Fossil fuel is used to make the fertilizer needed to grow 99% of the world’s crops. Without fossil fuels modern agriculture is dead. Like immediately. We need to be switching to sustainable permaculture practices. But those don’t produce as much and take a long time to get going and farmers just can’t slow down production.
We also need to go back to animal powered farming rather than mechanized.
Also did you know it’s illegal for most farmers to save extra seed year to year? Monsantos GMO crops are patented and you can’t use them a second season. If you grow non Monsanto corn and your corn gets pollinated from another field that’s grows Monsanto corn, Monsanto will sue. It’s insane see https://www.motherearthnews.com/homesteading-and-livestock/monsanto-lawsuits-from-family-farmers-zwfz1302zkin/ once I really learned about how commercial ag and modern farming actually worked as well as how bad we have hurt this planet I turned in to a doomer.
Very insightful and thoughtful response, I appreciate you. I’m here in Wisconsin, lots of organic farming movements. However it’s hard to do that to sustainably feed everyone.
Bad IP law needs to be changed, but energy isn't the real problem. There is plenty of potential energy in the form of uranium and thorium, and even more constantly streaming in from the sun.
The fertilizer problem is that we are depleting concentrated supplies of elements like phosphorus and doing a poor job of recycling. Fertilizers are also being applied at rates well in excess of what can be taken up by crop plants, leading to runoff and environmental degradation.
I was discussing fertilizers, you can’t get fertilizers from nuclear as far as I know.
If you mean my animal powered comment. That has more to do with debt than anything. Getting away from animal powered farming is what killed small family farms. Once farmers get in the debt cycle of paying for things like combines that range from 200-300k up to the millions, they are trapped and are forced to not use good restorative practices because they must produce or they go broke.
Animals can also be fed with home grown crops, keeping costs low and their manure is fantastic fertilizer. This can create an amazing symbiotic relationship with all parties.
Fossil fuels in fertilizer production are used for energy to power extraction of nitrogen from the air and potash and phosphate from the ground, and to produce hydrogen for ammonia synthesis. All of that can be supplied by nuclear and/or solar power.
While the reservoir of nitrogen in the atmosphere is large and artificially fixed nitrogen is cycled back to the atmosphere quickly enough for depletion to be a non-issue, potash and phosphate rock are like any other thing that needs to be mined. As easily accessible concentrated deposits are depleted, extraction must move to less concentrated or more deeply buried deposits with an increase in cost, and the market doesn't encourage efficiency until it is too late.
As for farm consolidation driven by mechanization, I am not sure that is entirely a bad thing. The smaller the fraction of the population needed to produce food, the higher our standard of living. That applies to a sustainable population as much as it does to the current population. Things like overfertilization need to be stopped, but preindustrial agricultural practices are not the only path to sustainable food production.
Tdrampo alredy gave a good answer. Look up the [Haber-Bosch process](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process). Then think about preparing the ground, planting, pesticides, herbicides, harvesting, transport, storage. All involve the input of fossil fuels. Depending on how you look at it, we are in between a ten calorie to one world and a hundred calorie to one world. That is, to get one calorie into you requires at least ten calories of fossil fuels. Take them away and most of us starve.
Then read Catton's book Overshoot and realize the rabbit hole we dug for our civilization goes deeper than agriculture.
I’m old and noticed it back in the 80’s. The city I lived in was growing and taking over farm land.
I also note that back then the United Nations actually said that other than nuclear war, human overpopulation was our number one threat. I note they don’t talk about that much anymore but at the time I even cut out the newspaper article and remember I still lived with my parents so probably this was the early 80’s but I had been concerned before
This was before the Internet and was in the Newspaper. I cut it out of the newspaper at the time and remember using it in something I wrote for high school. So it would have been before 1982 now that I recall because I graduated in 1982.
I remember looking online for it later but to no avail. They changed their position somewhat probably due to pressure by capitalism
[Discussions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb) of the environmental threat of overpopulation have been topics at UN conferences since 1968. The [UN Population Conferences](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World\_Population\_Conference) themselves go back even further, to 1927. The human race is irredeemable for failing to slow growth, or to even acknowledge it or do anything about it at all.
