Quinnian population dynamics

[sacha]

Daniel Quinn’s work is a source of great insight in many ways. But there is one aspect of Quinnian thinking that is not only flawed, but in my humble opinion seriously harmful. Especially since it is so influential. I have heard people ask “What are Quinn’s key ideas?” and the first idea that they name is Quinn’s model of population dynamics. I hope that Jason Godesky, who has incorporated this model, seriously rethinks it before he publishes the Thirty Theses as a book and spreads this model even further. I have heard Urban Scout repeat this basic idea in videos online.

The Quinnian model of population dynamic is stated concisely in the title of the fourth of the Thirty Theses: Human population is a function of food supply. The Quinn model of human history is easy to summarize: when humans started practicing agriculture, their food supply increased; therefore, because their food supply increased, their population increased; and once the population had increased to a certain point, they were forced to continue with agriculture.

According to the Quinnian model, the population explosion of today is the result of the expansion of agriculture. And the only – and inevitable – solution to the problem of civilization is a mass human die-off from mass starvation, mostly in the overpopulated poor countries of the world when human population finally exceeds the ability to produce food.

This story is deeply rooted in, and expresses, the civilized worldview. We are so used to seeing our species through civilized eyes that we seem unable to look at it any other way. I will explore this later in this thread.

This is not to say that mass starvation die-off could not happen. It is to say that it is not inevitable.

But the longer civilization continues, the more that world population will increase (not, however, for Qunnian reasons) and the greater the likelihood of a mass trauma for our species.

However, the collapse of civilization is not the signal for mass die-off.

Although civilization gave rise to overpopulation, population increase is now following its own trajectory independent from civilization. In other words, you could have mass starvation and die-off in poor countries without a collapse of civiliztion. On the other hand, you could have a collapse of civilization without a mass die-off in the poor countries.

The urban population in industrialized countries would still likely suffer, but for the poor of the “Third World,” the fall of civilization would be an absolute cause for celebration.

And the collapse of civilization offers the only chance of stabilizing the population and with minimal suffering and trauma.

I saw on the Anthropik page, someone wrote about the collapse “Bring it on, already!” and she was jumped on for her heartlessness, because (it was said) by actually wishing for the collapse of civilization, she was wishing for the mass deaths of billions of people.

This conflates the collapse of global civilization with the collapse of global population.

If we are in this movement, we are supposed to accept that the poorest and most exploited are expendable. Surely in our hearts we should feel guilty toward those masses of suffering poor who will have to suffer even more from this collapse. But we are supposed to harden our hearts about that. (Civilization always teaches us to harden our hearts and accept that there are always unfortunate consequences to unfortunate victims. So we have all had plenty of practice at hardening our hearts to consequences. No wonder it is as easy for many primitivists to casually accept the deaths of billions of people, in the “cause,” as it is for a bomber pilot to bomb hundreds of civilians he never sees.)

So, first, I am here to tell you that you can work for the collapse of civilization with a clear conscience. You are not working to cause mass suffering. The majority of humankind, and especially the bottom of the heap, will be far better off.

The collapse of global civilization is the only hope for the poor of the world. The only hope for liberation from a system that victimizes them, and the only hope for slowing down, stopping, and even reversing the runaway train of overpopulation. The poor of the world are civilization’s victims. And overpopulation serves civilization’s purposes and keeps them victims, while making it possible to blame them for their own victimization.

Overpopulation is a consequence of civilization, but the runaway train of population cannot be slowed down until civilization comes down.

(It’s not that some people won’t suffer, but I personally think that suburbanites who have spent all these years poisoning their lawns, along with the nearby waterways, and have made the ground under their care unforageable, deserve to starve to death,)

This is sort of an introduction to a long, multi-post discussion on population dynamics. I am going to talk about maintaining population balance among non-human animals, among human hunter-gatherer tribal peoples, among horticultural tribal peoples, and the real connection between agriculture, civilization, and population growth (which is [b]far[/b] more complex than the Quinnian model), and about the connection between the industrial revolution / colonialism with the population explosion of the last 300 years. the connection between globalization, modern agriculture and the “Green Revolution,” and present-day population explosion in poor countries (which is not just a straight more-food-means-more-people mathematical function) and why the collapse of civilization would be the greatest thing that could possibly happen for most of our species.

