Man always kept animals close to his heart, especially that one stingray…
“So what I’m going to do is travel around the world and harass animals for television.”
This is why I get so mad when people say “we don’t have an overpopulation problem, we have a resource allocation problem”.
No. There are not supposed to be this many fucking humans. Where the fuck are the animals supposed to live???
We need to return to preindustrial population levels so the animals can too
If you had half as many humans in the world, but they all lived in suburbs, it would be much worse for the environment than having twice as many humans but they all live in cities.
Compare America to India. If Americans lived the way Indians do, the population would be absolutely fine. So if you want to solve overpopulation problems, stop the American style suburbs before you worry about the actual population.
Sure but all those humans need an insane amount of farmland that dwarfs the amount of land they need for housing. And that’s ignoring meat consumption.
With a huge population, beef consumption is insane and is destroying the world.
With a small population, it isn’t a big deal.
That amount of farmland is a lot less if you’re not raising livestock and throwing out perfectly good food because it isn’t profitable. A vegan socialist society has a much higher population ceiling than a carnist capitalist society.
Actual Indian here, please DO NOT live the way Indians live in India. The worst unplanned urban sprawl and urban density and squatting and squalor and slums :-(
If you are referring to the Ancient Civilization of local produce and local distribution and local Kingdom Tithes to the Empire while living in villages and the concentrating political, commercial and military power in the major cities. Education “institutes” in deep forest with no “fees” but labor for classes. Since that type of Civilization did once exist and thrived before being wiped out by repeated invasions and conquerors. Most definitely there were social and technology issues, but the slow pace of development did not destroy the landscape.
Medicine, Technology, Transportation, Global Trade need tempering with ecological ethical and sustainable standards of implementation, research and development.
Yeah, I’m not idolizing the actual conditions of India, just pointing out an exception to what the person above is talking about.
My ideal society would be a solarpunk version of soviet block housing with tons of bike paths and trams and high speed intercity rail. Cars and meat would be banned, but everyone would have gigabit fiber internet and induction stovetops. Also the thermal and sonic insulation would be fantastic
Have you seen how people in the slums of India live? No one wants that life. It is not unreasonable to want a fair standard of living.
Pay attention. https://lemmy.ca/post/23724190/9974658
Why? Who decided that there aren’t supposed to be this many humans? We just need to accept that humans exist and work with that. Unless your solution is genocide and mass sterelization. And historically, richer nations paradoxically breed less, which is pretty unnatural IMO but seems like the solution to overpopulation: feed and educate.
The Earth has carrying capacity limits. I think we’re probably over that, temporarily, mostly because of fossil fuels. We turn fossil fuels into energy and food, degrading that environment and decreasing the Earth’s carrying capacity at the same time. It’s like we’re playing a game of Jinga to push population higher at the expense of our foundation.
What happens when rich nations become poorer? The world’s current predominant economic system cannot function without growth. What will the elites do to maintain the status quo? Perhaps push for banning abortion, contraceptives, and taking away women’s rights and autonomy?
Here, I have a couple examples to kind of, illustrate why, despite the common sentiment, antinatalism, and malthusianism, inherently, like, just straight up, don’t make any sense. This is all based on back of the napkin math that I did a while ago, and I don’t want to redo the numbers, so take it with a grain of salt maybe, but, yeah.
Okay, so, not really taking into account consumption or supply chain, which are major factors, you could fit the entire population of earth in one city the size of about one and a quarter rhode islands, if you had the population density of kowloon. Now, kowloon has retroactively been shat on as having a low quality standard of living, which is partially true, there were leaks everywhere, it was run by the mob, yadda yadda, but there’s nothing inherently problematic with that level of density, there. You could easily expand that to, say, two rhode islands, or three, right, and that would cover an insanely small portion of the earth’s surface while also being more than enough for everyone to live.
On the other hand, if you divided up the earth based on only habitable zones and arable land, you’d get about 2.5 acres per person, which I think also accounts for the elderly and children. To me, that sounds like probably 2.5x more than I would ever need in a lifetime, especially once we kind of tally up all the savings that we can get at scale, at mass production, and then maybe take costs for transportation.
We also, never, never ever take into account the amount of land management which was being done by the various natives of all their lands before colonialism kind of came in and fucked everything up. We have this conception of nature as being some kind of like, inherent good entity that humans can only ever destroy with their presence. A kind of untouched garden of eden that we should basically never touch. As being like, inherently sacred, or having some inherent value, even, to the point where we anthropomorphize it. “Mother nature”. We have this view of humans as also being completely separate from nature, as being an aberration, rather than being a part of it. I think these are both mistakes. We have to view humans as being a part of nature, and we have to start viewing nature as existing everywhere, rather than just being something that you minorly interface with when you go for a hike. Our built environment is part of nature, our decision to plant exclusively male trees that will give off a shit ton of pollen which covers all the windows and makes everything super shitty all spring so we don’t have fruit, that’s a part of nature. So are the raccoons and possums and stray cats and dogs and pigeons and weeds and other things which we see as being invasive but also simultaneously as having no real habitat anymore.
The real solution, I think, is only going to come about when humans collectively start to conceptualize and take accountability for what they go around and do, rather than just sort of, pawning off all responsibility for everything, and cooking up some apocalyptic reality where it’d just be better off if we didn’t exist at all. The genie is out of the bottle. Even to conceptualize of us as being “the problem”, as though there is a singular kind of problem, is a kind of anthropocentrism, and a kind of anthropomorphizing of nature.
I also assume I don’t need to really discuss how like, the idea that we’re currently doing everything in the most efficient way, is a little bit overconfident, and takes everything at a kind of, unchanging face value. As though we exist in the long arc of history with a kind of inevitability, rather than a random happenstance.
Wildlife is now only 4% of the mammalian life on the planet, by mass. The rest is livestock and humans. https://www.ecowatch.com/biomass-humans-animals-2571413930.html
We need to return to preindustrial population levels so the animals can too.
What exactly are you proposing?
I don’t have all the answers, it’s like saying I want candy and not knowing how to make it.
That said, maybe something like a tax on children, free contraceptives, free sterilization, free abortion. Pay people when they reach 45 if they don’t have kids. Robot caregivers for elder care in a decreasing population.
So deep. Now watch how I manhandle this croc for your chortling entertainment.
Everyone in here acting like farming and livestock hasn’t been the cornerstone of human population since 400k years ago…
It hasn’t. Livestock farming started about 10,000 years ago (give or take 1000 years), although this keeps getting refined with DNA studies and I’m not sure what the consensus is. But that also doesn’t mean it’s necessary in the modern era with modern agricultural practices.
https://www.alimentarium.org/en/fact-sheet/history-pasture-farming
Agriculture began in fits and starts, but the first permanent farms we knew of are even newer- taro farms in New Guinea about 9000 years ago.
Also, homo sapiens have only been around for less than 300,000 years.
10k years is longer than recorded history. That doesn’t change anything that I said.
Thank you for the corrections though.
It doesn’t change your claim that it’s been something we’ve been doing for thousands of years, but like I said- it isn’t necessary in the modern era with modern agricultural practices.