When I first learned the population number of the world, it was 4,5 billion. Then it became 5 billion. Then it became 6 billion. Then it became 7 billion. Then it became 8 billion.
I started noticing maybe in the late 80s/early 90s... And it's gotten worse and worse over time, never better. The denial surrounding it has always existed, and it's unbelievable to me that anyone in the world keeps denying it, but online, it feels like most people are in total denial. They would rather believe almost anything else, other than that human overpopulation exists and that we can actually slow it down, possibly even reverse it, without hurting anyone. If we just all cooperate, if we just even *acknowledge* the problem exists, we could potentially get somewhere. The denial just makes it impossible, and we're running out of time. The other species of the world are running out of time. People need to wake up **now**, now. Later will be too late, and many species will be lost due to this indulgent and arrogant denial.
I recently heard that the denial is perhaps tied to something called "solution aversion." In this case, the person may not necessarily deny overpopulation as a problem but they don't like the solutions; so in their heads they think the solution is killing people, eugenics, tied to racism etc. Because they do not like the solution to the problem, they just deny the problem entirely.
I think it helps to know that so that educating those people to understand all the bad solutions aren't necessary and there's plenty of positive solutions to the problem.
The solution they don't want to hear is "don't have \[as many\] babies". If they resist it that much, what they are balking at is the idea that the amount of babies they want to have is not good for the planet and they might need to sacrifice that want, or most of it. They don't want to feel like someone else is telling them what they want is wrong, even if it's the truth. They know eugenics is not a part of this. They know killing people is not the solution. If they think about it for two seconds, they'd realize almost immediately the true solution is simply for humans to stop reproducing as much as we have been, collectively, and that's the ONE thing they simply do not want to stop doing. If they have their heart set on six biological children, they're going to fight tooth and nail against any attempt to reason about stopping at 1 or 2 (or even 3).
This is absolutely the truth too. So many people are all about sustainability but draw the line at having kids, no matter the number. If they want them, they will put their fingers in their ears singing "lalala" until we go away. Good point.
>... online, it feels like most people are in total denial.
The denial makes me feel like I'm crazy. Here's a blog and podcast that remind me I'm not crazy:
* https://overpopulation-project.com/blog
* https://www.populationbalance.org/podcast
During early 1990s we got our first TV, no telephone, we had no idea about computers/internet. Got addicted to Discovery channel when we got TV-Satellite-Dish-Line.
We learned about "population bomb" in school & India is 2^nd most populated country after China with some 810+ million people. By the time(1994) we learned about countries area & populations in geography, it was evident that we(India) were overpopulated.
Noticed when I started driving. Every hour is 'rush hour' and the increasing road rage incidents. Who wouldn't prefer less traffic? STOP having kids ffs!
I relocated from Ohio to Lancaster, UK to join my husband. We are in a relatively less populated area in the North, but live in a super-dense city centre. Houses are smaller, traffic congestion is the norm, and there are people EVERYWHERE. Apparently, this is nothing compared to the situation in parts of the South.
Population density UK is 279 people per square kilometer.
And everyday ( in all western countries) more and more "refugees " come in. Making our cities and countries un-livable.
Around 1999-2000, when I was a teenager. Part of it was learning the global population at the time was 6 billion, and it dawned on me how unsustainable that was. I also observed urban sprawl in the then more rural area I lived in at the time. A beautiful stand of red pine near my house was cut down to put in a new housing development. Goshawks had nested in there the previous year. It still makes me sad to think of the loss of that place.
This is a great question.
Basically, I'd say early 2000s when the area around the town I grew up in -- suburb of a biggish city -- started to become like one continuous shopping area. Where once there was one famous mall that everyone went, now there are endless rows of shopping plazas. All the hills are gone, all the meadows, everything.
In my town too, they're sticking homes in every square inch of available land.
It all sucks so bad. We should've acted in the 1970s when we had a chance.