So this is sort of an intro to this discussion.

[Willem]

Gayle;

I absolutely agree with your central point, that the “starving millions” and third-world poor of the world will only benefit from the collapse of civilization. I think you may not understand the point of Quinn’s accent that “populations act as a function of food supply”.

He doesn’t mean (nor does Jason in his Thirty Theses, nor as far as I know Urban Scout either) that only food exerts influence over populations.

Quinn simply means, without food, you cannot make more people. So, at minimum, you need food to make more human bodies. Human cultures that constantly increase their food supply will tend to constantly increase their populations, too. In the language of systems thinking, food operates as a “limit to growth”.

Now, of course, other cultural factors can intervene. Certainly in the First World population growth has begun to slow, as a result of some cultural factors (ironically). Also, you have the cultural population balance practices as seen in indigenous cultures.

The Quinn human population and food dynamics operates similarly to a sole jug of gatorade (yes, forgive me, but they do drink it ) at an athletic competition. The jug limits the amount of physical effort expendable by the athletes, but it does not determine it. Without sufficient hydration the athletes will experience cramps, nausea, dizziness, and other dehydration symptoms. In a highly competitive culture, the athletes will bump right up against (and probably exceed) the safe level of activity such hydration would allow. In a wise and collaborative culture, you might see different behavior.

Sort of a hackneyed metaphor, but I think it makes the point. Quinn doesn’t point to food and population as the only factor, just the limiting one. Owing to the lack of success interceding at other points in the population growth system (condoms - birth control pills - “education” - etc.), he points to food as a fundamental lever that will change the system’s behavior.

I also don’t think Quinn ever claims that mainly third-World people will die-off as a result of the fall of global civilization. Certainly if they don’t have to grow the first world’s cash crops anymore, their ability to feed themselves will improve.

[chase]

I also don’t think Quinn ever claims that mainly third-World people will die-off as a result of the fall of global civilization. Certainly if they don’t have to grow the first world’s cash crops anymore, their ability to feed themselves will improve.

And the ability of first and second world people to feed themselves will have to be quite a bit better than it is now - or there will be a massive die off there. Ai think the so called “developing” countries, because they havent been developed, will be much better off post-collapse than most other peoples, since they have most of the remaining indigenous and semi-civilized former indigenous (eg. the zapatistas in southern Mexico) who still subsist off the local environment (whether that is tending the wild, horticulture, or traditional agriculture). Such people will not care on a food level and will reJOYce that the more civilized bullies are gone or weakened.
Sacha: ai certainly agree with you about the whole heard-hardening thing! But its also a part of civilized thinking, ai think, to need to think and care about everyone everywhere. Ai’m only a human, not a god! According to the relationship number thing, ai cant think about them each as indeviduals. If ai think of them, it can only be in an abstract way, except if ai know some of them, which ai dont. So when ai think of all the people that ai know will probably die, ai’m very sad, but ai cant allow myself to dwell on it. Ai cant save everyone and ai must accept that. Unless ai move to Africa (or other), ai cant worry too much about their family and freinds, only mine. Sorry if that sounds hard-hearted, but that is what ai’ve come to. (sorry for rambling)

[Urban_Scout]

Sacha,

I’d like to remind you of our forums guidelines to “tell your own story.” You said:

I hope that Jason Godesky, who has incorporated this model, seriously rethinks it before he publishes the Thirty Theses as a book and spreads this model even further.

This statement falls under passive, unsolicited advice. “I hope Jason does X.” Please remember to refrain from giving unsolicited advice, and follow the other principle of our forum which is to “ask questions.”

Such as; “From what I understand about Quinnian Population Dynamics, I don’t agree with them. I noticed that Jason and Scout talk about this a lot, so I’d like to ask what your take is on my perspective…”

Your post was so “absolute” against Quinn that even though I don’t think you fully understand the concept, I don’t even want to post a reply because it sounds like you’ve “already made up your mind” and have no curiosity for understanding it.

