← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Six
Thread ID: 17405 | Posts: 9 | Started: 2005-03-19
2005-03-19 20:07 | User Profile
[I]Kevin MacDonald recommended this book at the Evolutionary Psychology Yahoo group[/I]
Rapid Growth of Human Populations 1750-2000: Histories, Consequences, Issues - Nation by Nation
Multi-Science Publishing Company Ltd. 2003
by William Stanton
ISBN 0 906522 21 8 * pp. 230 (+ vi)
William Stanton states that "All human history is of populations expanding when resources are available and shrinking when they are not", and he predicts that "population reduction will begin as soon as foreign aid dries up" and when basic "carrying capacity will become critical".
--If it is necessary to read the history of collective human reproductive mistakes in order not to repeat them, or to avoid continuing to make them, then this is the book that should be read by all policy makers who have anything to do with famine relief, foreign aid, fertility control education as well as immigration / greenhouse gas emission. It offers a graphical record of recent population growth as well as a brief verbal summary of the political history for every nation.
--Stanton's panoramic history takes us back to the transition from hunter-gathering to agriculture about 10,000 years ago when he supposes that world population may have been double the 2 million of 100,000 years ago. The Agricultural and Industrial revolutions in the mid 18th century, and the Green revolution in the mid 20th century increased the ability of society to feed greater and greater numbers. He points out that before 1750 most of the world's half billion people lived on the edge of starvation, confronted with repeated famines, and 250 years later almost five times as many survive in similar conditions. The increased food produced by the Genetic revolution in the 21st century is expected to be similarly unsuccessful in raising living standards, because the response of our species has been to produce more babies to meet the increased carrying capacity that these revolutions have facilitated. "Darwinian" reality, with only the fittest surviving the scarcity that results when births exceed deaths, has been suspended for the last 250 years. Until the mid 18th century there was a very slowly rising population ceiling as deaths had to approximately equal births.
--With population growth currently exceeding 80 million per year, Stanton says that "most of the world's people are entirely unaware that they are living in an anomalous [period of ever increasing food production], which, after 250 years is approaching its end."
--Historical carrying capacity, absent the temporary increase made possible by exhaustible fossil fuels, is dealt with early in the book using England as an example; from 300 BC, until coal and then oil made vastly more food production possible starting around 1750, the population approached five million several times but it repeatedly collapsed to much lower levels due to poor crop yields, tribal warfare and disease. The ten fold increase that has occurred in the intervening two and a half centuries has been dependent upon increased agricultural carrying capacity and "Death Control (DC)" health care that are supported by finite exogenous geological energy stores. Stanton and a growing number of others foresee future energy scarcity orchestrating a population collapse, back to historically, solar-energy supported levels, during the next 100 years. Estimates of human numbers after the collapse vary from the 600 million that solar energy supported in 1750, to perhaps 4 billion, depending on whether global energy depletion or local factors such as water shortage, desertification, sea level rise, climate change or the overcrowding and land hunger that produce "Violent Cutback Level (VCL)" drive the collapse. Stanton appears to define the population densities (persons per square kilometer) that result in "VCL" by hindsight according to when and where tribal conflict, genocide and ethnic cleansing have taken place.
-- Although population percentage growth rates are decreasing worldwide, Stanton drums home the fact that population numbers continue their inexorable and uninterrupted exponential increase due to the ever larger numbers these percentages are based upon. Relief from population pressure is provided by emigration from areas where numbers grow faster than their economies, to areas where the economy is still growing faster than the population, and by longstanding foreign aid programs and famine relief that mask the fact that the land will no longer feed the increased number of mouths. The continuing acceptance of massive numbers of immigrants and provision of food aid, by countries that are still able to produce agricultural surpluses, are seen to allow inappropriate fertility patterns to be irresponsibly maintained.
--Stanton is very critical of the willingness of aid agencies to take the easier course of "saving lives" with food aid that artificially maintains reproductive strength as human populations continue to further overshoot the carrying capacity of their lands, while most of these aid providers refuse to address the more difficult issue of assistance with the birth control programs that many women are clamouring for in recipient countries.
--The book illuminates the concept of competitive breeding, wherein certain ethnic groups openly admit that they have a policy of maintaining irresponsibly high birth rates ( "We will beat you in the beds"), designed to produce long-term political and militarily dominance, at great cost to the natural ecosystems that must support them long after current conflicts are forgotten.
--The author designates the last 250 years as an historically unprecedented, one-time phenomenon with "Weak Restraints On Growth (WROG)" as escalating human numbers rapidly draw down the Earth's resources (especially non-renewable energy). He attributes much of the reluctance to deal with the "delicate subject" of population control to the now obviously failed 'Demographic Transition Theory' of Adolphe Landry (1934), that assumed increased prosperity and food supplies would result in people having fewer children. This idea "has persuaded decision takers and their advisors that population growth is not a serious problem because financial aid will sort it out". If Stanton had written the book in 1960 and policy makers had taken remedial action, there might be several billion less people contributing to the global carrying capacity overshoot than there are today. He suggests that donor nations must finally realize that population control must precede attempts at poverty reduction because the other way around does not raise living standards.
--Stanton sees multiculturalism and massive immigration policies being feasible only when conflict to control resources is unnecessary, in countries whose populations still are growing slower than their economies. He anticipates violent "religious", "ethnic" and "class" conflict to control shrinking resources as the legacy of such policies when the temporary (200 year long) 'Petroleum Interval' begins to wind down.