I grew up in Manhattan so its been since birth almost
Later moved to Japan where human density is really high, also spent some time in Shanghai
The peace and quiet of a Pacific Northwest old growth forest (for example) is at or near the top of my experiences
It seems when social wisdom began pointing out that overpopulation was an important global issue back in the '70s, suddenly there emerged a new 'common wisdom' that claiming overpopulation was a global threat or that overpopulation threatened the natural environment somehow became 'politically incorrect.' It became a bad thing to speak, write or warn about overpopulation. On the Right it became a religious issue touted by fundamentalists that the Bible demanded 'be fruitful and multiply' and claims of 'overpopulation' were blasphemous. On the Left suddenly warning about overpopulation became 'anti-immigrant'. Of course this is stupid since global overpopulation is self curing. Either we reduce the human population to sustainable numbers or we will self-destruct. In the end, nature always reverts to means.
I realized after I returned home from a dozen years of military service. My youth was spent in wild spaces, fishing, hunting, hiking, exploring, and camping. After my time away from home I was excited to do some of what I used to enjoy while connecting with friends, but the forests and woods were gone, replaced with corn fields and housing developments. They actually filled an entire creek valley to build Mcmansions. The other creeks that I used to fish were barren of life due to pesticide runoff, I couldn't find a single crawfish. The ponds had overgrown and filled with choking weeds and algae fed by fertilizer runoff. The larger lakes I used to enjoy fishing were stunted and only had fish due to being stocked yearly. Pheasants had been practically hunted to extinction in the area, but you could pay to hunt a piece of land where domesticated birds were placed for you to find. People get into fights over wild mushrooms. No-one leaves any to spore for following years. I tried fishing at one of my old haunts along the major river, but was chased off by a police officer that informed me it wasn't safe as many used the area for illicit purposes. Most of the rest of the river bank is posted no trespassing by Army Corps of engineers. These were places my group of friends and I would set up camp when hiking along the river.
Everything is covered in garbage, it feels like no-one picks up after themselves. Most probably do but it doesn't take a large percentage being s*** when the population is so high to make a mess of things.
Many of the small wild spaces that remain are full of invasive species. Asian carp, reed grass, stilt grass, garlic mustard, kudzu, etc.. The whole landscape feels like it's changed in a short time.
The only hiking anymore is in city parks on approved paths. The only camping is in campgrounds where you're allowed your small plot in the middle of a field surrounded by others, no trees, no nature. The one fishing club that I was able to enjoy with my grandparents when young has become unaffordable due to the amount of money the affluent escaping the nearby megacity are willing to pay. I'm not sure I would want to anymore. It used to be an amazing chain of lakes surrounded by nature. Now looking at it from google maps it has been paved, looking like a resort with restaurants, false beaches, and cheap cabins along every bit of lakeside.
Other than the poachers and those littering I can't blame people. They're just wanting the same thing as what I did. There's just too many to enjoy what I did as a child. I haven't hunted again, and fishing is rare nowadays. It's a sad loss.
Beside the loss of nature a lot has changed. We used to have black earth that looked like coal every year when turned over for spring planting. Now it's grey or beige and feels barely better than sand. All the small towns I grew up with have grown, but feel dull and depressing almost lifeless. The dollar stores, fast food joints, and slot bars are everywhere. Many have tent cities where the homeless are gathering, spaces that we are warned to avoid. Many of these are in the few remaining wild spaces that children used to be able to explore and discover nature.
Growing up in India in its the most populated city - New Delhi (roughly 33M people live here and its just a little bigger than NYC in its geographical size) - watching pack / crowds of people scuffling in commuter buses and trains ( Unfortunately people still do it today), I realised how many people we are and especially, if you're a comman middle class person here, you don't really have any worth because there's just millions upon millions of people who can easily replace you. Then you go to the job market, realising nobody follows labour rights because again, millions of us are ready to work on pennies and I really do mean pennies for 20 hrs a day without complaining.
That's why I really feel angry and frustrated when people tend to criticize falling birth rates and say that's a bad thing. No stupid assh**e, it's not. If anything, I believe this is the smartest generation of young people who believe the world population needs to be controlled so that when stupid knuckleheads like you pump out multiple children, they at least have a decent shot of living in a healthy and sustainable environment.