As far as population dynamics go…

Quinn has never suggested that “the only solution is a massive die-off.” He’s constantly saying that he doesn’t think that. He thinks (and I disagree with him) that if we can have “agriculture feeding 6 billion people, than we can have sustainable agriculture feeding 6 billion people.”

The other element here that we see go hand in hand with agriculture is the moral shift from “tending the wild” to “domesticating the wild.” It becomes okay to “take more than you need” because when you practice agriculture, you put all your eggs in one basket. All your food comes from mono-crops which can fail at any time for various reasons. The only way to avoid the pain of a famine (if your an agriculturalist) is to store a surplus of food; to take much more than you need because your altered environment will no longer provide enough… you must make it provide enough. So you can see that full-time agriculture also leads to a reorganization of cultural morals which in turn, keep the culture going in the mythological sense. So agriculture isn’t the only factor playing into population growth, our mythology plays into it too, telling us to “be fruitful and multiply” and that we must “take more than we need” because nature doesn’t provide enough on it’s own. But these cultural beliefs stem from agriculture itself. As Willem said, “In the language of systems thinking, food operates as a ‘limit to growth’.”

Famine represents a result of the agricultural lifestyle. Those who stop living this way when civ crashes will immediately experience the benefits of horticulture. Those who don’t will continue to suffer and starve. Whether we’re talking about over-populated third world countries or first world rich kids. The ones who rewild will live a lot easier than those who try to keep the world domesticated.

You said:

The urban population in industrialized countries would still likely suffer, but for the poor of the "Third World," the fall of civilization would be an absolute cause for celebration.

I agree. I’ve said this a million times. And I definitely think a die-off is inevitable. I would not call it “solution” to anything. I see it as a “result” of a flawed system that we have little to no control over. I’ve also read Tending the Wild and understand how horticultural practices can increase biodiversity and food supply, but never to the extent we have today. The collapse of civilization means the end of slavery and the return of community. A die-off in my mind, is the transformation of human-mass back into bio-mass. Humans transforming back into an array of biodiverse plants and animals. Not to say that this will not be a time of grief as well, but that change is both beautiful and sad.

But the longer civilization continues, the more that world population will increase (not, however, for Qunnian reasons) and the greater the likelihood of a mass trauma for our species.

Could you please explain the other reasons for population expansion?

This conflates the collapse of global civilization with the collapse of global population.

The global population is a symptom of agriculture. Civilization is the word we use to describe this process… So I can’t imagine a collapse of agricultural systems that doesn’t imply a collapse in populations as well. We’ve seen this over and over with all other civilizations that collapsed. Only, even they lived closer to the land than we do. Those who survive in the long run will be those who rewild.

If we are in this movement, we are supposed to accept that the poorest and most exploited are expendable. Surely in our hearts we should feel guilty toward those masses of suffering poor who will have to suffer even more from this collapse. But we are supposed to harden our hearts about that.

Who said we have to “harden our hearts?” I’ve never said that. I think grieving over this loss is a great thing to do, and I do it regularly. I also feel a deeper affinity towards the life (human and other-than-human) that is being killed right now. The slaves being tortured right now, as a product of civilization.

So, first, I am here to tell you that you can work for the collapse of civilization with a clear conscience. You are not working to cause mass suffering. The majority of humankind, and especially the bottom of the heap, will be far better off.

I’ve been saying this for years: http://www.urbanscout.org/pessimism-vs-rewilding/

This is sort of an introduction to a long, multi-post discussion on population dynamics.

I’m very interested in this!

[clicketyclack]

I think people might be surprised at how many people in developing/third world countries will NOT celebrate collapse. Those people have civilized minds like the rest of us, so plenty of them have civilized desires, hopes and dreams. Plenty of them will try to prop it up just as people have done for thousands of years.

[Ink]

I’ve been lurking for a while and finally feel ready to say something. My name’s Annie; Yarrow Dreamer’s housemate, and I know Willem (that’s how I know of this forum).

