Further discussion

I got a response back from the person on the mailing list, and we’re taking the discussion off the list. We’re going to be meeting next week, and will presumably continue it then. It may continue here as well, we’ll see.


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.

Umm, not so, here are some facts about human lifespan before modernity and chemicals: Average life expectancy before the health transition of the modern era is thought to have varied between about 20 years and 35 years. reference

I’ll grant you the high infant mortality rate, which has always been high relative to the mortality rate once beyond that point – and that’s still true now. But that’s population control (something sorely lacking in modern “civilized” society), and some cultures (I wish I had a reference for this) don’t even name their children until they’re at least a couple years old, or weaned.

I was thinking more of the suffering and deaths caused by toxic chemicals in the drinking water, or by increased disease rates as a result of denser population centers, antibiotic-resistant strains, and pesticide-resistant vectors.

So let’s reduce infant mortality by reducing population. 9% (avg, first two years, source, which is one of those cited from your linked Wiki page) of 5 million people (10K years ago, near the beginning of the Agricultural Revolution) is 450,000 as opposed to 0.7% (source) of 7 billion people is 49,000,000. That’s over 100 times more dead babies. Reducing population and eliminating modern medicine is a win-win.

Modern medicine, what reduces the infant mortality rate, is also one of the major contributors to overpopulation. There are millions of people with ailments like diabetes and Crohn’s that are only alive because technology supports them. Not only that, but they live to pass on those infirmities to their offspring. A simple removal of medicine would do wonders (though not enough, in and of itself) toward solving the problem of overpopulation.

But to go back to the data on that Wiki page, notice that the Pre-Colombian America and Upper Paleolithic (late Stone Age) life expectancies were actually longer than any other time/technology level prior to the 20th century. Given that civilization is falling apart, that sounds like a good enough reason to return to that lifestyle rather than any other that occurred between then and now.

The problem with the rest of the estimates of lifespan is that they still include infant mortality, which drags the average down a lot. Historically, if you could make it past that rough patch, you could be reasonably assured of having a good long (see graph on p 174, or p 19 of the pdf, from the first infant mortality link above).


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.

Here's why people don't want to live in Eden--because they can but they don't: Because they don't want to. I don't see masses of people moving to rainforests to live in harmony with nature? Do you? If you believe it, why aren't you doing it?

There is so much bullshit packed into those few short sentences, I don’t even know where to start.

What rainforests? The people who continue to live there are consistently killed off so that the trees can be cut down and the oil can be pumped out of the ground they’ve always lived on. As for myself, I’m kinda trapped at the moment, but I’m moving this summer, and this fall fully intend to start “doing it” – making real progress toward a sustainable existence and disconnecting myself from civilization. I’m already making plans and contacts. This is not a pipe dream, this will happen. It will have to, because civilization is fundamentally unsustainable, and anyone who survives will have to live without it.

Derrick Jensen talks extensively (with references, in both Culture of Make Believe and Language Older than Words) about hostage exchanges between American Indians and white settlers:

In Letters From an American Farmer, Michel Guillaume Jean de Crévecoeur noted: “There must be in the Indians’ social bond something singularly captivating, and far superior to be boasted of among us; for thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of those Aborigines having from choice become Europeans.”
Benjamin Franklin was even more to the point: “No European who has tasted Savage Life can afterwards bear to live in our societies.” It was commonly noted that at prisoner exchanges, Indians ran joyously to their relatives while white captives had to be bound hand and foot to not run back to their captors.

No hunter-gatherer tribe that has adopted our “civilized” way of life has done so voluntarily, it has always been at gunpoint (or sword, or bayonet, whatever). A quick survey of colonial history will show that slavery, massacres, and other miscellaneous oppression have always been necessary to “civilize” the “savages”.

So why do they resist it so much? Is it just that they’re so entrenched in their way of thinking that they can’t see the virtues of our system (much the same way that we’re buried in material junk up to our eyeballs, so that we can’t see just how unhappy we are)? Well, possibly. But hunter-gatherers work less and are happier (because of more social and leisure time) than “civilized” people, and manage to live perfectly well, as long as they’re not killed off or displaced off their land by the greedy bastards with guns.

Some notes from Richard Heinberg’s Peak Everything:

Hunter-gatherers : 1000 work hours per year
Medieval peasant: 1620 (broken up by frequent rest/food breaks, many holidays)
US, 1850: 3500
US, 1985: 1850
US, now: 2000

Like I said before, we’ve been brainwashed in this culture to believe that #1, our way of living is the best, the only way people should ever live, and therefore #2 that any other way is somehow inferior, that anyone who lives any other way is somehow degenerate, or not as “advanced”. And because of that, we’re eradicating even the possibility of living any other way. Which, because of the unsustainable way we’re living, means that we’re effectively eradicating the possibility of living at all.