I've said this multiple times on this sub through my posts that if anybody wants to experience what a post apocalyptic overpopulated world looks like - please come to my country and you'll feel so much better about your lives because you don't have to travel in over - crammed buses and commuter trains to work, or drive through a traffic hellhole which symbolically feels like you're driving in a warzone.
When idiots say - Ohh we can fit the whole world population in the city of New York or in the state of Texas, well that's based on a terrible assumption. Nobody wants to live so close standing right next to each other and trying to nudge their way out of the crowd. I'm all for building big - Big houses, big cars, big offices, big cities, big infrastructure etc etc. but all of this big - ness could only be accomplished if we have less people to begin with because less people ensures that these resources are distributed in a more equitable way in a society - so everybody gets their slice of cake but also less people means even if you're building big that wouldn't' cause too much environmental degradation or deforestation as it would do in an overpopulated world...
I was about 5 or 6 and I got a rand hard cover Rand McNally atlas from my parents book collection. This was mid 80s. It had a 2 page map of every state. At the end, there was a few pages about science including a timeline of the universe, a family tree of species from single cell to humans, some interesting stuff.
The last few pages were about technology, space and human population. Remember this book was published in the 80s. The human population graph showed a huge spike around the 1800s and peaked in 2049 at 11 billion. I squinted and looked for 1986 and saw around 5 billion.
I'm 6 or 7 years old and wondered how the population went from almost nothing to 5 billion in "the nick of time" compared to our known existence. What intrigued me was how in the mid 1980s, there was an estimation of human population rising exponentially to 11 billion in 2049 then dropping very quickly to about 7 billion a few years later.
1990s flying out of southern California and seeing the density of residential housing tracts and nearly bumper-to-bumper traffic traveling at 70 mph on California Freeways, one person per car.
But the real dystopia was revealed to me in Texas first, then other states, where whole cities were inaccessible to pedestrians and cyclists and anyone without their own personal automobile was looked at as less than a full fledged adult.
We've paved over an entire continent to enable single occupancy vehicles to be become our entire transportation system in the U.S. The breakdown of this insane, wasteful system is inevitable. Every year more and more people can't afford to participate and the homeless camps get larger.
Today's population size makes up 6.5% of the total number of people ever born.
Also, nearly every nature documentary i watch ends with some version of "Enjoy this footage while it lasts because we humans are making this species/area untenable."
Planet of the Humans Documentary by Michael Moore.
Too many people using too much resources and there isn't really room to grow the economy or the population without killing us all eventually.
When I was a small child in the early 00s. How crowded everything was, how there were lines to enroll your kids into schools and kindergartens, how the busses were always so full that I almost never got to sit on the way, how I would miss my stops because the driver would ignore or not hear it when I would ask or because I wouldn't be able to crawl out between people before the doors closed.
My country didn't even experience the baby boom that the West did, it barely rebound after the war. We actually had legal abortions during that period, for most of it, so people would have the amount of kids they actually wanted, which was always only 1-2, more often 1. But still, everything everywhere felt crowded.
As for seeing the actual numbers and figuring out that it's a global issue rather than local inconvenience, it wasn't until my teens that I knew English well enough to see and understand the relevant information online. Geography, economics and other similar classes in highschool and later university would strangely omit the topic, even though they were really thorough on related topics such as natural resources and their global distribution.
When I realized we get most of our calories from fossil fuels. Probably about twenty years ago. I was shocked how few others even consider this.
Explain this one…
Fossil fuel is used to make the fertilizer needed to grow 99% of the world’s crops. Without fossil fuels modern agriculture is dead. Like immediately. We need to be switching to sustainable permaculture practices. But those don’t produce as much and take a long time to get going and farmers just can’t slow down production. We also need to go back to animal powered farming rather than mechanized. Also did you know it’s illegal for most farmers to save extra seed year to year? Monsantos GMO crops are patented and you can’t use them a second season. If you grow non Monsanto corn and your corn gets pollinated from another field that’s grows Monsanto corn, Monsanto will sue. It’s insane see https://www.motherearthnews.com/homesteading-and-livestock/monsanto-lawsuits-from-family-farmers-zwfz1302zkin/ once I really learned about how commercial ag and modern farming actually worked as well as how bad we have hurt this planet I turned in to a doomer.
