Argumentation

These bits of argument were really written to an e-mail list that I'm on, and of course I had to respond, in my (possibly misguided) borderline obsessive need to straighten out people who might actually come around. There are plenty of other people on whom it's not worth wasting my breath (or electrons, or whatever). In any event, they were significant enough, and covered some ground I hadn't hit here yet, so I'm reposting them.

If you spend time in the undeveloped world, you see first hand the infant mortality and preventable deaths and diseases that would be avoided with more development and a higher standard of living.

How about less development and a higher standard of living? Most of those preventable deaths were caused, one way or another, by those in power dumping chemicals and such on these people. These people have not always been miserable; it's civilization that has made them that way.

I think that we all wish that there was a self-sustaining Eden-like existence widely available, but the truth is that most humans don't want that life.

WTF? Why the hell wouldn't they? The only problem with Eden was that it got paved over by the people who said, "That's not the way you're supposed to live," and forced those people to live by the "civilized" rules that generate more misery, destruction, mass production, and oppression.

Unfortunately, in underdeveloped areas, human populations grow until they are limited by resources and the result is death and suffering.

The real problem with the "underdeveloped" areas is that they've had any "development" forced upon them at all. The aboriginals of whatever location you want to point to lived there perfectly well and sustainably until civilization moved in and started developing (read: enslaving and/or killing) them and their area. The native people would never have cut down their low-maintenance trees, plowed up their meadows, and otherwise destroyed the naturally thriving ecological community and planted labor-intensive cash crops unless they were forced to. That same force is what keeps the people impoverished while their leaders are wealthy. And it is the failure of those cash crop monocultures that has plunged them into starvation. A more diversified land/food base will be more resilient, more able to resist minor annual perturbations, with a lessened dearth of sustenance for the people living there.

Cash crops are also a contributor to starvation by other routes, in that the excess food produced during plentiful times allows for increased population. Then when crops fail, and they have no local food, and can't afford to buy any from elsewhere, they starve, and we see their sunken eyes and swollen bellies on TV, pleading for food.

Another reason for crop failure is that continuous monoculture depletes the soil, to the point that it can't grow anything anymore. Of course, the quick fix for that is chemical fertilizer, but that's expensive, and if they had money they'd just buy the food for their own immediate consumption - you can't plan for the future if you can't eat NOW.

...absent any major technology breakthrough...

Ah, yes, the fabled Technofix. If you actually look at the history of technological "advances", they have a horrible track record in terms of waste production/disposal. So we switch from fossil fuel burning cars to electric. That's not solving the problem, that's just displacing it. Is the electricity coming from a coal-fired power plant? Obvious problem there.

How about a nuclear plant? That puts out lots of heat, which consistently destroys the viability of whatever water source it's attached to, and that completely ignores the actual toxic waste, which usually gets shipped off to some storage facility and buried - but it's still there, it's still being produced, even if it's not out in front for everyone to see.

Hydropower? Destroys the watershed, prevents migration of fish, floods areas above and starves areas below.

Solar or wind? Where do you think the materials to build them came from? They had to be mined, which means #1, they're unrenewable, and will eventually run out - and quicker, given the huge increase in demand. #2, The mining processes use up lots of other fuel sources, usually oil, to extract and purify the materials. The same series of arguments can be applied to any proposed technofix. You trace them back, and you see that the problems aren't really getting solved, they're just getting swept under a different rug.

Of course, we have 150,000 years of sustained human population growth...

No, actually, we've got about 10,000 years of sustained human population growth. The previous 200,000 years (if you're counting H. sapiens sapiens, or 4.5 million years, if you count the other human predecessors since they took to the savannas) saw a long-term net growth of effectively zero. They may not have known the theory behind carrying capacity, but they knew the practical implications. If you consume more than the land can produce, you reduce your own future survivability.

It is inevitable that either nature will correct this through pandemics, or humans through wars and policies that increase starvation, or least likely but most reasonable: Negative population growth.

Famine, war, and pestilence all lead to mass death, which is another form of "negative population growth". Usually when people use that term, what they're really talking about is a reduction in birth rates, because they don't want to think about increasing mortality rates. Well, get over it and open your eyes, because people are going to start dying en masse. One way or another, the world population is going to be reduced, and there's not a bloody thing anybody can do about it. We have radically exceeded our carrying capacity for so long, we've reduced our future survivability so far, that we're up shit creek without a paddle, in a wire canoe, petting the dog backwards, herding cats, and many more increasingly obscure and less relevant idioms.

Green is good and in my opinion the most ethical choice, but even if widely adopted I doubt that impact is sufficient to reverse current trends.

It's not. It's too late. "The American way of life is not negotiable" - the first Bush, June 1992, at the first Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, and later quoted by Cheney. The people in power are going to fight tooth and nail to hold on to that power, no matter how circumstances change to make their position untenable, and even self-destructive.

Really, the best strategy for the planet is fewer people and the sooner people realize this, the better. We can then move on to the question of how to ethically encourage this goal.

Not just fewer people, but lower energy requirements. Neither of the two can possibly be successful without the other. And regarding ethically depopulating the planet, again, it's too late. Maybe if we had started on that fifty years ago, it could have made a difference in where we are now, but we've hit critical mass. There are so many people consuming so much energy and causing so much damage that the vast majority of people alive now will not live out what they'd like to think of as their "natural lives" - they're going to be unceremoniously done away with as civilization continues in its death throes.