The real problem with the "underdeveloped" areas…

Ummm, see above, the historic data for people living without civilization is a lifespan of less than half of what it is today. Eden was human death-trap long before the advent of cash crops, chemicals, and capitalism.

No, again, the people who lived there were doing perfectly well until the capitalists came along and destroyed it. See below about the world population during that time.


No, actually, we've got about 10-12,000 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.


The population graph looks sustained to me--I see no flat spots or negative growth from 100,000 bce to 10,000 bce, hence no genetic pressures to limit population growth. reference

First of all, that graph is misleading because it’s on a log-log scale. What the text accompanying it says is that between a million years ago and 10,000 years ago (which is effectively a million-year time span), the population went from 125,000 to 4,000,000, a 32-fold increase. To start with, let’s push that back another 2000 years, to one million people at 12,000 years ago (10K BCE), before the agricultural revolution. That alone reduces the increase to 8-fold.

(Between the end of the last ice age, which opened up much more area to be inhabitable by humans and made the area that had previously been inhabited more fertile, and the gradual adoption of early agricultural practices, I think we can write off that 4-fold increase fairly easily, especially given how quickly the population took off after that. Let me also note that all of these population numbers are estimates with little to no evidence to back them up, since before the 18th century nobody had even made an attempt to count people in the world.)

Now let’s also look at the rest of that million-year span. Homo erectus (the only one around a million years ago) was later replaced by Homo sapiens, and while many of the same rules might apply, it’s not really fair to equate the two. I’ll let that go, though, and just deal with sheer numbers.

The reference that gives a population of 125,000 at a million years ago only has them living in Africa, with a land area of 30,370 sq km (using Wiki land areas), and by 12,000 years ago, we’ve got people occupying Eurasia, North and South America, Australia, and the rest of the Pacific islands, for an additional 105,330 sq km. So when we take the increase in living space into account, what looks like an 8-fold increase drops to less than a doubling. (125K/30,370 = 4.12 people/sq km, vs 1M/135,700 = 7.37/sq km; 7.37/4.12 = 1.79)

Now let me say again that that’s over the course of a million years. If we add in there the better tools and weapons that enabled more food to be collected, it’s no wonder the population increased a bit.

So back to the other points raised. If Eden was a death trap, how could the population have held steady, let alone increased at all?

And the idea of carrying capacity. These early humans were effectively living at their carrying capacity. They knew how many people they could support in their area (with some wiggle room and short-term fluctuations), and if they were at their limit already, they didn’t have kids. Some of that was behavioral – there are plenty of herbal contraceptives and abortifacients all over the world that women have known about all along, but that rarely got written down because it was always the guys doing the writing.

Other physiological factors in the lack of population increase were diet, nutrition, exercise, and breast-feeding. If women are active, they menstruate less often. This is common among female athletes now. A woman who is malnourished, or simply doesn’t have much body fat (anorexics are another textbook example) will also cease menstruation, because she doesn’t have the energy reserves to put into producing a baby.

Nursing also tends to stop menstruation, again as an energy conservation measure. If you’re still providing sustenance for your own body for one child that you’ve already invested a year or two of resources in, it’s counterproductive to start diverting those resources to start fresh on another one, and risk the one you’ve already invested in dying. Even the mammals that pop out a lot of babies quickly won’t mate again until they’ve weaned the previous litter.

While these aren’t “genetic pressures to limit population growth” they are genetically controlled mechanisms by which population growth is limited.

On the other hand, with the advent of civilization, women in particular were more sedentary – meaning both less exercise and more tendency to plump up, both of which contribute to more regular cycles, and therefore more kids being born. Also, with fields to plow and animals to tend, there was a social and practical reason to pop out as many kids as you could, to help with the work. “Work” that didn’t exist for the hunter-gatherers, and so therefore they had no drive to pop out as many kids as they could.


Famine, war, and pestilence all lead to mass death…

Even [if] it was undeniably true, why would you state it that way when it is unpalatable to most people. If you can see the future trends, a more effective strategy is to gently reposition peoples thinking so that they can adjust to it as it develops and becomes apparent. Forecasting doomsday apocalyptic scenarios does not help when most people are only beginning to appreciate the dimensions of the problem. It is more rational to support what awareness there already is, and build on that foundation to prepare people.