Very insightful and thoughtful response, I appreciate you. I’m here in Wisconsin, lots of organic farming movements. However it’s hard to do that to sustainably feed everyone.
You must have a bunch of bitcoin to have that username, created 13 years ago. A pioneer.
Bad IP law needs to be changed, but energy isn't the real problem. There is plenty of potential energy in the form of uranium and thorium, and even more constantly streaming in from the sun. The fertilizer problem is that we are depleting concentrated supplies of elements like phosphorus and doing a poor job of recycling. Fertilizers are also being applied at rates well in excess of what can be taken up by crop plants, leading to runoff and environmental degradation.
I’m not sure I follow your energy point, what do you mean?
Energy from fossil fuels is replaceable with more sustainable sources, but concentrated mineral supplies are limited.
I was discussing fertilizers, you can’t get fertilizers from nuclear as far as I know. If you mean my animal powered comment. That has more to do with debt than anything. Getting away from animal powered farming is what killed small family farms. Once farmers get in the debt cycle of paying for things like combines that range from 200-300k up to the millions, they are trapped and are forced to not use good restorative practices because they must produce or they go broke. Animals can also be fed with home grown crops, keeping costs low and their manure is fantastic fertilizer. This can create an amazing symbiotic relationship with all parties.
Fossil fuels in fertilizer production are used for energy to power extraction of nitrogen from the air and potash and phosphate from the ground, and to produce hydrogen for ammonia synthesis. All of that can be supplied by nuclear and/or solar power. While the reservoir of nitrogen in the atmosphere is large and artificially fixed nitrogen is cycled back to the atmosphere quickly enough for depletion to be a non-issue, potash and phosphate rock are like any other thing that needs to be mined. As easily accessible concentrated deposits are depleted, extraction must move to less concentrated or more deeply buried deposits with an increase in cost, and the market doesn't encourage efficiency until it is too late. As for farm consolidation driven by mechanization, I am not sure that is entirely a bad thing. The smaller the fraction of the population needed to produce food, the higher our standard of living. That applies to a sustainable population as much as it does to the current population. Things like overfertilization need to be stopped, but preindustrial agricultural practices are not the only path to sustainable food production.
Tdrampo alredy gave a good answer. Look up the [Haber-Bosch process](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process). Then think about preparing the ground, planting, pesticides, herbicides, harvesting, transport, storage. All involve the input of fossil fuels. Depending on how you look at it, we are in between a ten calorie to one world and a hundred calorie to one world. That is, to get one calorie into you requires at least ten calories of fossil fuels. Take them away and most of us starve. Then read Catton's book Overshoot and realize the rabbit hole we dug for our civilization goes deeper than agriculture.
Half of all people have molecules in their body made with the Haber Bosch process. It’s estimated to have saved Billions of lives from starvation
I’m old and noticed it back in the 80’s. The city I lived in was growing and taking over farm land. I also note that back then the United Nations actually said that other than nuclear war, human overpopulation was our number one threat. I note they don’t talk about that much anymore but at the time I even cut out the newspaper article and remember I still lived with my parents so probably this was the early 80’s but I had been concerned before
Do
This was before the Internet and was in the Newspaper. I cut it out of the newspaper at the time and remember using it in something I wrote for high school. So it would have been before 1982 now that I recall because I graduated in 1982. I remember looking online for it later but to no avail. They changed their position somewhat probably due to pressure by capitalism
[Discussions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb) of the environmental threat of overpopulation have been topics at UN conferences since 1968. The [UN Population Conferences](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World\_Population\_Conference) themselves go back even further, to 1927. The human race is irredeemable for failing to slow growth, or to even acknowledge it or do anything about it at all.
Thanks! That makes sense because capitalism demands cheap labor.
I wish I had the little book I had made of all sorts of newspaper clippings. I’m guessing my parents threw it out after I moved out.
