Aye, though I think Catton’s fixation on fossil fuels is rooted in a good point: the overwhelming majority of our energy right now comes from that. The other resoruces we tap are vital, but if we’re looking at where our energy comes from, it’s not a very appreciable amount.

Oh sure. But how many discussions have had with people that think we want (or that want themselves) to go back to 1900 tech? This will bring it up again, I’d lay money down! (unless we preempt)

Janene

See, this is precisely why I believe that some people aware of this should take responsibility for it and choose to die.

Because the number of us even aware of the problem is so much lower than even the reduced carrying capacity, and the problem we’re likely to face is underpopulation?

True, but I don’t think those numbers on lions and tigers represent the full number of what those animal populations were pre-civilization. Lions and tigers were hunted down for thousands of years to those populations. … However, I had always thought the forager carrying capacity (in a healthy ecosystem, obviously) was ten million. Interesting that there is another estimate.

Yes; humans are not strictly carnivores, but omnivores, and that means we also inhabit lower trophic levels for some of our behaviors, and higher ones for others. We also have a global range, as opposed to geographically-constrained lions and tigers, so of course we’d expect a significantly higher human population—something in the millions, rather than the hundreds of thousands. But this is an order of magnitude difference from the billions we have today, and that’s the most important point: illustrating how far we are today from a sustainable population, i.e., how overshot we are.

Umm… Wow. Thousands as in hundreds of thousands or just thousands?

Hard to say. I’d like to say hundreds of thousands, but others are afraid with an overshoot this superlative, we may be facing extinction. I think this ignores how amazingly adaptable Homo sapiens is, but we’ve come close to extinction before.

Also - though arable land will preclude scalable agriculture, there is nothing preventing smaller horticultural get-ups in the immediate future. Not enough to support billions of course, but certainly millions. If the clmiate remains steady enough to support a healthy ecosystem in any location, a well designed horticulture can work there as well.

Yes, but as I mentioned, overshoot leaves capacity diminished compared to what it was before. How many of us will actually use horticulture? Horticulture will raise our sustainable carrying capacity to several millions, but I think we’re going to dip well below that, and rise back to it in the first several generations post-collapse.

This is going to sound strange but the reason the human population is so high is that we are food for other humans. Capitalism is a form of parasitic canibalism.

Granting your argument about capitalism as parasitism (and I don’t think that’s a fundamental element of capitalism any more than the other agricultural economic systems that have exhibited the very same structure, including Communism and feudalism), that cannot explain the growth of humanity, since you’re talking about humans harvesting energy from other humans. That is an entirely internal matter. There can be no growth from that: it would violate the Law of Conservation of Mass-Energy.

One problem I noticed — and I think it has to do with the assumptions of your sources… it gives the impression that the ‘detrious’ that we are over shooting on is *only* fossil fuels. But of course, we have been doing this for 10K years, not just the last 5o: so the detrious must include topsoil/old growth forest/surface minerals etc.

Aye, though I think Catton’s fixation on fossil fuels is rooted in a good point: the overwhelming majority of our energy right now comes from that. The other resoruces we tap are vital, but if we’re looking at where our energy comes from, it’s not a very appreciable amount.

Nice article, you covered this topic rather smoothly.

One problem I noticed — and I think it has to do with the assumptions of your sources… it gives the impression that the ‘detrious’ that we are over shooting on is *only* fossil fuels. But of course, we have been doing this for 10K years, not just the last 5o: so the detrious must include topsoil/old growth forest/surface minerals etc.

Janene

Wouldn’t a newly evolved predator outstrip its rosources also at first?

But as far as the lumpen figuring all this out, I give them as much chance as the caribou.

But maybe the parasites will make decisions to lower the population, conserve resources and things like that. Human husbandry.

parasites feed on the ENERGY of other animals without killing them. The elite of the capitalist class feed of the economic energy of the masses.
There are all these people around, it seems very probable that a predator would evolve the ability to capitalize on this vast resource.

To me it looks more like a situation of a parasite ramping up the metabolism of its host in order to get more energy.

All these individual workers running around destroying the earth are doing so to feed the parasite and not just themselves. They do it for money, in order to survive. The system works so that much of this energy is funneled to the parasite. The parasitic class.

See, this is precisely why I believe that some people aware of this should take responsibility for it and choose to die.

In our present cultural context this reads like madness, but you are probably right, and not the only one to propose this. Yet, I feel that this is a classical case of Prisoner’s Dilemma applied: Those who choose death will do so in vain if the rest of the population keeps on increasing, and for now those who would chooose death as a sensible option are the ones needed to propagate the knowledge about the factors leading to the end of civilization, and of possible alternatives.

Unless, of course, this voluntary die-off is initiated on the level which is commonly called subconscious. Depression leading to suicide may be a natural reaction to the complex, pressing problems weighing heavily on one’s soul. Or men of power keep on deciding everybody’s fate without consulting the victims, leading to involuntary die-off. The necessary means exist, and the necessary mindsets do as well, I suppose.

In the near term, it all seems to depend on the timeframe and the eventual rate of decline in fossile fuel production. In the best of cases, it might suffice to “simply” stop having children, then grow old as a society and finally die of old age, however improbable this option is on a global scale, where not even climate change or the limits in oil supply are agreed-upon facts.

But if things come to a head in 2012–2015, then there is nothing left for us to do, except to try and move in a position which allows us to inherit the remaining wilderness.

(And it still reads like madness.)

Also - though arable land will preclude scalable agriculture, there is nothing preventing smaller horticultural get-ups in the immediate future. Not enough to support billions of course, but certainly millions. If the clmiate remains steady enough to support a healthy ecosystem in any location, a well designed horticulture can work there as well.

Granted, I’m not talking about saving civ. Just disputing using foraging numbers only in the context of a post-civ population count.

True, but I don’t think those numbers on lions and tigers represent the full number of what those animal populations were pre-civilization. Lions and tigers were hunted down for thousands of years to those populations.

But of course, the general point is true, and that’s more nit-picking.

However, I had always thought the forager carrying capacity (in a healthy ecosystem, obviously) was ten million. Interesting that there is another estimate.