What you say is theoretically true, assuming that we have enough lag time before the crunch comes. But we don’t. People with that mindset started trying to make changes thirty years ago, and look what it got them. They failed to change enough minds quickly enough, and it’s screwed us all. I’m not blaming any of them personally, the problem is the inertia of the culture, and the (mis)direction of the media, and the government that controls it.

(Which leads me into another rant about how we don’t actually live in a democracy, that the people don’t really have a say in the laws, that their elected representatives have free reign to do whatever the hell they want, and that that’s exactly the way the Founding Fathers intended it.)

If people had started making any significant progress 30 years ago, we might be able to make a smooth transition to something sustainable now, but we’ve eaten up our buffer. It’s now too late to stop the train. It’s going to crash. The vast majority of people are already dead, they just don’t know it yet. We don’t have time to slowly, gradually, comfortably change peoples’ minds. They need a clue-by-four upside the head, they need to wake up and smell the armageddon or they’re going to become more roadkill.


It's not. It's too late. "The American way of life is not negotiable"…

If it is too late, why waste your time and energy on discussing the inevitable? Why waste of your time on the predetermined? This is a democracy. The American people can and will change.

Oh, I don’t argue that. They will change, but it won’t be by their own choice. The people who are left in 100 years (I’d bet closer to 50), won’t be living the way we’re living now, because anybody who tries to hang onto this lifestyle is going to die. I’m not wasting my time trying to change the world, I’m trying to get to a few more people who don’t have their heads too far up the media’s ass.

I’m not trying to save the world. I’m trying to point out to a few people that might be able to prepare and survive that they need to get started on it. I will say that the only way to save the world at this point is for people to start following this track en masse, immediately. But it won’t happen soon enough or on a large enough scale to prevent the crash. Regardless, that’s my plan and I’m sticking to it, because it’s the only hope anyone has.


As long as some humans survive and subsist, civilizations will re-emerge. Civilizations are spontaneous human phenomena.

Not if there are no resources left. We’ve depleted all of the easily accessible fossil fuels; what’s left is requiring more and more energy input to get any energy out of it. Meaning cheap energy, the basis of what we think of as “civilization” is a thing of the past. In the future, anything that passes as civilization will be based on slave labor – as was everything that passed for “civilization” before the industrial revolution. The Greeks, Romans, Aztecs, they all had large numbers of slaves to do the work for them.

It also assumes the presence of other resources, like metals to work into tools. Most of the easily/cheaply accessible metals have been depleted as well, so they’re going to be left with whatever scraps they can find lying around, which will eventually be depleted as well. As the remnants of civilization disappear, the few people that are left will gradually (over several generations, possibly centuries) revert to a stone-age existence. That part will be a more gentle transition, but we’re in for a hell of a shock when the changeover starts.

Also, about civilization being spontaneous human phenomena, see the end of this post about civilization and cancer.


[I wrote in my e-mail response, but didn’t post here previously:]

I don't mean to be picking on [the person] specifically, you just happened to voice a lot of the standard bullshit lines. :)

No offense taken!
I don't think these are standard lines. The standard line is if we are all a little greener it will all work out. I don't think it will improve until there is population decline. But beginning by building awareness of what it is to try to be greener is a great place to start.

The things you’re saying are slightly more sophisticated elaborations on that “recycle and change your light bulbs and everything will work out” kind of half-assed green mentality. They’re still arguments that have been produced and batted around independently and repeatedly by people still in denial, still coming to terms with just how bad off we really are. :)

People need to think outside the box. We can’t just tweak our current lifestyle to make it sustainable, or even suffice with a general overhaul. We need to start over from scratch. A lower population with our current lifestyle still will not be sustainable, it’ll just last longer before it crashes and burns.


I just don't see any purpose or rational basis for a relentlessly grim apocalyptic viewpoint when it is obvious that food shortages are self-limiting phenomena in terms of population growth. Droughts, famines, Ice age, whatever... civilizations rise and fall. Always will.

Yes, food shortages are self-limiting, because when the food is short, the population will decrease. That’s the way it’s always happened. It’s just never happened on this scale before, with this caliber of widespread consequences. Isn’t that enough for an apocalyptic attitude towards it?

The real problem is that it’s not just the food. It’s the oil, and the economy, and the environment, and the politics, and everything else. If we could deal with one of these problems at a time, we might be able to muddle our way through it, but they’re all hitting right bloody now, and the system is already starting to collapse.