--At the end of the book, Stanton speculates that "political correctness", "civilized standards", current ideas about "human rights", and the concept of "the sanctity of human life" will disintegrate in the face of resource conflicts and massive movements of refugees from lands whose carrying capacity has been reduced by combinations of soil depletion/erosion, desertification, sea level rise and the lack of continued access to non renewable energy stores. He foresees a return to "quick and inexpensive corporal punishment for lesser crimes", the general encouragement and legalization of "euthanasia, abortion, and infanticide for handicapped babies" as well as the enforcement of severe restrictions on family size.
-- Stanton hopefully speculates, as have others, that the population collapse that is expected during the 21st century will produce a smaller human society that will have "the wit" to restrain its numbers so as to allow "a sustainable high quality of life", at a level that is in balance with the Earth's long-term carrying capacity, and a level that may even allow some repair of an Earth that has been considerably damaged by the open-ended expansionism of the last 250 years.
Peter Salonius
Natural Resources Canada
Canadian Forest Service
2005-03-19 21:13 | User Profile
I am looking forward to the "Balkanization" and re-segregation. Of course, in the case of white countries, that would mean expelling the invaders, as the events of the latest decades hardly involved any white migration to the duskylands.
Multi-kulti isn't a sustainable model. Nor is the export of technologies, jobs and resources to alien peoples.
2005-03-19 22:08 | User Profile
[QUOTE=madrussian]I am looking forward to the "Balkanization" and re-segregation. Of course, in the case of white countries, that would mean expelling the invaders, as the events of the latest decades hardly involved any white migration to the duskylands.[/QUOTE]
Same here. The larger context of the struggle is that America has always had dirt cheap energy and other resources, providing for all manner of destructive social experimentation. Now things will be changing.
2005-03-20 02:12 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Six]Although population percentage growth rates are decreasing worldwide, Stanton drums home the fact that population numbers continue their inexorable and uninterrupted exponential increase due to the ever larger numbers these percentages are based upon.[/QUOTE]
This doesn't make sense mathematically. An exponential increase implies an increase in the rate of population growth, as well as an increase in the raw numbers. And how is the increase "inexorable" if the rate of increase is dropping? Surely the population will peak and then decline once the rate of increase reaches zero?
Some estimates put the estimated world population peak at as low as 8.8 billion
[url]http://www.nature.com/nature/fow/010802.html[/url]
[QUOTE]Probably the most pressing concern of the modern world — both environmentally and socially — is the burgeoning global population. The geometrical growth in numbers over the last century, when extrapolated, presents a foreboding picture of massive, unsustainable growth and accompanying famines and heath crises. Yet to simply follow the current trend is naive, and informed estimates of population trends are increasingly predicting a less disastrous future.
The latest study, presented by Lutz et al. in this issue, reckons an 85% chance that global population will peak before 2100, and predicts with 60% certainty that this peak will be less than 10 billion, compared with a population of 6 billion today. They even give an outside chance, 15%, that there will be fewer people living at the end of the century than are alive now.
Their results are notable not just for the relatively low figures projected, but also for the rigorous probabilistic analysis that accompanies them. Whereas the United Nation estimates present just four possible outcomes (constant, high, medium and low), the figures presented by Lutz et al. include specific chances of a particular scenario occurring on a specific date. This graphically illustrates the confidence (or otherwise) of predictions further into the future.[/QUOTE]
2005-03-20 17:14 | User Profile
This doesn't make sense mathematically. An exponential increase implies an increase in the rate of population growth, as well as an increase in the raw numbers. And how is the increase "inexorable" if the rate of increase is dropping? Surely the population will peak and then decline once the rate of increase reaches zero?
Some estimates put the estimated world population peak at as low as 8.8 billion
[url]http://www.nature.com/nature/fow/010802.html[/url]
I think the reviewer stated things clumsily. The rate of pop. growth may not increase but the absolute numbers will. The issue has to do with the absolute amount of energy available and the amount of enegy per capita. So a population of 8.8 billion would still be a disaster. Add in the fact that the world economy is based on the concept of growth.
2005-03-20 18:57 | User Profile
[QUOTE=RowdyRoddyPiper]This doesn't make sense mathematically. An exponential increase implies an increase in the rate of population growth, as well as an increase in the raw numbers. And how is the increase "inexorable" if the rate of increase is dropping? Surely the population will peak and then decline once the rate of increase reaches zero? [url]http://www.nature.com/nature/fow/010802.html[/url][/QUOTE] No, an exponential increase (or decay) happens with a fixed rate of growth or decay. It's like interest. And even if the rate changes, at any given moment the growth is exponential :D
2005-03-20 19:36 | User Profile
[QUOTE=madrussian]No, an exponential increase (or decay) happens with a fixed rate of growth or decay. It's like interest. And even if the rate changes, at any given moment the growth is exponential :D[/QUOTE]
A paradox of Higher Math, it is...
This planet's population is quickly approaching 7 Billion. Had it not been for Western advances in medicine; agriculture; engineering; transportation and communications there'd never have been more than 2 Billion.
2005-03-20 20:49 | User Profile
A paradox it is: the greater population excess in the third world, the more white countries, that have made that excess possible in the first place, get inundated with third worlders. All that on the background of the greatest fratricides in the white countries in the 20th century and a huge drop in recreation.
2005-03-21 00:48 | User Profile
[QUOTE=madrussian]No, an exponential increase (or decay) happens with a fixed rate of growth or decay. It's like interest. [/QUOTE]
By rate, I meant change in population/change in time. It depends whether you express the rate as number of extra persons per year or a percentage difference (like with interest). I meant the former, but incidentally, the rate of increase is falling either way. My fault for wording it badly I guess.
[QUOTE=madrussian]And even if the rate changes, at any given moment the growth is exponential :D[/QUOTE]
Right you are.