So, ok, intuitively I totally get what Sacha is saying, but the biologist in me doesn’t know why. I majored in biology and we studies animal population sine waves where, for example, rabbit population would increase because of a few good years of food, leading to more bobcats to eat them. Soon, a year with a little less rain, coupled with the increase in bobcats, would cause a rabbit population crash, quickly followed by a bobcat population crash caused by starvation.

At the same time, I’ve taken sociology and history classes that showed current surviving and recent past hunter/gatherer or permaculture groups in which starvation was almost never the cause of death or unhealthyness. Likewise, the women never had so many children or had them so close together as to destroy her own health and independence.

So, on the one hand it seems to me that Sacha’s right: something other than starvation controls population in these groups. On the other hand, I don’t really know what that “something else” is; I just know what it isn’t.

A question I would ask of these people groups: do you actively control your birthrate for fear of starvation? If “no”, then does your way of living just seem to effortlessly result in a low birth rate without actually “trying not to have kids”? In other words, have you found a way to make your population a function of culture rather than a function of food?

One more thing to consider…
It seems that in agriculture, the more “workers” you have to work the fields (i.e. kids), the greater the survival chances for your family line; making this the most evolutionarily expedient choice (for agriculturalists). But what is the “optimum” number of children for hunter/gather or permaculture groups? Obviously not “as many as possible”…so what is is?

I thinking up a theory right now that primitive culture naturally results in a low birth rate, which just also happens to be the evolutionary optimum for passing on genes, which makes a limited birth-rate primitive culture itself an evolutionary adaptation for survival of the group.

[If the phrase “primitive culture” offends anyone, or if anyone knows a better term for what I’m trying to say, I welcome suggestions.]

[sacha]

I apologize for offering unsolicited advice – but it is one thing if the “advice” is about an individual and their personal life, another thing if they are doing something that influences others.

I said “I hope Jason will do this” not for Jason’s personal sake, but for the sake of this movement. I feel that it is important that Quinnian population dynamics be rethought for the sake of this movement – rather than further extended and entrenched.

Urban Scout, I think that Quinnian population dynamics can be stated very simply:

Increased food supply causes increased populations.

(If you feel that this is a misunderstanding of Quinnian population dynamics, I can bring out many quotes from both Quinn and Anthropik to show that not only is the basic assumption, but that it operates pretty mechanistically.)

I mentioned “die-off” and the conflation of civilization collapse with population collapse as one of the consequences of this assumption.

But there are other consequences to it as well.

Willem, it sounds as though you are talking about food supply acting as a ceiling on population growth. It is true enough that food supplies act as a ceiling – but normally we would not hit that ceiling, or even come close to hitting it.

Consider – salmon used to run so thickly up the Columbia that it appeared one could cross the river by walking on their backs and their rotting bodies on the banks were an important source of nutrients to the forest. If a large food supply mechanistically causes populations to increase up to the ceiling of that food supply, then indigenous peoples on the Columbia should have increased up to the limit of the food supply provided by the salmon, to the point of depleting the salmon runs and setting themselves up for starvation in years of smaller runs the way that agricultural peoples set themselves up for famine in bad agricultural years. Yet the human population did not increase anywhere near the point of exploiting the salmon population to its limits. This is one question that might be pondered.

It is true that increasing the food supply makes it possible for the population to increase.

But there is a fundamental difference between making something possible and causing it.

(A bit like the difference between saying that knives make it possible for people to be stabbed versus saying that knives cause people to be stabbed. If people are being stabbed, there are other causes at play besides the simple existence of knives.)

Ink, your intuitions are telling you something valid (imho). I hope that I can clarify the reasons why they are right (imho).

it seems to me that Sacha's right: something other than starvation controls population in these groups. On the other hand, I don't really know what that "something else" is

This is what I will talk about in this thread. There are other causes at play in overpopulation – causes that have been utterly neglected by for whom increased food supply in and of itself is enough explanation for population growth and overpopulation.

It will take a series of posts, starting with talking about population dynamics in other species.

Again, I apologize because I know that I am causing discomfort by doing this, but I believe that by the time I am done, it will be understood why I consider this question to be important.

