Mass starvation is humanity’s fate if we keep flogging the land to death | Hacker News Reader

Mass starvation is humanity’s fate if we keep flogging the land to death

theguardian.com

37 pointsaviziva14 comments

"I am plagued by visions of starving people seeking to escape from grey wastes, being beaten back by armed police."

Excellent. But where are they escaping to?

All countries north of 40th parallel are living far beyond their sustenance level. For example Sweden can maintain population of one million and then the food must as simple as possible, mostly potatoes.

This fact comes from history. There were mass famines at that population level around 1000 AD. The reason why vikings started to travel to other countries murdering and pillaging.

Actually Vikings invaded much of western Europe as well as Ukraine earlier starting in 800AD in response to Carolus Magnus proselytism, and it is contested that they were "murdering and pillaging". Most probably this vision was propagated by their enemies in the Christian world.

We do not know for the "mass famines", but this time was the Medieval Warm Period (800–1300). It is thought that between c. 950 and c. 1100 was the Northern Hemisphere's warmest period since the Roman Warm Period.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_Age

Ok. "Oppressed people of Ukraine invited vikings (ie russians) to rule them." I do not know much history, but this snippet from Putin's speech from 2014 comes to mind.

The historical reality is quite different.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varangians#Kievan_Rus'

According to some semi-official sources I found with a quick Googling, Sweden was mostly self-sufficient up until the mid-90's. Dunno how many people lived there during the 90's, but I take it that it was more than a million?

Of course, things will change once harvests will start failing, and if you guys had just a bad of a harvest as we had this year (Finland), then it doesn't matter if 50% or 10% of the food comes from local sources; you're going to be reliant on imports anyway.

Yes. But this was accomplished with heavy machinery and fertilization, which are based on imported oil. In Northern Norway you can find most pitiful attempts of agriculture above the arctic circle, indicating that the land was overpopulated and even the sea was overfished.

Interesting times ahead for us people up here then... Good thing I grow my own potatoes.

Malthusian fallacy. People have been saying this for centuries. Maybe he can eat grass, but I think I'll stick to my meat.

Malthus considered only one very narrow facet of the results of population growth. There are others - most significantly, ecosystem degradation and eventual collapse - that will impact humanity.

So it is vital to consider these factors too, rather than recklessly rejecting the spirit of the argument.

I agree that we need to consider those factors. But saying we need to switch to a plant-based diet is ridiculous. Any "solution" that involves everyone just changing their behavior (behavior that in some ways defines us as human) is just flat-out not going to happen.

A real solution is cognizant of human behavior and the tragedy of the commons. A real solution isn't dependent on every human being lowering his standard of living. The solution to whale extinction from whaling didn't depend on everyone using less whale oil, it depended on finding new, better, sources of energy.

Ain't that the sad fucking truth of how people think. This is one of the fallacies of capitalism and consumerism culture. The human ego has grown to levels that exceed the single planet we live on. We have the tools to find new and better sources of meat, it's called lab-grown. A simple yet effective solution, taxing the shit out of real cow meat as well as ocean caught fish would cause huge falls in demand, and would create opportunity to develop the lab grown meat technology to ecologically and economically competitive levels. If eating red meat is actually a higher standard of living, we should treat it as such. It makes no sense that a double cheese burger is cheaper than a salad. The same with driving gas guzzlers, tax that shit to hell. Make it economically painful to consume in those markets which are damaging. That is the purpose of government because markets don't regulate themselves.

Our primitive tendency to frame actions into nature can be fixed with education.

If every human being was more aware of how their actions are effecting the world, which is directly effecting themselves, they would realize their vote does matter and it does make a difference. THAT's the real issue with the world right now. People are burying their heads in the sand. Humanity is more connected than ever before with the internet, yet our disconnect with the world is greater than ever before. Even a small reduction in eating meat by everyone, especially red meat, would have huge impacts on the environment.

We need to reframe what higher standard of living really means.

> By the middle of this century there will be two or three billion more people on Earth

..this is only inevitable if we choose to make it so. The laissez-faire approach to population growth prioritises sparing the feelings of current liberal observers over the happiness of the future inhabitants of earth and the quality of the environment. Whatever mitigation measures we take, a global population of 12 billion are inevitably going to have far nastier lives than 3 billion could.

Invest in soylent green.

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