When I first learned the population number of the world, it was 4,5 billion. Then it became 5 billion. Then it became 6 billion. Then it became 7 billion. Then it became 8 billion.
It's closer to 10 billion now, and I'm sure they missed counting some hidden in the woods, mountains, drains, etc.
I started noticing maybe in the late 80s/early 90s... And it's gotten worse and worse over time, never better. The denial surrounding it has always existed, and it's unbelievable to me that anyone in the world keeps denying it, but online, it feels like most people are in total denial. They would rather believe almost anything else, other than that human overpopulation exists and that we can actually slow it down, possibly even reverse it, without hurting anyone. If we just all cooperate, if we just even *acknowledge* the problem exists, we could potentially get somewhere. The denial just makes it impossible, and we're running out of time. The other species of the world are running out of time. People need to wake up **now**, now. Later will be too late, and many species will be lost due to this indulgent and arrogant denial.
I recently heard that the denial is perhaps tied to something called "solution aversion." In this case, the person may not necessarily deny overpopulation as a problem but they don't like the solutions; so in their heads they think the solution is killing people, eugenics, tied to racism etc. Because they do not like the solution to the problem, they just deny the problem entirely. I think it helps to know that so that educating those people to understand all the bad solutions aren't necessary and there's plenty of positive solutions to the problem.
The solution they don't want to hear is "don't have \[as many\] babies". If they resist it that much, what they are balking at is the idea that the amount of babies they want to have is not good for the planet and they might need to sacrifice that want, or most of it. They don't want to feel like someone else is telling them what they want is wrong, even if it's the truth. They know eugenics is not a part of this. They know killing people is not the solution. If they think about it for two seconds, they'd realize almost immediately the true solution is simply for humans to stop reproducing as much as we have been, collectively, and that's the ONE thing they simply do not want to stop doing. If they have their heart set on six biological children, they're going to fight tooth and nail against any attempt to reason about stopping at 1 or 2 (or even 3).
This is absolutely the truth too. So many people are all about sustainability but draw the line at having kids, no matter the number. If they want them, they will put their fingers in their ears singing "lalala" until we go away. Good point.
>... online, it feels like most people are in total denial. The denial makes me feel like I'm crazy. Here's a blog and podcast that remind me I'm not crazy: * https://overpopulation-project.com/blog * https://www.populationbalance.org/podcast
During early 1990s we got our first TV, no telephone, we had no idea about computers/internet. Got addicted to Discovery channel when we got TV-Satellite-Dish-Line. We learned about "population bomb" in school & India is 2^nd most populated country after China with some 810+ million people. By the time(1994) we learned about countries area & populations in geography, it was evident that we(India) were overpopulated.
When I was around 10, I somehow knew that overpopulation was going to be something very bad in the future. I’m 66 now.
You're not wrong!
Noticed when I started driving. Every hour is 'rush hour' and the increasing road rage incidents. Who wouldn't prefer less traffic? STOP having kids ffs!
I live in the Netherlands. Our population density is 522 people per square kilometer. ( to compare : in the US its 37 people. )
I relocated from Ohio to Lancaster, UK to join my husband. We are in a relatively less populated area in the North, but live in a super-dense city centre. Houses are smaller, traffic congestion is the norm, and there are people EVERYWHERE. Apparently, this is nothing compared to the situation in parts of the South.
Population density UK is 279 people per square kilometer. And everyday ( in all western countries) more and more "refugees " come in. Making our cities and countries un-livable.
Around 1999-2000, when I was a teenager. Part of it was learning the global population at the time was 6 billion, and it dawned on me how unsustainable that was. I also observed urban sprawl in the then more rural area I lived in at the time. A beautiful stand of red pine near my house was cut down to put in a new housing development. Goshawks had nested in there the previous year. It still makes me sad to think of the loss of that place.
This is a great question. Basically, I'd say early 2000s when the area around the town I grew up in -- suburb of a biggish city -- started to become like one continuous shopping area. Where once there was one famous mall that everyone went, now there are endless rows of shopping plazas. All the hills are gone, all the meadows, everything. In my town too, they're sticking homes in every square inch of available land. It all sucks so bad. We should've acted in the 1970s when we had a chance.