[jason]

I’ve only quickly scanned this thread, so I can’t comment more deeply, but I am doing some extensive editing before publishing the Thirty Theses as a book. That said, it takes more than just an assertion of “you’re wrong” to get me to change my mind. I’ll assume you have not read the thesis essay you’ve commented on, since these arguments were already answered there, so I’ll try to summarize the arguments I made in full there.

You seem to have gotten why food production acts as a ceiling for human population, but it also acts as something of a floor, for the reason that any population that could expand but does not will find itself out-competed by its neighbors who do. This is the foundation of that old adage, “Nature abhors a vacuum.” Even if we assume that we do in fact have free will to restrain ourselves, such free will would in fact guarantee a lack of free will on the level of societies, since for every person who restrains themselves there is someone else who indulges. So if you decide to not partake of the new bounty and not have more children, someone else will just have twice as much food and twice as many children. The net effect on the society’s growth is the same.

So if food production is both a ceiling and a floor for human population, then that makes human population a function of food supply. Yes, increased food supply causes increased populations. This has always held true, not just in human populations historically, but in every other animal population as well.

You can attenuate that function with lifestyle, and that’s what happens in the First World. As I described in the essay, the First World buys its standard of living by offloading its costs on the Third World. But in fact, in those terms, it is the First World that is overpopulated. Quinn never said that this could end only in mass die-off (I have suggested that, but that has to do with the prisoner’s dilemma of cultural complexity, as argued in thesis #12). But when that happens, as I’ve written many times, it’s the First World that will feel it most acutely. I don’t know if people in the Third World will celebrate (as per clicketyclack’s observation), but it will probably make their lives much easier, whether they recognize it or not.

This is all in the original article. I’m quite open to criticism, but if you’re going to reassert the same arguments I dealt with in the essay, I do at the very least need some reason why my arguments against them are flawed. I’d be overjoyed to see some discussion that moves into new territory, but I don’t have much interest in treading over this same ground yet again.

[sacha]

I'd be overjoyed to see some discussion that moves into new territory

I am glad! I am relieved and happy that this has turned out to be positive.

I haven’t actually gotten into the discussion yet; this has only been the introductory phase. I believe that you may indeed be gratified that we will get into some new territory!

(You might also find a bit of new territory if you also check out my posts in the “Endemic Warfare” thread in Misconceptions section, the “Clan System” thread and the discussion of a feminism based on tribal principles in the “Feminism” thread, both in the Relationships section, “Why Capitalism Cannot Stop Destroying the Earth” in Civilizations Collapse section, and several threads in the Language section.)

I do want to say that I have read the Thirty Theses, and agree with by far the greater part of it. There are a few other things with which I could take issue, but this is the one area I feel is too important to ignore.

So, following soon with a discussion of animal population dynamics in general, then a discussion of hunter/gatherer population dynamics, and on from there.

[sacha]

NON-HUMAN ANIMALS AND POPULATION DYNAMICS - Part One

I am going to start with talking about maintaining population balance among animals in general before moving to humans specifically, but will have to break this into several posts.

The foundation of Quinnian population dynamics is (as stated in Thesis #4. “Human population is a function of food supply”) “Like every other animal, we reproduce very quickly to fill up our carrying capacity.”

Most definitions of carrying capacity don’t specifically mention food, but in this context, I will take this statement as meaning “Like every other animal, we reproduce very quickly to the limits of our food supply.” And, although we may have been shocked by starving deer, impressed by the smooth mathematical curves in rabbit/bobcat balances, and persuaded by Daniel Quinn’s hypothetical expanding mouse cage, as a generalization about animal populations in general, it is not valid.

Animals under normal circumstances do not expand their populations to the limits of their food supply. The only cases in which we see this happen is with species like rabbits that are highly dependent upon predation to keep their populations in check, and whose main defense against predation is a high reproductive rate.

Ink mentioned the rabbit/bobcat model. This is a good place to start, an example of prey/predator population dynamics. This model is the clearest example around of populations increasing or declining based on food supply. Rabbits increase; bobcats increase because there is more food; rabbits decrease because more bobcats are eating them; bobcats decrease because they have less food. This model also provides the only example (outside the microscopic world) of populations growing to the limits of their food supply and then starving – when the predator is removed, the prey animal can keep increasing its population until it runs out of food and starves.

