One way we have been able to have this many people, are modern farm practices. But those rely heavily on chemicals. Which is not ideal(dead ecosystems, poisoned water). Just because we can, doesn't mean we should.
Food is not a limiting factor. China is a net exporter of food in a country of 1.4 billion on about 1.1 million km^2 of arable land. For context, the United States has about 1.6 million km^2. And the quantities of arable land can be expanded somewhat dramatically everywhere.
I doubt that these depend on quantity and not quality.
Food and more importantly, as you would know if you googled depleted aquifer, water are limiting factors. Always. You will always need those two. Most of our agricultural practices are unsustainable across multiple measures, especially water.
> China is a net exporter of food in a country of 1.4 billion on about 1.1 million km^2 of arable land.
Saudi Arabia used to be a net exporter of wheat until about 5 years ago. Our arable land, the topsoil so vital to it, and the fresh water we overuse so much faster than it can be replenished worldwide are all hitting bottlenecks in the coming years. Egypt and Jourdan are fighting over the Nile. The Sahar and deserts in China are expanding despite great efforts otherwise. China is imposing its will in Thailand and Vietnam over their control of the headwaters of the Mekong. The Europeans are worried about the Po and Rhine being lower than usual with glacier meltwater being depleted faster and faster with rising temps and milder winters. Aquifers built over thousands or millions of years are being pumped at rates unrecorded for agriculture and residential use. Ogalalla and western US aquifers are sinking the land and running out. Encroachment of freshwater systems by erosion and saltwater from rising sea levels and fierce storm surges are threatening ecosystems and coastal farming. A pernicious side effect of a hotter atmosphere is increased vaporization of water from lake reservoirs causing water loss exceeding water use of cities and populations. The outlook and ongoing crises in places like California are grim, but there's a lot we can do. Price water more closely to its real cost. Build desalination plants. Implement water saving tech into manufacturing and households. Water loss from reservoirs and recording depletion rates of aquifers can give us better data of the scale and rate of the depletion to inform the urgency. More data can be collected. Swale water runoff and improve land management techniques to retain water. Implement drip irrigation and water efficient and drought resistant crops. Build cisterns and modify reservoirs to improve water storage and retention. Chinampas can be built. Many other efforts and policies can be implemented, but they are all costly and take time. Perhaps that's why this issued has been ignored for so long, because we turn on the tap and the water always comes out. Until it doesn't anymore. We've certainly been warned. Hydrologists have been warning about this for almost a century.
The point of this though is that it's all still on a distribution. We've lowered the mean but a higher quantity still means more outliers, which are those that ultimately do neat stuff for all of us.
The calculation shouldn't just be, "what's the maximum # of people we can physically support on earth?" It should be, what's a nice number that makes life pleasant and fulfilling and leaves time for leisure?
And while the earth is very large, the number of places that are truly special is much smaller.
For example, if you look over the whole earth, what fraction of it is at the level of, say, the San Francisco Bay Area, for sheer natural beauty and enjoyability of surroundings?
A small fraction indeed, I would say!
(Of course there is some room for personal preference in here; maybe you're a desert person or whatever. But though squishly defined, the point still stands.)
Today, it's expensive and stressful to live in the Bay Area, because of overcrowding.
But look back at say the middle of the 20th century -- it was still an amazing, beautiful place, but it was much less crowded and much less expensive! This provided fertile ground for interesting artistic and cultural movements, like the beats & their poetry & the hippies & their music.
Now it's much harder to have those kind of cultural and artistic movements in SF, because just basic physical survival is much more of a struggle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effects#Wrigh...
This is what brought us scientific and engineering progress.
The problem is, of course, that growing inequality stalls these mechanisms.
I think this is one root of colonialism: more people and land with which to expand our already developed ideas, processes, et al. - and also perhaps (though often/typically problematically, controversially, etc.) benefit them in doing so, bring our developed ideas, processes, et al. to them, saving them the development, a jump forward for them.
The most obvious example I can think of for this (the general idea, not colonialism) in the modern world is Canada: lots of land, well developed, few people; promoting net immigration.
(The UK has roughly double the population while Canada has about 40x the land area. I don't see many ads but something I've occasionally seen all my life is 'move to Canada' - like the colonial example they're helping us too, eh?)
Prior to pandemic we were building fewer than 0.4 new houses per person nationwide (down from 0.7 back in 2010), our healthcare system is very stressed with lowered population provinces (example Maritimes) having massive waits to get family doctors causing ppl to use ER for simple things adding major stress and delays there.
Most of the talk about Canada's RE market gets pushed to secondary causes or really reactions and symptoms of the core issues. Foriegn money, private investment, greedy landlords etc are all results of a basic supply and demand problem that the government could fix via zoning reform and immigration reform but seem to deflect away from instead giving ppl boogiemen to hate on instead.
Net migration into Canada is great and we benefit greatly by those who choose to come here however if it's not balanced by the government spending to support it Canada is heading for disaster in the next decade.
Aside from housing, it's healthcare that really surprises me - I've seen second-hand (I'm not a doctor) the lengths citizens have to go to, and how competitive it is, to get a residency spot at home; even more so apparently if they studied abroad (even if somewhere similar, e.g. US/UK/EU).
