Why are Progressives ignoring overpopulation?

Progressives are too busy building up a fornication credit before the air gets so poisoned that breathing difficulties make fornication impossible.

 

That's weird. What happened around 1960? The Pill? The Great Leap Forward?

 

Well Anders

You can do your part by not having any children....!!!!

And if you are a real fanatic just find a high bridge and jump off...!!!

Set the example mate.......you go first.....if it bothers you that much......!!!

 

-very few of the very poorest ever qualify as immigrants they have no skills to offer...
-we can't tell other countries how to plan their economies and demographics, they would tell us to **** **!
-these countries have no social benefit structure, no pension, no healthcare, no welfare...kids become their pension plan, no one else will help support them in their old age...
-the free market system is designed to work on perpetual growth which is impossible and will fail eventually but to suggest stopping population growth and economic growth along with it is a non starter for any political party...

 

The Earth isn't over-populated.

If we used our resources wisely, we could handle 20 billion people.

 

I suggest we should hurry and convince those States, to become socialist enough to simply pay their citizenry to become couch potatoes instead of coming over here and making us look bad with a third world work ethic.

we already know the right has only complaints but no solutions.

 

unfortunetly that isn'y

that isn't reality, we've already exceeded the planets ability to sustain us..., the best agricultural land is used to the max and declining due to urban sprawl, fishery is severely damaged...

 

you should look into modern hydroponics in urban environments.

 

Most data seems to support that false notion.

http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN

Its not poverty alone but also culture, mortality rates, and a sense of hopelessness. Population trends are downwards for emerging countries. Some social movements in some first world countries are trying to increase births but most still fall under 2.0 (births per female) population growth.

Eastern europe has low birth rates due to cultural influence. Many of the young women in these countries have hopes of attending western schools and having better careers than their parents could hope for, having children would seriously impede their ambitions.

The young women in Mexico, Pakistan and most of Africa have little such ambition. Patriarchal culture and a history of political subjugation and violence keep these young women in their place. Having little to say about their own futures they often fall into the traditional role of mother and family caretaker. By no means is this universal, many young women seek to break the mold, but when looking at social behavior they are a minority.

 

I agree that overpopulation is the elephant in the room that is commonly ignored. My frustration is how environmental groups have pivoted away from taking overpopulation seriously. This seemed less the case in earlier decades. My impression is the technofix folks have taken over the conversation. The solar folks battle it out with the nuclear folks. In my view no approach will work if it doesn't have a reduction in population at its heart.

This Grist article offers a wide ranging discussion of the consequences of child bearing or the lack thereof.
http://grist.org/living/time-magazine-catches-on-to-the-childfree-movement-misses-the-green-angle/

 

Malthus was bleating about overpopulation when the earth had an order of magnitude fewer people than it has today, and at a far lower average standard of living. How much wronger does he have to be proved?

Probably a good thing if those who take such nonsense seriously refrain from reproducing....

 

I believe we should be acquiring more perfect knowledge of structures, such that we place suitable habitation anywhere on our planet, regardless of climate change.

 

Malthus' skill sets were not in the specifics of prediction but in the mathematics of exponential growth. He was so right on that Darwin incorporated it into his evolutionary theory. It's kind of like my telling you that if you stay on a certain road you will run off a cliff. Well I might call it wrong on the distance of the cliff but not the fact. So I tell you I think the cliff is 10 miles and you go 10 miles and no cliff so you conclude I don't know anything about the ending of the road. You go another 40 miles and you drive off the cliff.

 

I would certainly like to see us become engaged in building self-sustaining communities.

 

nice idea but we've passed the point of no return... my city of a million has no way sustain itself without food supplied by truck plane and rail from around the world we would be running out of food in 3 days were that to stop...we have entire countries that can no longer sustain themselves completely because of globalization...

 

With modern hydroponics, multi-story buildings can be used to grow indoors.

 

And it's fine, as long as you are talking about organisms that extract their subsistence from a fixed environmental resource. But when an organism produces its subsistence, that relationship no longer holds. And when through economic phenomena an organism's production of subsistence varies directly with its population, all bets are off.

Nope. It's not like that at all, because the cliff is not there at all. Our approach makes it recede, like a mirage.

Malthus's specific error was in falsely assuming that exponential growth applied to population but not subsistence. That has been proved false. Subsistence has been increasing even faster than population. Henry George refuted Malthus very simply and eloquently: "The man and the jayhawk both eat chickens. But where there are more jayhawks there are fewer chickens, while where there are more men there are more chickens."

 

I think you are taking a little window of time and projecting it into an infinite future. Both limits and the law of unintended consequences are catching up with us. Technofixes run into a wall finally. http://technofix.org/

And population growth does count. http://www.worldpopulationbalance.org/content/one-planet-onechild

 

At our present population level I certainly don't think most people could live in self-sustaining communities. But one way or another I think either through deliberate choice or Mother Nature the population will drop. Self-sustaining communities exert a discipline to maintain your living environment into the future. You can't downstream the costs. Plus we lived that way for most of our modern evolutionary history so we don't have to re-invent the wheel. We know they work. Modern industrial society degrades our ecological base plus adds WMDs to the picture to make our future pretty much apocalyptic. The challenge is to take what we have learned from modernity and incorporate it where possible into a simpler more sustainable way of living.

 

I believe it is more accurate to say that with any degradation of our current level of technology, we may have to re-adapt to less modern times.

 

I agree...I don't see change happening, IMO self sustaining communities will happen only if mother nature forces societies to change the political will never be there to do it voluntarily...

 

There is no evidence that technofixes can't remove that wall.

But population growth is slowing, while economic growth continues exponentially.

 

No evidence and no evidence to you live in two different worlds

The UN projects 9 billion folks by 2050 and still growing. We need to turn it around and put the lid on economic growth too. The eco-system services are breaking down.

 

But because of under-justice, under-honesty, and under-wisdom, not over-population.