But humans are not rabbits.  We are not dependent on predation to keep our population in check.  What is more significant to our species is -- how does the [i]bobcat[/i] population stay in balance?    Just exactly [i]how[/i] does the bobcat population goes down as the rabbit population goes down?  Is it through mass starvation of the bobcats?   Do the bobcats have to wipe out the rabbit population, exhaust their food supply, and experience catastrophe and disaster in order to begin to decline?  And if the woods were full of desperate, starving, and overpopulated bobcats who couldn't stop increasing till they hit the limits of their food supply, could that not threaten the last remnants of that declining rabbit population?  

And if mass starvation is the means through which the bobcat population declines, how is it that the bobcat population ends up healthier than ever, instead of sick and weakened, by going through these cycles?

I am going to continue this discussion with some important and neglected factors in animal population dynamics, factors which are directly related to the population dynamics of hunter/gatherer societies – who live as normal animals in this respect, and that is why their population levels remain balanced. Sacha-nian population dynamics holds that every other animal does NOT reproduce very quickly to fill up their carrying capacity, and neither do humans when they are living like normal animals.

Next part I will talk about how bobcats, birds, wolves, coyotes, among others, as examples, control their populations without reaching the limits of their food supply, and also talk about Daniel Quinn’s mice.

[jason]

This follows from the misconception that population limited by lack of food implies starving animals. Rabbits are not by any means the only animals that produce to the limits of their carrying capacity. Every farmer knows that you can control the size of your cow herd, your chicken flock, your horse herd, indeed, any animal population, just by increasing or decreasing the feed you supply.

It doesn’t take anything nearly as drastic as starvation for food supply to check population. Female fertility depends on sufficient fat stores, so even just “getting by” can make the female of most species infertile. Fertility has evolved with a hair trigger for good reason: to try to ensure that babies come into a world of relative abundance, at least from birth.

But even that marks one of the more extreme mechanisms. Consider: if you have to spend more time looking for food, then you have greater stress, which again reduces fertility. You also have less time for sex, and even less energy for sex. This applies to humans, too. It’s no coincidence that over-worked, over-stressed Americans have created such a huge market for Viagra and Cialis, after all. That’s generally all it takes to depress reproduction rates, which decreases population growth and ultimately population.

Starvation is only the most extreme way by which food supply controls population. It only gets to that point after a great many things have gone wrong.

[system]

“It’s no coincidence that over-worked, over-stressed Americans have created such a huge market for Viagra and Cialis, after all. That’s generally all it takes to depress reproduction rates, which decreases population growth and ultimately population.”

Your kidding, right?
So places like India and China have the populations that they do because of the abundance of food, stress free lifestyle and the amount of free time that the people have? If they worked as hard as Americans do, their populations would go down?

I think the huge market for “erectile dysfunction” drugs has more to do with pharmaceutical marketing propaganda and a twisted view of sexual health than anything real.

[jason]

Well, in point of fact, people in India and China do work less hours than Americans, on average. But I’ve written elsewhere that trying to separate the U.S. or India or China as independent populations in an interdependent, globalized economy is about as silly as examining medieval British nobility as a population distinct from medieval British peasantry. We have plenty of means of shifting the wealth to one sector and the cost to another, which is something we’ve perfected since the Roman Empire. The fact that global human population has always adhered to global food supply spells that out rather clearly. The differences between different countries when every country trades with and relies upon all the others is just silly.

[system]

So call me silly.

[jason]

Well, rather than repeat myself, I’ll simply copy and paste from the article in question:

All of this, however, is theoretical. This hypothesis is easy to test: calculate carrying capacity, and compare it to actual human population numbers. This is precisely what Russell Hopfenberg of Duke University did in his 2003 study, “Human Carrying Capacity is Determined by Food Availability.” [PDF] As you might imagine from such a title, he found that the numbers lined up almost perfectly.

There is a significant complication in this, however, which critics of this stance are eager to point out. The First World is facing a population growth decline–the world’s richest nations are growing by the smallest percentages. Italy has been very concerned with its low growth rate, only 0.11% according to a 2003 estimate. Italy has the 201st highest population growth, and the 100th highest agricultural growth. Meanwhile, Singapore has the sixth highest population growth rate, and the 147th highest agricultural growth rate–out of 147.

