simple one...profit. You don't go around shooting your customers. It is theft and attempted theft that causes wars.

The problem with that concept is that profit comes from getting more production from fewer and fewer workers. That represents an imbalance which equals increasing general poverty, not increasing general wealth. The wealth that is increasing is the wealth of the powerful. The rest are lucky if they are not losing wealth. And eventually, inflation will eradicate their wealth as well.

[Into the Night]

Much of the concern for over population beliefs is the perception that we are running out of resources such as oil, natural gas, etc.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Like hydroelectric power, oil and natural gas are both renewable sources of energy. This extraordinary statement is in direct conflict to what is commonly taught in grade school, that such fuels come from dinosaurs (Sinclair Oil even has a brontosaurus as its logo!). It is now known different, thanks to the Germans and the Russians. We started seeing other problems with this theory. Some oil wells are quite deep (some go down to 2 miles!). That is well below any fossil layer, and well below any dinosaur fossils. Some oil sources are quite shallow, existing as surface ponds of the stuff. Some is under rock layers that must be cracked using hydraulic pressure before a drill head can get through (that's what fracking is).



During WW2, the U.S. and Europe was putting the screws to the Germany economy, making it much harder for them to get the oil products they needed to conduct the war. In response, Germany, being the chemical leaders that they were, decided to have a go at making their own oil synthetically. They succeeded. Known as the Fischer-Tropsche process, this endothermic reaction combines a carbon salt (such as CO2, CO, CaCO, etc) with a source of hydrogen (H2, H2O, H2SO4, etc), with tremendous heat and pressure (the source of energy to run the endothermic reaction) and in the present of an iron catalyst. The result is a variety of hydrocarbons, also known in the industry as light sweet crude (if H2SO4 is used, you get sour crude).

These conditions are naturally found deep in the Earth.

Now look at where the major oil fields of the world are. They are all primarily located on or near edges of tectonic plates, especially where spreading action is taking place. The Mid-East. The North Sea. The Alaskan North Slopes. The Caribbean and Gulf seas, and all the way up into PA and Texas.

While drilling the Vostok ice core, the Russians learned how to drill a hole deeper than anyone had ever done before. They took this technology and drilled a hole deep in Siberia, far away from any tectonic plate edge. They found oil and natural gas. It was deep, but it was there. Essentially then, the Earth is a giant Fischer-Tropsche reactor that is constantly making new oil. It is why we can drain an oil well dry, cap it, and return later to find it full of oil again. It is why oil comes closest to the surface near plate edges.

The market for oil (and natural gas that comes with it), is not something easily compared to yesterday, due to the changing values of world currencies. In general, all world currencies in the last many decades has been falling (lately, quite rapidly). This inflation masks the price of oil as compared to other commodities. Today, both oil and natural gas are CHEAP. They are about the lowest they've ever been. This compared to other commodities, not by money. We are effectively awash in oil. Correspondingly, we have plenty of natural gas. These two fuels are NOT fossil fuels (no surprise, fossils don't burn!) but are created continuously by the Earth itself.

Water and food are other resources to consider. Plenty of water is available, but WHERE it is available is the question. Water is not uniformly distributed across the land. It varies literally with the weather. We are so dependent on it that most cities and towns are built along rivers, lakes, and streams (including underground ones!). However, rivers change course. So do underground ones. They silt up. Cities and towns built along them might find their water source as simply moved away. If too much is wasted, you have won't have enough to drink. This is currently California's problem, as well as the problem in the mid-west States. Sometimes people pollute the water, other times it is used to raise crops that are very water intensive (such as rice, almonds, or cattle). More wars have been fought over water over the millennia than any other resource!

Food is somewhat related. It takes effort to grow food, but today, thanks to modern techniques, we can grow all the food we need. The United States alone can feed almost the entire world by itself. The problem with food, like water, is distribution (and hostile areas blocking that distribution), not a lack of it.

Real estate is not a problem. Like I said, most of the land area is open country. Only a very small percentage is urban.

Therefore, all the reasons to try to implement some form of population controls are based on beliefs on shortages that are really not there. We have enough and to spare for all of us, if we can only get to it.