ideal global population

[lemur]

Assuming that global population change would be completely controllable using non-violent voluntary reproductive cultural choices, what would the ideal global population be and why?

[SMF]

Non-violent voluntary reproductive choice has nothing to do with your question. What is important is what is sustainable. The number of people on our earth that is sustainable requires a number of choices. Presumably we want a society that supports a scientific enterprise that is capable of continued progress (e.g. as suggested by Mrs Zeta) and allows for continuing improvement. On the debit side, most activities necessary to support society would have to be low enough as to be reasonably sustainable. For example, human wastes are currently causing major environmental problems. A population size that doesn't require any special solutions, such that all waste is handled by natural processes, would be appropriate. A similar analysis regarding energy needs and food production is necessary but my own, admittedly ignorant, suggestion is that we would have to reduce our current population of 7 billion down to about 1 billion or less. If you wish to deny my estimate, please explain where the fresh water, energy, fertilizer, and a replacement for foods supplied by the ocean are going to come from. If you agree, what is going to happen to the excess 6 billion humans? How are we going to deal with this? SM

[lemur]

Non-violent voluntary reproductive choice has nothing to do with your question. What is important is what is sustainable. The number of people on our earth that is sustainable requires a number of choices. Presumably we want a society that supports a scientific enterprise that is capable of continued progress (e.g. as suggested by Mrs Zeta) and allows for continuing improvement. On the debit side, most activities necessary to support society would have to be low enough as to be reasonably sustainable. For example, human wastes are currently causing major environmental problems. A population size that doesn't require any special solutions, such that all waste is handled by natural processes, would be appropriate. A similar analysis regarding energy needs and food production is necessary but my own, admittedly ignorant, suggestion is that we would have to reduce our current population of 7 billion down to about 1 billion or less. If you wish to deny my estimate, please explain where the fresh water, energy, fertilizer, and a replacement for foods supplied by the ocean are going to come from. If you agree, what is going to happen to the excess 6 billion humans? How are we going to deal with this? SM

If every couple had only one child, how long would it take to go from a population of 7 billion to 1 billion? The problem is that it's not ethical to insist to people that they MUST limit their reproduction when they don't agree with your analysis and reasoning. I think you're making assumptions without putting them up for discussion. E.g. you write, "a population size that doesn't require any special solutions, such that all waste is handled by natural processes, would be appropriate," which implies in passing that handling waste by natural processes is "special," and that it is an obstacle for population size (density you mean?). So, really, I think you should raise these issues in a way that the facts can be critically discussed and evaluated.

 

Generally, my impression is that the most difficult obstacles to resource-conservation is combustion transit and materialist consumerism. Are you saying, however, that in the absence of excessive motorized mobility and material consumption, waste management would still be a limiting factor? As for water and fertilizer, nitrogen is the most abundant ingredient in the atmosphere, though it's hard to render available for plant metabolism. Water can obviously be recycled, desalinated, etc. as it currently is naturally by various patterns of water-migration. Energy is obviously needed to produce food and shelter, but there is so much room for increases in consumption-efficiency, it's hard to even fathom that there could be some fixed limit/minimum to energy-usage per-capita. As for the oceans, people don't need to eat fish or at least not all the time. Other sources of protein are available for most meals.

 

The kind of posts I was hoping for in this thread are visions for cultural lifestyles that people imagine would be possible with their target population. For example, with a global population of 1 billion do you imagine people being able to consume limitless and for all global poverty to be replaced with unrestricted access to all forms of material consumption? Do you imagine people being able to drive/fly as much as they want anywhere without concerns for pollution spiraling out of control or resources getting used up? I.e. what would this global population-limited utopia look and live like?

 

 

[Mr Skeptic]

The sustainable population depends on whether you want to live like, say, someone from the US, or perhaps like someone from Cuba. You can only have 1/5th of the people if they are living like an American. Got to stay to the left of the red line on that graph.

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

 

There is however some wiggle room since we can use non-renewable resources for now and perhaps during that time improve our renewable resources technologies and so increase the sustainable population.

[lemur]

Do these footprints reflect the total supply-chains of consumer-consumption in the given regions or do they attribute production-footprints to the region of production regardless of where end-consumption occurs? My impression is that some regions host more production and others host more consumption of imports. If this difference isn't controlled for in the data, it could create the appearance that heavily import-dependent regions have a smaller footprint than their consumption actually causes. Still, the focus should ultimately be on consumption and production practices that create the smallest footprint and if/whether/how consumers in these regions are achieving well-being and happiness with such minimal levels of resource-depletion.

