For a movement to defend the right to live off of the land (repost from DailyKos) | 30 comments (30 topical, editorial, 0 hidden)

Re: For a movement to defend the right to live off (none / 0)

On the first point, is your idea that if the world population stays around the seven billion mark, there are enough resources out there to keep making various things, maybe with more efficient recycling of old things so that tomorrows chairs are todays tin cans, where the planet's resources cycle round and about us without running out? Sorta positing humans as essentially stuff making and stuff acquring animals--I don't mean that in any snide way...a sort of material emanation of our curiosity, so humans are happiest when making things, swapping things for other things (maybe via money exchanges etc.), and kicking back...letting technology do the hard pulling?

Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.

by rg (leopold dot lepster at google mail dot com) on Wed Jan 10th, 2007 at 05:46:56 PM EST
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Re: For a movement to defend the right to live off (none / 0)

Yes, and it's not just the stuff making and acquiring, it's also that a lot of that stuff makes life more pleasant. Washing machines, running water, medical technology, furniture, music in your home, books, light, ability to move around, communications, etc.

by MarekNYC on Wed Jan 10th, 2007 at 06:14:19 PM EST
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Re: For a movement to defend the right to live off (none / 1)

>Washing machines, running water, medical technology, furniture, music in your home, books, light, ability to move around, communications

What percentage of the world's population has access to these things? If we just take medical technology, how many humans have access (either physical or financial) to medical technology?

I went off to google to see if I could find some numbers, and wandered into this from ...oh my word...dieoff.org

"Science Summit" on World Population:
A Joint Statement by 58 of the World's Scientific Academies

I have no quick way of finding out the truth-worthiness of those academies.

There's a preamble which states:

In a follow-up to several recent initiatives by assemblies of scientists and scientific academies, most notably one taken by the Royal Society of London and the US National Academy of Sciences that resulted in a joint statement, "Population Growth, Resource Consumption, and a Sustainable World, '' issued in February 1992 (see Documents, PDR, June 1992), representatives of national academies of science from throughout the world met in New Delhi, 24-27 October 1993, at a ''Science Summit'' on World Population. The participants issued a statement, signed by representatives of 58 academies. The statement offers a wide-ranging if ex cathedra-style discussion of population issues related to development, notably on the determinants of fertility and concerning the effect of demographic growth on the environment and the quality of life. It also sets forth policy propositions, with emphasis on contributions that ''scientists, engineers, and health professionals'' can make to the solution of population problems. The statement finds that ''continuing population growth poses a great risk to humanity, '' and proposes a demographic goal, albeit with a rather elusive specification of a time frame: "In our judgement, humanity's ability to deal successfully with its social, economic, and environmental problems will require the achievement of zero population growth within the lifetime of our children. '' The text of the academies ' statement is reproduced below.

The New Delhi meeting was convened by a group of 15 academies "to explore in greater detail the complex and interrelated issues of population growth, resource consumption, socioeconomic development, and environmental protection.'' One of the convening organizations, the Nairobi-based African Academy of Sciences, declined to sign the joint statement, issuing, instead, one of its own. The text of this statement is reproduced below as the second Documents item appearing in this issue. Other academies that did not participate in the New Delhi meeting, or did not choose to sign the joint statement (whether for substantive or procedural reasons), included academies of Ireland, Italy, Japan, Singapore, and Spain, and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. Notwithstanding the African Academy dissent, representatives of six African national academies, among them four from countries of sub-Saharan Africa (Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, and Uganda) were among the fifty-eight signatories.

The world is in the midst of an unprecedented expansion of human numbers. It took hundreds of thousands of years for our species to reach a population level of 10 million, only 10,000 years ago. This number grew to 100 million people about 2,000 years ago and to 2.5 billion by 1950. Within less than the span of a single lifetime, it has more than doubled to 5.5 billion in 1993.

This accelerated population growth resulted from rapidly lowered death rates (particularly infant and child mortality rates), combined with sustained high birth rates. Success in reducing death rates is attributable to several factors: increases in food production and distribution, improvements in public health (water and sanitation) and in medical technology (vaccines and antibiotics), along with gains in education and standards of living within many developing nations.

Over the last 30 years, many regions of the world have also dramatically reduced birth rates. Some have already achieved family sizes small enough, if maintained, to result eventually in a halt to population growth. These successes have led to a slowing of the world's rate of population increase. The shift from high to low death and birth rates has been called the "demographic transition."

The rate at which the demographic transition progresses worldwide will determine the ultimate level of the human population. The lag between downward shifts of death and birth rates may be many decades or even several generations, and during these periods population growth will continue inexorably. We face the prospect of a further doubling of the population within the next half century. Most of this growth will take place in developing countries.

So a question:

What is the best way of transitioning developing countries to the developed world's arriving standard of low death and birth rates? One way would be to make them more like us. But aye here's the rub...Is our position only maintained by their being a lot of people who are not like us...and never will be like us? We have the power, they don't. And "we" is spread across the globe, the nation state is dead, but the regional block is thriving, and some nation states are, in fact, regional blocks...

So, thinking in terms of schooling, medical services, a warm place to read a good book, all the non-tech heavy experiences we could all have...and maybe it would look very similar to some more enlightened democratic countries, but...people don't have time for all that, because they don't have access to food unless they do something for someone else. Does the capitalist expansion model help them out of that trap? You need money to live in a capitalist society, or else you're reduced to picking up the scraps. No free lunch! But once upon a time, people picked food from the trees, and from the ground...

...this is where I hear the gritting of teeth. Because they were also attacked by wolves (though apparently this is a myth...man's best friend is his dog...why did we have it in for wolves...the besrmiched species...bemerded...by humans...to keep them away...their howling....

I'm sure someone once said, "Before we have any more children, shall we sort out making the world a nice place to be?" The nicer the world, the less children will have, on average...an average of two. One for you and one for me. If every couple has two children, there is no net gain to the world's population...except it has increased by two for every adult couple...and then it stabilises at two...and we can get on and enjoy our funky new friendly world...ah shit, the techonic plates are shifting again. Shit!

Ah, Nomad! A planet is not a risk-free environment. Yes! Exactly!

Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.

by rg (leopold dot lepster at google mail dot com) on Wed Jan 10th, 2007 at 08:29:08 PM EST
[ Parent ]

For a movement to defend the right to live off of the land (repost from DailyKos) | 30 comments (30 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)

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