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Comment by forgetfreeman | Hacker News Reader

"The problem is not the number of people" Bullshit. None (not one) of the systems/industries we have in place to support our current population operates at anything even close to sustainable. CLothes, food, shelter, whatever, if it's on tier 1 of Maslow's hierarchy the shit we do to service it has overwhelmed or is in the process of overwhelming available global natural resources (renewable and otherwise), with no obvious path to sustainability. It's trivially agreed upon that there are natural carry limits for every other species on the planet. The notion that this also applies to our species shouldn't be controversial, especially in the face of overwhelming evidence that that carry limit has been exceeded.

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Other species don’t build technology. Technology changes the carrying capacity. Humans also have environmental impact that varies far more than animals. A bird in Africa and a bird in America probably have similar environmental impact, but a person in Africa uses far fewer resources than a person in America.

Your position should be controversial because it is incorrect. The ecosystem dynamics of humans are nothing like that of other animals.

You're right. Birds haven't managed to cause a global mass extinction event. Meanwhile the technology you're touting has permitted our species to very nearly eradicate every marine fishery on the planet, fuck up CO2 levels badly enough to alter the climate globally, pump more water out of aquifers than can be recharged through natural processes, and has driven unrecoverable topsoil loss globally in all major agricultural areas. Your claim that carry capacity has been altered significantly doesn't mesh well with the facts on the ground. Available evidence suggests all we're really accomplishing is a temporary increase in humans on the planet in exchange for a bricked ecosystem. That ain't carry.

A small freshwater fern bricked the Earth's climate for a while: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azolla_event

It is possible that the evolution of a fungus that could degrade lignin is what brought about the end of the Carboniferous, with an associated extinction event: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous#Fungi

And, of course, probably the biggest one of the all, the Great Oxidation Event: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event

None of this is to downplay humanity's role in our current climate catastrophe. But we are the first of a long line of organisms that have the ability to do something about it, which is not nothing.

Right, and the only non-hypothetical, physics-or-economics-defying solution we have available is to get our population down below some threshold where our existence on this planet becomes long-term sustainable.

I’m not really sure what your comment has to do with carrying capacity. The damage humanity has done to the environment has more to do with a minority of the population using an insane number of resources.

You'd like to believe that and yet the only capital S sustainable human enclaves on the planet are indigenous populations with no industrial capacity.

It's taught that the Green revolution was what broke Malthus, but so far we haven't solved the core problem(finite natural resources), only kicked the can down the road(we can turn crude oil into extra food).

I hate to be so grim, but your position is, "technology has allowed humans to dominate the planet and push up our carry capacity. Externalities are building up as a result of those technologies and they make our enviroment less hospitable. We have yet figured out how to not do that, despite the problem being significantly more difficult now that we are locked in to supporting more people. But we will do it, for sure. "

Is the last part saying that because their are have nots we are fine? You completely ignore the "we don't know how to make basic stuff at the quantities needed in a sustainable way" bit. I don't think banking on the discovery of new technology and having enough coordination as a species to implement that tech in a timely enough fashion is so safe that doubting it should be controversial.

> None (not one) of the systems/industries we have in place to support our current population operates at anything even close to sustainable.

...In other words, the problem is the rate of externalities per person. By replacing those systems with sustainable ones, we win.

And we don't do genocide.

Pull your head out, there are no sustainable options that scale. Food production alone takes up something like 70% of the dry land surface of the planet. permaculture/sustainable ag produces at max a third of the calories per acre of modern monocrop ag. So unless you're planning on raising Atlantis a severe reduction in global population is a hard requirement to transition food production to sustainable methods because we dont have the spare acreage required.

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