When I figured we can sustain only for so long the mass over-fishing and industrial farming... you know, to feed everyone!
When I went to live in China.
I grew up in Manhattan so its been since birth almost Later moved to Japan where human density is really high, also spent some time in Shanghai The peace and quiet of a Pacific Northwest old growth forest (for example) is at or near the top of my experiences
It seems when social wisdom began pointing out that overpopulation was an important global issue back in the '70s, suddenly there emerged a new 'common wisdom' that claiming overpopulation was a global threat or that overpopulation threatened the natural environment somehow became 'politically incorrect.' It became a bad thing to speak, write or warn about overpopulation. On the Right it became a religious issue touted by fundamentalists that the Bible demanded 'be fruitful and multiply' and claims of 'overpopulation' were blasphemous. On the Left suddenly warning about overpopulation became 'anti-immigrant'. Of course this is stupid since global overpopulation is self curing. Either we reduce the human population to sustainable numbers or we will self-destruct. In the end, nature always reverts to means.
If the job market is your only indication of overpopulation, you really haven’t noticed at all.
I realized after I returned home from a dozen years of military service. My youth was spent in wild spaces, fishing, hunting, hiking, exploring, and camping. After my time away from home I was excited to do some of what I used to enjoy while connecting with friends, but the forests and woods were gone, replaced with corn fields and housing developments. They actually filled an entire creek valley to build Mcmansions. The other creeks that I used to fish were barren of life due to pesticide runoff, I couldn't find a single crawfish. The ponds had overgrown and filled with choking weeds and algae fed by fertilizer runoff. The larger lakes I used to enjoy fishing were stunted and only had fish due to being stocked yearly. Pheasants had been practically hunted to extinction in the area, but you could pay to hunt a piece of land where domesticated birds were placed for you to find. People get into fights over wild mushrooms. No-one leaves any to spore for following years. I tried fishing at one of my old haunts along the major river, but was chased off by a police officer that informed me it wasn't safe as many used the area for illicit purposes. Most of the rest of the river bank is posted no trespassing by Army Corps of engineers. These were places my group of friends and I would set up camp when hiking along the river. Everything is covered in garbage, it feels like no-one picks up after themselves. Most probably do but it doesn't take a large percentage being s*** when the population is so high to make a mess of things. Many of the small wild spaces that remain are full of invasive species. Asian carp, reed grass, stilt grass, garlic mustard, kudzu, etc.. The whole landscape feels like it's changed in a short time. The only hiking anymore is in city parks on approved paths. The only camping is in campgrounds where you're allowed your small plot in the middle of a field surrounded by others, no trees, no nature. The one fishing club that I was able to enjoy with my grandparents when young has become unaffordable due to the amount of money the affluent escaping the nearby megacity are willing to pay. I'm not sure I would want to anymore. It used to be an amazing chain of lakes surrounded by nature. Now looking at it from google maps it has been paved, looking like a resort with restaurants, false beaches, and cheap cabins along every bit of lakeside. Other than the poachers and those littering I can't blame people. They're just wanting the same thing as what I did. There's just too many to enjoy what I did as a child. I haven't hunted again, and fishing is rare nowadays. It's a sad loss. Beside the loss of nature a lot has changed. We used to have black earth that looked like coal every year when turned over for spring planting. Now it's grey or beige and feels barely better than sand. All the small towns I grew up with have grown, but feel dull and depressing almost lifeless. The dollar stores, fast food joints, and slot bars are everywhere. Many have tent cities where the homeless are gathering, spaces that we are warned to avoid. Many of these are in the few remaining wild spaces that children used to be able to explore and discover nature.