[Mr Skeptic]

I'm pretty sure the people who calculated that know that items don't magically appear from nowhere when they are imported. And I'm pretty sure it is about consumption, not production. Feel free to check for yourself though.

[lemur]

I'm pretty sure the people who calculated that know that items don't magically appear from nowhere when they are imported. And I'm pretty sure it is about consumption, not production. Feel free to check for yourself though.

I read it but it's hard to tell. I think the biggest obstacle comes from correlating hectare-usage with regional averages instead of simply listing the number of hectares used for various goods and services and letting individuals tally up their own footprint. Modeling usage by region leaves too much room for generalizations based on assumptions about regional culture that ignore individual differences.

[Mr Skeptic]

You mean like this?

http://myfootprint.org/en/visitor_information/

or

http://www.footprint...ge/calculators/

[lemur]

You mean like this?

http://myfootprint.o...or_information/

or

http://www.footprint...ge/calculators/

Both interactive calculators begin with location. How can you assume anything about an individual's consumption based on where they live except by formulation general patterns based on statistical averages?

[Sorcerer]

I don't even want to read this, this is just draconian thinking.

 

But if I was gonna say I would say 0. Especially people like u.

[Blahah]

It's impossible to estimate a human carrying capacity for the Earth, except to say that it is certainly going to be less than some extremely high upper bound (say, 100 billion). Our current state of technology and resource use is not sustainable, but I think it unlikely that the solution to that will be rapid population decrease. The solutions will more likely be technological and social. It's absurd to say that we should estimate the maximum population in a world where there is no need for technological solutions to our waste problems - we haven't lived in a world like that for hundreds of years.

 

The maximum population depends on the sustainability of current resources. Once we kick this stupid habit we have of consuming fossil fuels, we'll be much more sustainable and will therefore be able to maintain a higher population in the long term. Energy, food and water pressures will always be the major ones until we physically take up all the space. There are technological solutions to all these things - if we come up with good enough sustainable means of energy production (these may or may not have already been invented) then the other problems are almost solved - food can be grown indoors, in towers or racks, and water can be desalinated or treated in an energy consuming way.

 

I sincerely hope that our future doesn't involve farming large animals for food, that's a serious waste of resources. I think the future of food is in metabolic/genetic engineering of plants and production of synthetic foods by engineering microorganisms in culture (like Quorn). I wouldn't like to guess about the future of energy prouction, I think that's still very much an open question.

 

Social solutions to population limits could include decreased population increase due to more stable developed nations emerging, and large habitations organising into more efficient networks. Cities and towns which have built up gradually throughout history are extremely inefficient, and people living dispersed through the countryside is even more inefficient due to the enormous costs associated with distributing resources and travelling between nodes in the network. There is quite simple one way to most efficiently organise such a network, and I hope future, well designed habitations will be built in that way. We're kind of getting there with current approaches to sustainable development and town planning, but it really will take new towns being built to achieve major increases in efficiency. Other social change could include consumer pressure to reduce packaging and supply chain waste, which is a huge source of both physical waste and energy inefficiency at the moment; and greater social pressure to become vegetarian, which would decrease our land usage for animal production and animal feed production.

 

Physical building materials might also be a limiting factor, but I think that's so far off in the future, and technologically created new materials are already available, that it won't be limiting for long.

 

@lemur: in an ecological footprint assessment, the footprint associated with production is assigned to the consumer.

Edited February 19, 2011 by Blahah

[Mr Skeptic]

Both interactive calculators begin with location. How can you assume anything about an individual's consumption based on where they live except by formulation general patterns based on statistical averages?

 

http://myfootprint.org/en/about_the_quiz/faq/

What is the general methodology for calculating my footprint?

 

The quiz begins with the per capita average carbon, food, housing, and goods and services footprint values for your country and then makes a series of additions or deductions to these values based on your choices. These footprint values are derived from per capita average forest, cropland, pastureland, marine fisheries, built space, and carbon footprint values generated by the global footprint calculator housed at Redefining Progress (RP) using data published by international agencies like the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the World Bank. The general methodology for the per capita figures is described in Venetoulis, Jason and John Talberth 2005, "Refining the Ecological Footprint." The allocation of the RP footprint values to the quiz footprint categories (carbon, food, housing and goods and services) is guided by an extensive set of scientific research published by governments, non-governmental agencies, and academic institutions.