If population is a function of food supply, why is the most significant growth taking place in those areas producing the least food?

The answer, I think, lies in globalization. How much of what you ate today came from your own bioregion? Unless you do a significant amount of your grocery shopping at Farmers’ Markets or eat only USDA-certified organic food, probably not a lot. In 1980, the average piece of American fresh produce was estimated to have traveled 1,500 miles before it was consumed. Interestingly, those same countries which produce so much food but don’t see it translate into their population, are also the heaviest exporters, and the impoverished countries with significantly rising growth rates are often the recipients. When the First World rushes in with foreign aid, food, and humanitarian aid to a desert area in the midst of a famine, we serve to prop up an unsustainable population. That drives a population boom in an area that already cannot support its existing population. The result is a huge population dependent on outside intervention that itself cannot be indefinitely sustained. Eventually, that population will crash once outside help is no longer possible–and the years of aid will only make that crash even more severe. In the same way that the United States’ policy of putting out all forest fires in the 1980s led to an even worse situation in its forests, our benevolence and good intentions have paved the way to a Malthusian hell.

Another part of the answer lies in our ecological footprint. In the passage above, Garrett Hardin made the distinction between the calories it takes to maintain a human body, and the “work calories” humans use to do anything else. While it is certainly true that population is a function of food supply, standard of living–how many work calories we recieve, in addition to mere maintenance–is an important factor in that equation. Not only how much food is available, but how much food each individual demands. The dwindling First World has the largest ecological footprint; the growing Third World has the smallest. Italy comes in at #25 with 5.51 hectares per person (1996); Somalia is #114 with 0.97.

This is ultimately why education appears to have an effect on population: because higher education raises the standard of living, increasing the ecological footprint so that fewer people can live off the same amount of food, reducing the population. However, the problem we face is not one of Malthusian catastrophe. If we could not feed our population, we would not have such a population in the first place. The problem is the ecological consequences of such resource exploitation. Expanding ecological footprints do nothing to lessen this. Also, this trend can only continue so far, because the First World needs the Third. Our prosperity comes from the triumph of the corporate model, but the corporation itself runs on externalized costs. Our economy could never function if we had to pay the full and total cost for the luxuries we enjoy. Consider simply our oil costs–never mind the way it is built in to, say, our food. The Arab population oppressed under Saudi rule pays the balance for our cheap oil. Low prices at WalMart are made possible by cheap Third World labor. It is a grim economic reality that, given ten apples and ten people, for one person to have nine apples, the other nine must split one between them. In the conclusion to their 1996 study on ecological footprint, Wackernagel and Rees stated, “If everybody lived like today’s North Americans, it would take at least two additional planet Earths to produce the resources, absorb the wastes, and otherwise maintain life-support.” Since we have but one earth, this conclusion can also be spun around in the form that each of us essentially has three slaves whose existence is one of constant misery for our benefit.

[clicketyclack]

The result is a huge population dependent on outside intervention that itself cannot be indefinitely sustained.

this is essentially the definition of civilization, not just overpopulated deserts. cities require the importation of resources from outlying areas to survive.

[jason]

Exactly the point.

[Willem]

So call me silly.

Silly!

[locke]

I would have to agree that population growth is systemic and is a function of food supply, but I don’t think it necessarily has to end with a horrific die off. As Jason has pointed out, birth rates are slowing in first world countries due to the complexity of those societies. I’ve noticed that few people in my generation (I’m 26) and younger are having children. Personally, I don’t know anyone my age with children. If things continue this way, the population could drop drastically within a couple of generations. This is assuming people aren’t encouraged to reproduce to maintain failing complexity.

Considering most people of my generation are going to college and waiting to make enough money to support children of our own, and due the fact that the way the economy is going we may never see that day, we may end up putting most of our energy towards helping to raise the children of the generation before ours rather than having our own.

[wildeyes]

Sacha, I think you’re opening up an interesting path here. I’m tingling with curiosity to see where you go with this.