This sounds similar to the crisis facing intern-level and entry-level software workers, where everyone is too shortstaffed to hire on inexperienced people they'll need to train/supervise. Though perhaps with medicine there's less of a concern of the trainee jumping ship immediately once they're "up-to-standards" (or through residency).. I don't know much about the medical industry
I view human life as an inherently good thing to have more of — and certainly a higher priority than nebulous problems like “pollution”. You also didn’t give any reason why we should care about “pollution” more than human life.
Human life is beautiful and good.
To me it follows because the aggregation intuition seems right to me--human life good, more human lives more good--and to me things like 'the repugnant conclusion' mean only that more nuanced thinking in how you aggregate is required, but not that aggregation itself is inherently wrong.
I think our likely-common intuition that it's more tragic for an 8-year-old to die than an 80-year-old indicates that it's really hard to just deny that utilitarian aggregation is appropriate and required in ethics. I suppose it's possible to say "it's more tragic for the 8 year old to die only because of the social expectation that they don't, and thus the impact on their parents and society", but I just don't buy it; I think we all have the intuition it's more tragic for the child to die primarily because they're missing out on more of life than the elderly person.
This is partly tied to social expectation about how close family feels about their children vs their parents.
Article is light on criteria. My criteria is misanthropy, personally.
The only reason anyone cares about pollution is because it endangers human life.
> Human life is beautiful and good.
I'm sure it is, if you only focus on the pleasantries.
This is simply not true. There are many people who view humans like a plague or a cancer. That matrix line didn't come from nowhere.
These people don't stop to think their feelings through to a conclusion.
They don't even realise it but when you view humanity that way you're essentially advocating for genocide.
> I'm sure it is, if you only focus on the pleasantries.
You can see beauty in all forms of life. It doesn't have to be a pleasantry.
Part of what gives humananity its beauty is its complexity and contradictions. All that yin and yang stuff. You don't have the good without the bad.
Admittedly, neither do those who view humanity as a plague. But then again, I'd tell the same to them too.
Of course, you're entitled to your opinions and preferences, but it seems to me as if you're trying to represent your opinion (that human life is beautiful and should be preserved) as some kind of objective truth - going so far to claim that the opposite side is advocating for genocide. The anti-natalist movement also considers humans a plague, but doesn't advocate killing of any kind - only voluntary abstinence from procreation. Does that count as "genocide" in your book?
Personally, I don't consider humanity beautiful in itself, I've seen many kinds of evil that humans are capable of doing, and how much of it just passes with impunity. I think that every human being is inherently self-serving and will do everything within their power to assert their own will, and that it's only the fear of punishment that keeps them "good" and in check. If you were to magically remove all punishments from society, humans would start doing all kinds of horrible things, just because they can. Any and all kinds of "altruism" are either indirect self-benefit (e.g. helping friends in need makes it more likely they will help you when in need) or some kind of mental imprint from the past (e.g. being punished in childhood for selfishness can make humans become overly altruistic in order to avoid the inner critical voice).
So when you say "humanity is beautiful and should be preserved", all you actually say is "I feel good when I think about humans, therefore they should be around". That is pure self-interest.
They are starving and out of homes.
If you had an arc ship sending ppl to hopefully a new planet. That ship has limited space and resources, at what point do you stop expanding the population of the crew and passengers?
I think we’ve heard the same end-of-humanity-death-cultism throughout history, and each time, continued growth led to a better humanity.
Also, consider non-humans: how many additional people would make destroying the Great Barrier Reef worth it? If clearcutting the Amazon rainforest would increase the population cap by N, for what values of N would you do it?
H̶u̶m̶a̶n̶ life is beautiful and good.
I was pointing out that more people is a goal in and of itself.
>how many additional people would make destroying the Great Barrier Reef worth it? If clearcutting the Amazon rainforest would increase the population cap by N, for what values of N would you do it?
Just want to say, I think we are all in just as much of a position to have to answer questions such as these as the parent commenter. We can't get away from tricky ethical questions simply because they're difficult.
We can even recognize that something's going wrong if we think we need to answer such stark utilitarian tradeoffs, but that's _still_ not a complete answer. Tricky questions like yours are inherent in the _world_, and it just so happens that the default "answer" to such questions is simply to cover one's eyes and pretend they don't exist.
Human life is beautiful. Dolphin and butterfly life are beautiful. They are not in exactly in competition, but they have something in common which is that we can't grow their population size without bound.
Also, non-modern farm practices are also not ideal and I think if we were forced to switch to traditional agriculture we would still have a large adverse effect on ecosystems.
Wealth for the 1%. The rulers need a group of wage slaves who will serve the foundation of capitalism. The whole system is designed so average workers can never get ahead but can be exploited.
For now...
What we're finding out as we study living systems (remember that ecology is a science) is that many of the subsystems involved spans quite large areas, e.g the Monarch Butterfly migrations, or the effects of ocean currents on climate.
The point is that unrestricted growth just isn't possible, so somewhere between Yukon and Kowloon there's a "sweet spot".
I enjoy going for a swim, it doesn’t mean I want there to be no more land.
Why would you simplify such a tricky topic to a binary decision