 

Yes, it is an estimate. To calculate the exact value you'd need to know the brand and model of every product you ever used, and the quantity, including, say, the toilet paper from a public restroom.

 

I don't even want to read this, this is just draconian thinking.

 

But if I was gonna say I would say 0. Especially people like u.

 

Do you like nature's system of population control? Big fan of violence, famine, disease? I'd take draconian population control over nature's population control any day. But we're not even discussing that. lemur just wanted to know what a sustainable population was. And maybe voluntary population control will suffice, which is my hope. Anyways, how about leaving the rude insults for people who are actually advocating involuntary population control?

[Marat]

Another problem is that the way the welfare and retirement systems of most societies are now organized, we need a 'Ponzi scheme' in which there are always more young working people at the bottom generating a surplus production which can be skimmed off to provide the older retired people with a decent lifestyle and medical care while producing nothing. This means that something like a one-child-per-family policy would cause the pyramid scheme to collapse, unless we could induce the younger people to endure the great decline in their standard of living required for each of them to be splitting their income with 0.8 to 1.0 old retired people.

[lemur]

It's impossible to estimate a human carrying capacity for the Earth, except to say that it is certainly going to be less than some extremely high upper bound (say, 100 billion). Our current state of technology and resource use is not sustainable, but I think it unlikely that the solution to that will be rapid population decrease.

The point of the OP title is to create an alternative to the habit of thinking of population in terms of growth toward limits. Considering that humans have developed elaborate multi-level forms of governance, I think you can also address this issue in terms of ideals and reasons for idealizing them. Once people decide that they want the Earth to have a target population of a certain amount of people, and they know what kinds of cultural parameters they want to see in that world, they can begin thinking about ethical means to pursue their ideals. Yes, this is social engineering, but in what sense don't all individuals engage in some level of social-engineering over their everyday choices about not only reproduction but every other aspect of how they live? Isn't it social-engineering every time an individual chooses whether to drive, bike, or walk, how to set the thermostat, or what to eat for a meal?

 

@lemur: in an ecological footprint assessment, the footprint associated with production is assigned to the consumer.

That is logical, but it could still skew analysis of the ultimate causes of resource-utilization. For example, imagine that investors living on a nice beach somewhere figure out that by investing in SUVs and oil-refineries, they can maintain profit levels that allow them to maintain and grow their wealth as they sip pina coladas and walk between the beach and hotel eating locally-grown food. The eco-footprint of their consumption could be small, but their investments would be stimulating consumption patterns among others that render their footprints much larger. Obviously investment can't directly or totally determine people's cultural choices, but if you analyze the choices made by people with large consumption footprints, they will often attribute their choices to a sense of economic or other determinism, saying for instance that they have to drive a lot for their jobs, and that they need to keep their jobs to pay their bills, etc. etc.

 

So it may make sense to investigate the footprint-contribution of various investment and other business-practices instead of only focussing on consumption.

 

Do you like nature's system of population control? Big fan of violence, famine, disease? I'd take draconian population control over nature's population control any day. But we're not even discussing that. lemur just wanted to know what a sustainable population was. And maybe voluntary population control will suffice, which is my hope. Anyways, how about leaving the rude insults for people who are actually advocating involuntary population control?

If someone gave me a choice between dying in a natural disaster, dying in a war, and dying in an extermination camp, I would question how these got to be my range of choices in the first place and why someone would have the power to determine what I may or may not choose. Personally, I would choose for conservation and maximum reduction of all forms of deadly and oppressive violence, including war, other extermination, or vulnerability to natural disaster. I think the point of human progress is to overcome natural population control, not replace it with artificial variations. I think some people have already shifted from struggling to overcome natural population controls to overcoming social population controls.

Edited February 19, 2011 by lemur

[SMF]

Blahah your magical technofixes combined with Lemur's conservation might just get the developed nations through the crunch, although I would be interested on how we can economically recycle enough water for our (US) breadbasket when the Ogallala aquifer is used up. If everything continues as usual there will be 10 Billion people on the earth in 2050. This will be a time when fossil fuels costs will be skyrocketing and the oceans will be dying. We need fossil fuels to make fertilizer and the undeveloped nations will be starving because subsistence farming and the added stress of loss of food from the ocean will culminate in involuntary population control noted by Mr Skeptic. We all will get to spend our extra resources defending ourselves so that we can watch the gruesome die off live via satellite. SM