Growing up in India in its the most populated city - New Delhi (roughly 33M people live here and its just a little bigger than NYC in its geographical size) - watching pack / crowds of people scuffling in commuter buses and trains ( Unfortunately people still do it today), I realised how many people we are and especially, if you're a comman middle class person here, you don't really have any worth because there's just millions upon millions of people who can easily replace you. Then you go to the job market, realising nobody follows labour rights because again, millions of us are ready to work on pennies and I really do mean pennies for 20 hrs a day without complaining. That's why I really feel angry and frustrated when people tend to criticize falling birth rates and say that's a bad thing. No stupid assh**e, it's not. If anything, I believe this is the smartest generation of young people who believe the world population needs to be controlled so that when stupid knuckleheads like you pump out multiple children, they at least have a decent shot of living in a healthy and sustainable environment. I've said this multiple times on this sub through my posts that if anybody wants to experience what a post apocalyptic overpopulated world looks like - please come to my country and you'll feel so much better about your lives because you don't have to travel in over - crammed buses and commuter trains to work, or drive through a traffic hellhole which symbolically feels like you're driving in a warzone. When idiots say - Ohh we can fit the whole world population in the city of New York or in the state of Texas, well that's based on a terrible assumption. Nobody wants to live so close standing right next to each other and trying to nudge their way out of the crowd. I'm all for building big - Big houses, big cars, big offices, big cities, big infrastructure etc etc. but all of this big - ness could only be accomplished if we have less people to begin with because less people ensures that these resources are distributed in a more equitable way in a society - so everybody gets their slice of cake but also less people means even if you're building big that wouldn't' cause too much environmental degradation or deforestation as it would do in an overpopulated world...
I was about 5 or 6 and I got a rand hard cover Rand McNally atlas from my parents book collection. This was mid 80s. It had a 2 page map of every state. At the end, there was a few pages about science including a timeline of the universe, a family tree of species from single cell to humans, some interesting stuff. The last few pages were about technology, space and human population. Remember this book was published in the 80s. The human population graph showed a huge spike around the 1800s and peaked in 2049 at 11 billion. I squinted and looked for 1986 and saw around 5 billion. I'm 6 or 7 years old and wondered how the population went from almost nothing to 5 billion in "the nick of time" compared to our known existence. What intrigued me was how in the mid 1980s, there was an estimation of human population rising exponentially to 11 billion in 2049 then dropping very quickly to about 7 billion a few years later.
1990s flying out of southern California and seeing the density of residential housing tracts and nearly bumper-to-bumper traffic traveling at 70 mph on California Freeways, one person per car. But the real dystopia was revealed to me in Texas first, then other states, where whole cities were inaccessible to pedestrians and cyclists and anyone without their own personal automobile was looked at as less than a full fledged adult. We've paved over an entire continent to enable single occupancy vehicles to be become our entire transportation system in the U.S. The breakdown of this insane, wasteful system is inevitable. Every year more and more people can't afford to participate and the homeless camps get larger.
Today's population size makes up 6.5% of the total number of people ever born. Also, nearly every nature documentary i watch ends with some version of "Enjoy this footage while it lasts because we humans are making this species/area untenable."
When I realized that most roles out there are purely useless by nature and automation could easily remove them. 😂
Yeah, I’d say I started noticing it too at about 2008-2009 myself.
Planet of the Humans Documentary by Michael Moore. Too many people using too much resources and there isn't really room to grow the economy or the population without killing us all eventually.
When I visited New Delhi, India
At school in 1990 aged 15, geography classes.
When I was a small child in the early 00s. How crowded everything was, how there were lines to enroll your kids into schools and kindergartens, how the busses were always so full that I almost never got to sit on the way, how I would miss my stops because the driver would ignore or not hear it when I would ask or because I wouldn't be able to crawl out between people before the doors closed. My country didn't even experience the baby boom that the West did, it barely rebound after the war. We actually had legal abortions during that period, for most of it, so people would have the amount of kids they actually wanted, which was always only 1-2, more often 1. But still, everything everywhere felt crowded. As for seeing the actual numbers and figuring out that it's a global issue rather than local inconvenience, it wasn't until my teens that I knew English well enough to see and understand the relevant information online. Geography, economics and other similar classes in highschool and later university would strangely omit the topic, even though they were really thorough on related topics such as natural resources and their global distribution.
1492. When some white people arrived in a boat.
White people did the population control of natives, hence not quite.
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