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Politics : Evolution -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Greg or e who wrote (68454)	8/31/2015 11:55:40 AM
From: TigerPaw	Respond to of 69300

Despite innumerable agricultural, environmental, and public health advances over the last few decades, the emotional tone and alarmist rhetoric of authors such as William Vogt and Paul Ehrlich remains pervasive among today's environmentalist writers. Despite the numerous advances in food production there is growing unrest in the parts of the world where that technology is least available. It could be argued that political concerns and economic exploitation are at the heart of these famines and mass migrations much as the Irish potato famine was aggravated by mismanagement by absentee landlords. That really is the point though, any society with a population dependent on complex solutions is vulnerable to even short term disruptions. Ireland has still not recovered in terms of quantity of residents in the 150 years since that population bubble, and this despite mechanized agriculture and the green revolution and outlawing abortion. I'm not familiar with the authors Vogt and Ehrlich, but in the 1960's I was reasonably familiar with the "population bomb" mostly via other works which referenced the book. I usually refer to a more concise work "The Tragedy of the Commons" dieoff.org . It doesn't spend many chapters getting to the point. The great civilizations of the past were destroyed either by invading armies or by a short term disruption in a key technology that was previously allowing their society to increase it's size well past it's former size. Even the invasions were primarily caused by the attacking society relieving it's own population pressure by sending a lot of people to die in some other place. As with most technology it was not one simple gimmick, but a complex and interconnected advance. The Romans went from superpower to looted and burned in a few weeks all because a couple of aqueducts were broken. They could have fixed that technological problem in a day, except there were Vandals with pointy sticks around the damaged sites and the all the rioting and people dying of thirst in the city provided a distraction to the repair crews. It's possible that a population bubble could lead to a human extinction event if nukes were used to discourage the swarming migrants. You might think that such drastic measures to stop a few thousand Libyans or a million South Americans, but just remember that the entire population of Europe from France to the Arctic CIrcle was killed off by migrating swarms of people between 300-700 A.D. Don't you think that the Celts would have used nukes if they had them. Most likely, the problem will take care of itself just as all other population bubbles have come to a conclusion in the past 4 billion years. The solution will not be pleasant. You can't swing a dead armadillo in Texas without coming in range of a "prepper", that is someone who thinks that they and their family will be the ones to survive the coming end of times. It's funny to watch them in pickling classes where they are sitting around with the children of old hippies who are discussing whether dill or wild mustard makes a tasty pickle, while the preppers ask such questions as whether they can pickle tree-bark or earthworms to sustain them in their gun filled hidey holes. I would prefer a more sustainable solution than the default.